Highlands resident reports slow but sure progress on Kabul school project

By SOMDATTA SENGUPTA

Published Jan 10, 2008

Since December last year, Khatera “Kathy” Muradi, Highlands, has collected $500 toward her objective of rebuilding elementary schools in Kabul, Afghanistan. A small beginning, she said, considering the enormity of the task at hand in a country devastated by years of political turmoil and warfare.

Following the death of her father, Din Mohammed Muster, in 2006, Muradi said she has felt an inner urge to get involved in rebuilding the educational infrastructure in Kabul. It is a city that three generations of her family has called home, and where her father has spent 30 years working to improve the education system.

“My father used to say, education is everything. If you don’t have education you have nothing,” she recalled. “He wanted me to come first in class and would get very upset if my grades were bad.”

Exposed to the western system of education through his masters degree at Columbia University in New York, 1963, her father had often shared with her his admiration of the American education process. “He told me how great this country was to live, work and study and he started to teach me English,” Muradi said.

Though an admirer of the western world, Din Mohammed dedicated himself to reviving and reconstructing the Afghani education system, first as a teacher, then working with a text book publishing company. His aim was to provide Afghani school children with more advanced textbooks so as to make them competitive with the world, according to Muradi.

“He had plenty of opportunities to leave and have a better life in other countries, but he chose to stay. Even during the wars when everyone was going abroad he used to say, ‘if everyone left, who will look after the kids here?’ So he chose to stay. He worked very hard to incorporate new ideas and update all textbooks in Kabul,” Muradi said.

However, his efforts were affected by the continuous political turmoil in the country. First the Soviet occupation in 1979, followed by the homegrown resistance by the anti-Communist Mujahiddin forces that resulted in a civil war (1992), then the rise of the Taliban (1996), and then the U.S. led military intervention in Afghanistan in the post-September 11 (2001) period. These successive armed conflicts disrupted normal life and civic infrastructures all throughout Afghanistan, Muradi noted. It was also the reason why Muradi herself had to abandon her engineering degree and leave the country in 1979.

“My life and safety was at risk,” she said. “I came to this country and got married and raised my family. But I never forgot my people back home.”

Shortly after she arrived in the United States, she married Harry Muradi, once her neighbor in Kabul, who at the time had established himself as a textile businessman in New York. After 26 years of marriage and raising two boys, Muradi counts herself as lucky to have survived the ravages of war-torn Afghanistan.

“Though I was here, I was never far away from the impact of the wars because it affected my family members and relatives,” she said. “Many of them had to run away to Pakistan. For many years I used to send $100 each to five families I knew, so that they could survive. They had no one. I was not rich, but I would make small sacrifices, like not buy shoes or new clothes, and send that money to my relatives.”

Her little contribution helped many of her relatives to tide over terrible times, she said. Then after her father passed away, her motivation to help the school system became a natural extension for her desire to help her family. Now they are her main support-base in Kabul, helping her revive the schools.

“Since I decided to raise money to help out elementary schools, my mother, one of my father’s friends, my cousin’s husband and a like-minded person has come forward to help with my efforts at the ground level in Kabul,” Muradi said. That has given her a lot of courage and hope, she said.

“My mother said anything I can do will go a long way,” she said. “She told me she is happy that it will help keep my father’s name and work alive. And, even if I am not successful, she still will be proud of me because I tried.”

Success in an elusive benchmark in her case, according to Muradi. “There is so much need. You are talking about rebuilding a nation’s educational infrastructure. You don’t even know where to begin. Two teachers I spoke with said the situation is so desperate that the government has asked them to help with the construction of the schools in their free time. Can you imagine that?” she said. “They are already underpaid, now on top of teaching they have to be laborers. That is not their job.”

It gets worse. When she was visiting schools in Kabul, there was one textbook per student. It wasn’t a new book, she said, the graduating class would return their textbooks to the school for the next batch of students to use. “But at least, each student had a textbook and they could take it home to study. Last year, I saw that three students shared one textbook and they could not take it home to study. How are they going to learn?” she asked. “But I am not even thinking of books, desks and chairs or even blackboards. The teachers there said the first important thing was to have a boundary wall for safety and running water instead of well water. I am focusing on that.”

Having defined her initial scope of work, Muradi said the little that she has raised is sign of hope. “It’s too little to report but so far I have had a lot of support from people who know me,” she said. That includes her clients from her hair salon in Hazlet, some of them have been her loyal customers for over 12 years, she said. The rest are a sympathetic network of people Muradi has come in touch with since The Courier started reporting on her cause in October.

“People who know me have faith in me. They tell me ‘Kathy we trust you more than the government.’ They know I will spend every penny on rebuilding the schools,” Muradi said.

After a thoughtful pause she added, “If we all wait for the government to do what needs to be done, we will never achieve substantial results.” Especially in Kabul, she pointed out, where there is almost no infrastructure and no budget for everything that needs to be done.

“The school children who I met come to school in torn shoes because their parents cannot provide more. I can’t help how they dress,” Muradi said. However, providing safety through building a boundary wall and having running water in schools in Kabul should not be too difficult, according to her. What she needs is just a little more support.