In a country weary of war and still reeling from the brutal repression of the Taliban, Afghan educator Sakena Yacoobi is an antidote to despair. Over the past 10 years, Yacoobi has organized education and health services for thousands of women and girls in refugee camps in Pakistan and in Afghanistan, and she is only just getting started.

The courage and persistence of Yacoobi was evident as she spoke with AFT secretary-treasurer Nat LaCour, AFT staffers and others in an informal meeting at AFT headquarters on July 11 to discuss the work of the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL), which she founded in 1995. She and two other Afghani democracy activists were later presented with the 2005 Democracy Award from the National Endowment for Democracy.

AIL is an ambitious program to train and educate Afghan women and children to better support themselves and participate more fully in community life. The group has developed manuals and trained nearly 10,000 teachers to educate thousands of students, mostly girls, who had been denied access to education under Taliban rule. AIL women's learning centers serve 350,000 women and children every year and include desperately needed health clinics, vocational training and supplies, and even computer labs.

After 27 years of war, the education system of Afghanistan has been virtually destroyed, Yacoobi told the group. Women and children have suffered the most, particularly after the Taliban forced them out of schools and the workforce.  "It will take another 10 years to recover," she said. "We lost great educators, lawyers and doctors." The new government of Afghanistan is struggling to rebuild the economy, and what little education is available, she said, is often provided in tents with no books, notebooks and basic school supplies. Most pressing, however, she emphasized, is lack of shelter, food, access to electricity and basic health services.

Yacoobi, who holds a bachelor's degree in biology from the University of the Pacific and a master's degree in public health from Loma Linda University, began working in refugee camps through the International Rescue Committee before establishing AIL. When virtually all other outside programs were shut down by the Taliban, she told the AFT, AIL was able to operate underground because the group trained local people to serve as teachers, the program had credibility with the community and local leaders promised to protect them from the Taliban.

She emphasized that her training program focuses on interactive, student-centered teaching methods, which have revolutionized the "dictation and rote memorization" of traditional Afghan education.

Yacoobi believes AIL's program of education, human rights and leadership training is already showing results, especially in helping the population understand the fundamentals of democracy. AIL's human rights training, for example, features passages from the Koran to demonstrate that their religious principles are rooted in peace and include respect and full rights for women—something that "really opens their eyes," she said of the women who attend the workshops. Without attention to the building blocks of democracy, she cautioned, the Afghani people will be ill-equipped to make decisions about how they are governed and who should lead them.

Yacoobi emphasized that the recent media attention on Taliban violence in Afghanistan should not overshadow the real desires of the people of Afghanistan. "They are tired of war," she said. "They really want peace."

The Afghan Institute of Learning is a project partner of Creating Hope International, a 501(c) nonprofit organization based in Dearborn, Mich. For more information about AIL, go to http://www.creatinghope/org/ail.