Dreaming big, more Afghan women studying in U.S.

BRISTOL, Rhode Island, May 25: After fleeing the violence of Afghanistan a decade ago, Nadima Sahar now dreams of becoming the country's first woman president.

''Sure, why not?'' she said.

Sahar and two other Afghan women received degrees from Roger Williams University in Rhode Island this month, among the first graduates of a programme created in 2002 to give Afghan women a free U S college education.

''Seven or eight years ago people would have thought I was crazy.

But now the situation has changed so much,'' she told Reuters before receiving a political science degree at ceremony on Saturday presided over by U S first lady Laura Bush.

Sahar, 20, remembers when the hardline Taliban seized power in 1996. Women were forced to wear all-enveloping burqas, confined to their homes and beaten if discovered outside without a male relative. Sahar and her family fled.

Arezo Kohistani, another graduate and former Afghan refugee who calls herself a ''child of war,'' wants to become an Afghan ambassador. Mahbooba Babrakzai, who earned a bachelors degree in financial services, hopes to be finance minister.

Back home in deeply conservative Muslim Afghanistan, women's rights remain in their infancy even after the Taliban were overthrown by U S-led forces in 2001. Education experts estimate the female illiteracy rate at 80 percent or higher.

''This is like a new world open to me,'' Babrakzai said.

Paula Nirschel, the wife of Roger Williams University President Roy Nirschel, founded the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women after watching television images of women covered by burqas and learning of their history of oppression.

Thirty-two Afghan women will join the programme this year at 16 universities and colleges across the United States.

Non-governmental groups have publicised the programme in Afghanistan, where the three women who received degrees in Rhode Island heard about it, and details appear on Afghan Web sites.

Nirschel said many women selected for the programme risked their lives by carrying textbooks underneath their burqas to study at secret basement schools during Taliban rule.

Kohistani, 24, fled with her family to Pakistan in 1993 when a rocket nearly hit their home during fighting by factions of Afghan warlords.

While living in Islamabad she secretly taught English and math to other Afghan refugees. Her father, who once worked for Afghanistan's Ministry of Planning, stayed behind in Afghanistan to financially support the family.

The White House has touted the initiative, which receives no government funding, as an example of the U S civilian effort to support democracy in Afghanistan since the ouster of the regime that harboured Osama bin Laden before the September 11 attacks.

BLUE JEANS AND T-SHIRTS

Women have held several prominent positions in Afghanistan's government, including Masooda Jalal, who ran against President Hamid Karzai in the 2005 presidential race, before being chosen by him as minister for women's affairs.

In Rhode Island, the three women said living and studying in the United States was difficult at first.

They all spent their first year in the classroom with an English dictionary close by, and looked forward to weekly visits from a Muslim cleric --- a former New York City policeman -- who advised them in matters such as which food they could eat in the university cafeteria.

Each prayed five times a day and visited mosques in nearby Rhode Island cities and during trips to New York City, Boston and Washington.

They wore blue jeans and long-sleeve T-shirts or other Western clothing that covered their arms and legs. They chose not to wear a headscarf in the United States, which they said would have drawn unwanted attention to themselves All three excelled academically, and the programme paid all their living and education expenses.

Kohistani graduated in three years with high honours with a bachelor's degree in business management.

Babrakzai launched a Muslim student association and was part of a team of student investors who achieved a higher return than the Standard&Poor's index while managing a 100,000 dollars portfolio created from the university's endowment, according to the university.

Sahar, who was 16 when she matriculated at Roger Williams University, became vice president of the university's mock trial team and tutored inner-city children in her spare time.

All three will attend a two-year graduate programme in public policy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, under an extension of the initiative scholarship for the highest-achieving undergraduate students in the programme.

They said they would return to Afghanistan after their graduate degrees to join the government.

''Afghanistan has been through a lot of struggles. Twenty-five years of war destroyed everything -- our families, our lives,'' Babrakzai said. ''I don't want my kids and the future generation of my country to be suffering like I did.''

REUTERS