Hope seen in Afghan training centers

From beneath the crowded street in the Khair Khana district, Kabul can hear the sound of reading breaking out. A broken signboard of the Abtikar Training Center lies across the stairs leading to its underground classrooms.

Approximately 200 students who come here and enjoy the knowledge of language, natural science, Islamic religion or computer science daily crammed into the only four small classrooms that the center has.

The majority of students here are office workers who struggle to acquire skills such as English and IT in order to carry out their jobs to a greater extent, according to Hasibullah, director of the private training center in the capital city of Afghanistan.

In those 18-square-meter classrooms, students sit in three rows of benches as the teachers give their lessons with a neat whiteboard in the front and a flat-screen television hanging in the corner.

"I am a businessman trading military equipment in the city. I came here to learn English because most of my customers are foreigners and my business gets better with more fluent and understandable English," Monir, 22, told Xinhua while learning English here.

In a beginners' English class, a 24-year-old anti-narcotics police officer, Abdul, said he was making use of his spare time studying English for gaining the capacity of dealing with international cases.

The tuition here is no big deal for policemen or businessmen. A 15-person English training course for about 25 hours costs five U. S. dollars, which amounts to 2.5 percent of an ordinary salary for Afghan policemen.

However, it is a relatively huge amount of money for the working classes who earn to provide for big families, which is a typical situation in the war-torn country.

"Due to lack of financial aid, the teaching staff can only share about one third of their students' tuition, which comes to around 40 U.S. dollars a month as their salary," said Hasibullah.

"Salaries at this level are far lower than the average among teachers in Kabul, which makes it hard for us to hire the qualified teachers. There are even school students teaching in our training center," Hasibullah added.

Jawed, an 18-year old high-school student, serves as a teacher of mathematics here while he is busy preparing for the Afghan national collage entrance examination "Kankor".

He told Xinhua that he wanted to take the chance to spread knowledge among people and would like to continue his lessons here even if he became busier at university.

Besides people's desire for passing on and deriving knowledge, the hope of gender equality is seen coming to fruition in this tiny training center.

Adolescent boys and girls are taught in the same classroom as they interact with their classmates and teachers freely and actively, young ladies dare to talk with male counterparts about life and culture in foreign countries, despite Afghanistan's conservative tradition.

Dunya, an out-going schoolgirl, found her seat alongside seven boys and two other girls during an English training class when telling Xinhua about her plan to study law in university and serve as judicial personnel as well as the support from her dear parents.

Girls going to school or being employed were strictly forbidden during the Taliban regime and still remained controversial in a wide range of Afghan families nowadays.

Speaking of girls like Dunya and other students practicing their skills, Kabul University professor Sayed Darwishian said, " More and more youngsters including girls getting education besides taking the country towards progress would also help reduce the violence against women in society."