Not one, not two, but 26 entire libraries have been created and filled with books around Taloqan (depicted at left), the formerly Taliban-held capital of Afghanistan’s war-torn northeastern Takhar province. Within recent memory, rifle fire and exploding bombs were part of the daily retinue in this remote town and its surrounding district where women wear full-body burkas. Even before US forces arrived, the region was a hotbed of battles between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. In one raid shortly before 9/11, for example, a Northern Alliance contingent seized from their rivals fifty Kalashnikovs, 23 PK machine guns, three ZPU-1 machine guns, two 82 mm recoilless rifles, 19 RPG rocket launchers, two truck-mounted ZSU-23 machine guns, one 82 mm mortar, two pickup trucks and ten wireless communication sets. But now relative peace reigns and it’s reading time, with the help of NGOs and $130,000 from the US Agency for International Development, according to Pakistan’s onlinenews.com: “The people will read in libraries free of cost. The purpose behind construction of the libraries was to enhance education level of the people in these areas. … Mohammad Nadir, a farmer of Khwaja Sabz village of Taloqan, said: ‘I have studied to 6th class, now I can read books besides farming work.’ He said: ‘Book is best friend.’”
“Book Is Best Friend”
Posted by Anneli Rufus at 1:03 pm, Friday, July 7, 2006
Evil Jimmy Says:
July 7th, 2006 at 3:44 pmVisit Evil Jimmy
This has to be the dumbest idea I have heard in a while.
I guess it never occurred to anybody at those NGOs to actually LOOK UP the literacy rate in Afghanistan.
It gets as low as one in a thousand for females in some of the more rural provinces.
http://countrystudies.us/afghanistan/72.htm
Jarmouly Says:
July 7th, 2006 at 4:07 pmVisit Jarmouly
Yes, Evil Jimmy, but if you want to increase literacy, you have to start somewhere. Just because women in Afghanistan have been denied educations in the past doesn’t mean we should “give up on them” and condemn them to illiteracy forever. Building schools is one step, and that is being done. But most homes in Afghanistan have no books at all, so the next step may very well be to make libraries available to people. It’s a long road, to educate an entire country, but that doesn’t mean every step along that road is worthless.
Evil Jimmy Says:
July 7th, 2006 at 7:31 pmVisit Evil Jimmy
Sure, we do have to start somewhere, but once you get out of the cities, the literacy rate plunges to some pretty spooky levels, but mostly those are for religious and cultural reasons.
The Soviets, believe it or not, actually spent some time and money on trying to bring up the literacy levels in that country, and didn’t get all that far.
At the tribal level, it seems to be a culture that does not yet seriously value an education for the common Afghani.
That is one of the reasons Koran memorization is so popular in that part of the world.
To me, it appears that this was a program that was dreamed up by some people that never set foot inside that country or if they did, were so idealistic that they couldn’t or wouldn’t see some deeper problems at hand and just wasted $180,000 on a cargo cult.
This (I think) is trying to attack the literacy issue at a point five steps removed from some of the real core reasons.
Also I would wager that any books deemed not compatible with Islam by the local Islamic council don’t exactly make it to the shelves in the first place.
I’ll have to ask the author(s) of that program how they dealt with that issue.
In closing, I don’t see this as anything leading to a more literate Afghanistan without a basic education system to fuel it.