- Published on Tuesday, 27 March 2018
Education is so important that one mother in Afghanistan sat for an exam while cradling her sick child in her lap.
As a picture speaks a thousand words, 25-year-old Jahantab Ahmadi’s image taken last month by a lecturer named Yahya Erfan at Nasirkhosraw Higher Education Institute who was monitoring the university’s entrance exam, has gone viral and sparked an outpouring amount of admiration.
The mother-of-three was captured sitting on the ground in full concentration, while holding her youngest child, Khizran, whom she says would not stop crying because she had an ear ache.
She told AFP, at the beginning of the test she sat at a desk with her two-month old daughter in her lap, but to hush her baby from not disturbing others, she later moved to the ground.
“I had to concentrate on the baby and do the paper.
“I don’t want to be deprived of my studies…I want to become a doctor, someone who serves women in my community or society,” she was reported saying.
While Ahmadi had completed high school after she got married at the age of 18, she revealed, “My life goal was to get admitted into university. But due to our poor economic situation and poverty I could not afford to study for three or four years.”
Though Ahmadi works as a farmer, she expressed her desire to help bring positive change to the Afghan people, “especially women” in her home province, a remote farming village in Daikundi province.
“Many women in Afghanistan, especially in the provinces, are illiterate,” Ahmadi said.
In fact, according to reports, Afghanistan’s general literacy rate is one of the lowest in the world — just 36 per cent, based on official figures.
After her image went viral, good news kept showering the woman. Not only did she pass her entrance exam, but Afghan women’s rights activist Zahra Yagana also invited her to Kabul to make her dreams come true by offering her to study there.
“If she had to study in Daikundi it would be difficult for her.
“The standard of education is low. There is no student hostel in Daikundi and she would have to live in a rented house.
“We will give her a house (in Kabul). There are many friends who have promised to help her. We are trying to find a job for her husband and also raise money for her children to go to school,” Yagana told AFP.
A GoFundMe campaign has also been launched to help pay Ahmadi’s fees at the private university, with many using the hashtag #JahanTaab.
Ahmadi plans to study sociology but the cost of the three-year course is between 10,000 (RM560) and 12,000 (RM670) Afghanis a term.
SOURCE AND MORE: video report:
Categories: Afghanistan, Asia, Education, Educational Resources