partnership in transitional civics lesson

Students from a Philly high school and an Afghan minority group will share words and images as part of a transnational civics lesson
By Mary Sneyd
July 18, 2009, 5:00AM

Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer. (McClatchy-Tribune)

It is the last place where you'd expect to find a school that teaches about civic rights -- and has links to Philadelphia's National Constitution Center.

But after driving an hour from central Kabul, over potholed roads jammed with trucks, cars, motorbikes and carts, and then maneuvering along a narrow, rutted dirt track and through wheel-deep puddles of water, we reached the Marefat school.

The two-story, pale-green, concrete building is built around a courtyard, with a balcony opening onto second-story classrooms. The school, which runs from the primary grades through high school, is the brainchild of Aziz Royesh, a largely self-taught, indefatigable, 39-year-old Afghan.

Royesh spent his youth fighting the Soviet occupation. But he was determined to expose a post-war generation to a different way of thinking about the world, and to unfamiliar concepts such as human rights, democracy and nonviolent struggle in lieu of war.

Royesh, a compact man with a large smile and a neat, black beard, set up his first schools in the Afghan refugee camps of Pakistan. Six years ago, he moved to Kabul and started the Marefat school in a poor neighborhood populated by Hazaras, members of a minority ethnic group of Mongol descent who are Shiite Muslims in a majority-Sunni country. Not surprisingly, the Hazaras have often been subject to persecution.

The determined Royesh got local people to donate land and began the school in a bombed-out building. Gradually, locals in the neighborhood -- which had no school -- contributed bricks, iron and labor; new classrooms went up every year. "They understood that we were helping them change the destiny of their kids," Royesh said. Continue reading ...