To get a college place in the US, she had to prove what she knew – “I tried to get a high school certificate in Afghanistan, the official at the Ministry of Education wouldn’t even look in my eyes”. In freeing herself from her life under the thumb of the Taliban – in finding a road out – Sola had to surmount seemingly-impossible challenges. So each word I learned, each equation I solved was empowering. “In my life, I was dependent on someone else for everything – on my father for food, on my brother to take me out. What struck me was how I see cleaning and cooking, versus how all-consuming it was in her life.” But despite the obstacles, Sola says it was all about keeping trying. “She had to take turns with the other women to cook these huge spreads for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Yet, using the Internet and an extremely slow dial-up connection, she was able to move from kindergarten level to studying calculus and reading philosophy and science.”Īnd this was despite Sola having so many household responsibilities. “She barely had a handle on the alphabet. Malaina Kapoor, author of Defiant Dreams.įor Malaina – who was introduced to Sola by a mutual friend during the pandemic and who began writing down the stories the Afghan woman shared about her life – what Sola has achieved is stunning. I was so obsessed with learning that within three years I was able to study college level calculus.” I read diverse literature from all around the world. Sola downloaded lessons and study sheets and did much of her learning in the dead of night. The organisation offers thousands of lessons in maths, science and the humanities for students of all ages. She discovered the Khan Academy, an American non-profit educational organisation with the goal of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. She translated vocabulary, recorded it in her own voice and, while cleaning and cooking, “listened to understand”. Secretly teaching herself Maths and English, she read dictionaries and whatever newspapers she could lay her hands on – despite finding news reports about her country’s problems “really disturbing”. And what she achieved educationally over the next few years is nothing short of mind-boggling. “For me, the burka’s a symbol of what is taken from a woman, how it strips her of the basic dignity of being human.”īy the time she was 14, Sola realised education was the way out of this oppressed, restricted life. Sola’s brother was guiding their mother – ‘be careful, don’t step there’. Wearing the burka, women do become blind because they can only see a tiny straight line in front of them. “You can see, but through these tiny mesh holes. Malaina tells a story, which she says eloquently shows how the burka handicaps women – a story about one of Sola’s brothers thinking their burka-clad mother was blind. The minute you wear it, you stop being you – you enter this space of non-existence.” I ask Sola what it’s like to wear the burka – to be the person inside that garment? “It’s like you are never seen as a person, you are just like an object standing there. I was very jealous of my brothers, of the freedoms they had.” And when I went out I had to always be accompanied by someone and wear a suffocating burka, which covered me from head to toe. “I was only allowed go outside a few times a year. What it meant was a life “suffocated” by restrictions. It was years later when I understood what it meant.” “I was still young and I hated school, so I saw it more as a child at that stage. Sola – born a year after the Taliban took over her home town of Kandahar – was just days past her 11th birthday when men came to her home and gave her father a dire ultimatum: stop sending his daughters to school or they’d suffer acid attacks, be kidnapped or worse.
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