Afghanistan: women's school to be opened thanks to Tokyo Catholics
Satoko Kitahara, a Catholic FAO worker, started the project thanks to funds collected from her parish. It is hoped that 1000 girls aged between six and 18 years will be educated each year.
Rog (AsiaNews/JCW) Satoko Kitahara, a 37-year-old Japanese Catholic who works for FAO in Afghanistan, has started a project to build a school for women in Badakhshan, an eastern province, thanks to donations gathered in her parish, Kojimachi in Tokyo.
Kitahara said she was inspired to implement the project by the "hunger for education I saw in Afghan children." She said: "It was a delight listening to the dreams they had for their own future. I decided I would do something to make the dreams come true."
The school will be opened in Rog, 90 kilometers from Faizabad, and it will be composed of 12 classes with 40 students in each. With a two-shift system, this would mean that per year, around 1000 girls aged between six and 18 years will receive an education.
The project has been named Choronay, which in local [Dali] dialect means "Why say it can't be done?" The organizers said: "Even the girls' parents became interested. It was an opportunity not to be missed."
Islamic practice demands that girls and boys be educated separately, but girls had no building of their own, given the limited funds of the local administration.
To find the funds necessary for the project, the FAO worker decided to launch a fund-raising appeal in Japan.
"The interest of the global population in Afghanistan has begun to flag recently, so although our aim is to raise money for our project, we also want to revive people's interest in a reality, which after five years of war, is still very hard," said Kitahara.
Among the main donors of the project are the woman's friends and fellow parishioners in Tokyo: the worker gives them detailed reports every time she goes home.
One of them, Akira Yamamoto, was baptised with her: "Of all the catechumens at that time, Satoko Kitahara seemed the most frail and delicate. What she is doing is amazing and I believe she should be helped. So this is my reason for helping although I cannot go to Afghanistan."
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15/01/2009
