Afghanistan/Indonesia (Commonwealth Union)_Ever since the return to power of the Taliban, life for Afghan women borders on hell; persecuted, beaten, confined to homes, and jailed or executed, there is only one way out – escape! And they do – most often through dangerous terrain with the chances of being killed more the rule than the exception. They flee to safe places where they can be heard and seen.
One such is the Cisarua Refugee Learning Center (CRLC), the first refugee learning center in the Bogor Regency, fifty miles south of Jakarta in Indonesia. Here, Afghan women are finding their voice. They become a boss, they become a teacher, they become a team player or they become a student; but the underlying feature is these women stay strong.
Founded by a group of Hazara refugees, when the male Afghan refugee teachers refused to lead the classes, the women stepped up. Today, Bogor has seven refugee-led learning centers with over 1,800 students in addition to three in Jakarta and one in Bangkok. English is the language of instruction. The other paradigm is that most of the students in the centers become teachers, which then pushes them up the scale to spaces they would never have dreamed could be achieved in Afghanistan.
Khatera, a gifted student who skipped multiple grades and completed an accounting course at just 19, fled to Indonesia in 2016 with three siblings, the youngest who was 14 at the time. The escape was the result of the Taliban kidnapping her mother, brother, and eight-year-old sister. Her escape route was through India and Malaysia to arrive in Indonesia. However, her challenges were not over. Being the parent to her three siblings, she faced bullying and sexual harassment and it is her chance to meet with a CRLC teacher that gave her the hope and safety she craved.
Most arrive in Indonesia with hopes of boarding a boat to Australia’s Christmas Island, but with Australia tightening border controls, those hopes have been dashed. Cisarua now holds about five thousand refugees, most of them Hazaras, who have taken this route and been forced to live in limbo. There is no hope of resettlement in Indonesia or anywhere else, although, some Western countries are gradually increasing the numbers they will let in.
By February 2023, the UN had registered 12,710 refugees with at least half of this number from Afghanistan, a majority of them, Hazaras. One of Afghanistan’s largest ethnic groups hailing from the central highlands and descendants of Genghis Khan, the Hazaras have always been at the butt-end of persecution for decades, with the Taliban being no exception.
For those like Khatera, teaching has given her a voice, a power, and a presence. By managing learning centers, she has become a boss and learned teamwork, management skills, and how to implement strategy and policy. These are women who would never have been seen, let alone heard, and whose inherent leadership and teaching skills were never allowed to blossom. It also gives them the courage to strive for more for women like themselves, especially after hearing about the oppression of their fellow women in Afghanistan. They now have the power to be their voice!
