Brave Educators Face Down Mortal Danger, But They Need Help

The dimming daylight in the courtyard outside told me that it would soon be time to leave. My fellow researcher and I needed to be back in Kabul before dark, and I pictured him outside—with the driver—checking his watch.

But when “Laila” opened up a photo album on the cushions where we sat, I moved closer. Here was a birthday party in Kabul, she explained, pointing to women with styled hair and eye shadow. A plate of sweets, family members smiling. Her father, a doctor, before he was killed by rockets. Laila and her husband had moved to his family’s land in a village in a province southwest of Kabul to escape fighting in the capital in the 1990s. The pictures were evidence, she showed me, that her life was not always like this.

“This” was her family’s mud-brick compound right across from an abandoned school building where Laila had been a teacher. I had come there to ask her about the school.

Laila says that when she first came to the village, people assumed she wasn’t educated and only later learned she had completed grade 14 (postsecondary technical training). After the Taliban government’s ouster in 2001, villagers asked her to run a school. “At first my husband and other family didn’t want me to become a teacher because, they said, ‘You will be killed,’” she says. “But I started despite these problems.”

Months before I met her in late 2005, Laila’s school had grown to nearly 200 girls in