Dear global education leader,
On 15 August, the Taliban took Kabul, ending a 20-year international debacle that started as a war, shifted to an occupation and ended with a departure that was to some long overdue and to others a brutal abandonment.
As the Taliban closed in on Kabul, Rangina Hamidi, Afghanistan’s acting minister of education, had the option to leave. Her own parents fled Afghanistan in 1988 when she was 11, moving first to Pakistan and then to the US where she and her sisters were raised. Hamidi, a dual US-Afghan citizen, double majored in religious studies and women’s studies at the University of Virginia.
In this week’s Learnit podcast, Hamidi tells me that when she and her husband first discussed their options, they opted to stay in their country with their 11-year old daughter Zara. “We are no better than the other 35 million Afghans,” she says, recounting their conversation. “This is the country where we lived and worked, where we hoped to retire and where we hoped to die.”
As education minister, Hamidi committed to reforming teacher training, modernizing the massive education department, and implementing a national education policy built around Afghan values, Islamic foundations and international standards. She courted more than her share of controversy, including criticisms that she did not have the right credentials for her post, anger over her belief that education should be offered in mosques, and a purported ban on girls singing in public, which she says was utterly misconstrued.
It’s clear she was working within an imperfect system, navigating through plenty of gray to pursue the changes she wanted. She is a devout Muslim committed to Afghan values, and a feminist committed to getting every girl the full education she deserves. She didn’t really want to be an education minister, knowing full well the vitriol it would incite. But it was the best way to have an impact, she told me. She always had the option to live outside a system with rules she did not like. She chose not to, explaining on the podcast she believes the best way to push Afghanistan forward is within, not from outside.
Ultimately, one decision became black and white. After the initial conversation about staying in Afghanistan, post-Taliban takeover, Hamidi describes thinking through what she would do if her daughter was seized by armed men. She decided she would find a way to kill her daughter and kill herself rather than let Zara suffer. “That imagery not only scared me, but it started making me feel as a different human being,” she said. “I had never thought these thoughts.”
On 15 August, Hamidi’s 45th birthday, she and her family left Afghanistan, ending up in Arizona. Zara, like her mother, left her home as an 11-year-old to start over again in the US.
If the decision to leave became very stark, the aftermath is once again riddled with gray as Hamidi grapples with how to build a life for her family so far from the country she loves, and how to build a future for Afghanistan’s women and girls from the outside — a place she never hoped to be.
Stay curious,
Jenny
🎙 LISTEN FURTHER: RANGINA HAMIDI, FORMER ACTING MINISTER OF EDUCATION, AFGHANISTAN
