Lessons from Afghani high school students

Penn students learned about nonviolent activism from Afghani high schoolers over breakfast yesterday.

The Penn Women’s Center hosted a dialogue with a group of students from Marefat High School near Kabul, Afghanistan.

The Afghani students — who ranged from freshmen to alumni ­— ­came to the U.S. through the efforts of the National Constitution Center. They are spending the week touring the East Coast, said Shaina Adams-El Guabli, program and outreach coordinator of the Women’s Center.

The students are visiting Penn because they want to learn about what life is like in an American university, according to Adams-El Guabli.

“However,” she added, “it’s also about the things they could share with us.”

The idea behind the visit was for both groups of students to share their experiences in an intimate setting, Adams-El Guabli said.

Marefat High School, which was founded in Pakistan in 1994 before it moved to Afghanistan in 2002, is the only Afghani high school of its kind, the school’s Co-Founder and Headmaster Aziz Royesh said.

Aside from literacy, the school’s main focus is to teach its students about humanism and democracy and to promote human rights, he said.

The impact of the school, however, reaches beyond its 2,500 students.

“The views of their families and the entire community is changing,” Royesh said. “Marefat High School is a symbol of that change.”

This focus on human rights was apparent in the events of April 2009, when the Marefat students protested against Sheikh Mohsini Kandhari’s “Rape Law” — a piece of legislation that, if passed, the United Nations said would have allowed the Afghani government to legalize a husband’s rape of his wife.

As a result of the students’ activism, members of the community verbally abused them, stormed the school and made threats to end Royesh’s life.

In Royesh’s view, however, the incident was positive because his students “stood and raised their voices, and saw the results of that,” he said.

After months of both domestic and international pressure, the law was drastically amended and its most discriminatory points were removed.

Despite their victory, the atmosphere of the dialogue was not a celebratory one, as many of the Afghani students broke down in tears when speaking about their experience.

The Penn students who were present were deeply moved by the Afghani students’ passion, College senior Rosa Cui said.

“What really amazed me is how far these students are able to look into the future,” she said.

The responses to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” were as varied as the students themselves: there was a future dentist, an architect, a sociologist and an artist.

“They are the new generation,” Royesh said.

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