ABSTRACT
In Quetta I met 53-year-old Sima, a petite Hazara woman who leaned forward over her crossed legs with great excitement as she told me the story of her education. When Sima, her husband, and their five children fled the jehadis and Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, her eldest son was already acquainted with RAWA’s work in Afghanistan. He led the family to settle in a refugee camp in Pakistan where RAWA had activities. There, at the age of 45, Sima, who had never before set foot in a classroom, says she did one of the scariest things she had ever done in her life. She entered a RAWA literacy class:
The first people who tried to convince me to go to classes were my children, but RAWA members also talked to me and they talked to my children because they thought that through them it would be easier to convince me. It took a month to be convinced to come to class…. For a week after I decided I still wasn’t even ready to come to the class but both my sons and daughters also worked hard to make me prepared to go, telling me “even if you don’t want to go to read and study just go and sit to be with other women….”
