The young people of Afghanistan

When I was a schoolgirl I had an adventurous friend called Christine. Although we lost touch, I've been thinking about her lately. She has recently been working as head of mission for UNMIS in Sudan. She also lived in Afghanistan for eight years, on and off, working for Oxfam, and has published three books about that country, one of them in collaboration with Jolyon Leslie.

On November 10th I listened to a presentation given by Paulette Schatz, formerly of the UNDP (and now a Senior Program Development Advisor for World Vision) who from 2007 to 2008 also lived in Afghanistan, managing the Joint National Youth Programme. An impressive lady, all the more so as she came across as modest and unassuming.

When Paulette first arrived in Kabul she had no budget and only a tiny office. She did eventually acquire a pick-up truck, but it was dangerous commuting to her office in the city. "I was worth $75 if kidnapped. My driver was worth $10. We were instructed never to take the same route twice."

She gave us an interesting statistic: 50% of the population of Afghanistan is between the ages of 12 and 26. Numerous though they are, young Afghans get precious little chance to make any decisions because the responsibility for their lives is taken by their parents or the elders of their community; that is the tradition. They mostly live in dire poverty, too. "Poverty is the absence of options," said Paulette. Working with the Afghan Ministry of Youth Affairs she managed to persuade the authorities to establish a Youth Parliament that meets four times a year with representatives from each province, the girls coming to the meetings with chaperones (their mothers or their aunts).

"When I'm out there, we don't think in terms of development. We think of building relationships." For example, she deliberately attended weddings, not making critical comments about the way things were done, but observing, and joining in as a friend of the families. She was able to buy new clothes, made locally, for impoverished schoolgirls. On International Peace Day, when a donation of white paint was received, the girls in Kabul painted the walls of their school courtyards rather than the outside walls, because it would have been dangerous to make these schools conspicuous.

While living and working in Kabul, she wrote poetry, perhaps as a way of getting her thoughts in order. She read us one or two of these poems aloud, during her talk. In one, she was imagining the hope in the minds of Afghan schoolgirls:

... We are a wave of humanity,
We are moving ...

"I believe in these young people," she wrote. "They see beyond the shackles that they wear." She claims that there's a profound spirituality in Afghanistan, and that people are still revere the 13th century poet, Jalal ad-Dīn Muhammad Rumi.

Paulette brought two young Afghans to the annual Youth Assembly at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Eight young people from that country were actually elected to attend, but the authorities were afraid some of them might take the opportunity to defect. (CIDA is reluctant to sponsor young Afghans to come to study at Canadian universities, for the same reason.) One of the two who did come to the Youth Assembly, and who has since become a parliamentary candidate in his own country, made a speech in New York asking the delegates from the other countries to "stand up for Afghanistan." Paulette, who was there, told us that the gathering spontaneously rose to its feet.