[American officials here and in Washington have refused to discuss the case of the robotics team, but several pointed out that U.S. law “presumes” all temporary visa seekers intend to remain in the United States unless they are able to prove they have compellingly strong ties to their country.]
By Pamela Constable
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Afghan
school girls work on robot at a school in Herat on Tuesday.
(Jalil Rezayee/EPA)
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KABUL
— When six Afghan teenage
girls were denied U.S. visas to enter an international robotics contest in
Washington set for later this month, the unexplained decision seemed to be
punishing the very ambitions that U.S. agencies have long advocated for girls
in Afghanistan, where many are denied educational opportunities.
But the story is more complicated than that.
Afghanistan, beset by insurgent violence and
economic uncertainty, is suffering from a massive brain drain, according to
Afghan and U.S. officials. Scholarship students, academic fellows and teachers
who receive temporary visas to visit the United States often vanish into
immigrant communities instead of returning home.
The growing phenomenon has made U.S.
officials especially wary of approving visa requests — even for applicants such
as the robotics students who may otherwise deserve them — if officials decide
there is a risk the person will fail to return home.
“It is sad to say, but some of them do not
come back,” said Elham Shaheen, a senior official at the Ministry of Higher
Education who manages foreign-study policies. He said 10 percent of all Afghans who are awarded
temporary visas for academic purposes in the United States or Europe defy
immigration rules to remain there permanently.
Female students and faculty members, facing
extra frustrations at home, are no exception. Several years ago, Shaheen said,
12 female university lecturers won scholarships to obtain master’s degrees in
economics in Germany. Of the 12, he said, “11 of them escaped.”
American officials here and in Washington
have refused to discuss the case of the robotics team, but several pointed out
that U.S. law “presumes” all temporary visa seekers intend to remain in the
United States unless they are able to prove they have compellingly strong ties
to their country.
Two members of the team, interviewed Thursday
from their home city of Herat, said U.S. consular officers had asked about
their ties to Afghanistan, whether they had relatives in the United States and
whether they intended to return home after the competition.
Youth teams from about 150 countries will
face off next week in the FIRST Global Challenge, created to promote
international student interest in science, technology and math. Only one other
team, from Gambia, was turned down.
“Each of us gave them written guarantees from
two government employees vouching for our return,” said Rodaba Noori, 16, a
member of the Afghan team that built a ball-sorting robot. “This is our
country. We have our life and family here,” she said. “How could we abandon
them and not return after the competition?”
Obtaining a visa, though, is just one of the
hurdles the female students face in their efforts to advance academically —
long before they can even dream of traveling abroad.
Afghan families often oppose their daughters’
attending universities in Kabul or other cities, fearing for their safety and
exposure to young men. Agencies that offer domestic scholarships, such as the
nonprofit Asia Foundation, often have to negotiate with families or agree to
support a male relative who can accompany the girl each semester.
Girls are also at a disadvantage in English
and math, because Afghan families are more willing to pay for boys to take
private classes. As a result, more girls fail college-entrance exams. To help
even the balance, the U.S. Agency for International Development sponsors
exam-prep classes for girls, and education officials have established a 30 percent female quota for all in-country
scholarships.
“There is a chain of barriers for Afghan
girls that requires a network of support to overcome,” said Razia Stanikzai of
the Asia Foundation in Kabul, whose job is to promote Afghan female students’
participation in science and technology.
Many Afghans, however, view these as “male”
fields, and families may try to steer daughters into nursing or teaching,
instead. To overcome such stereotypes, Stanikzai’s program sponsors science
fairs at provincial schools, where girls demonstrate projects to fathers and
male community elders. “We don’t want girls sitting at home and being told that
science and technology are for boys,” she said.
Even students at such elite institutions as
the American University in Afghanistan, where the U.S. Embassy has funded more
than 400 scholarships for women, face prejudice. Two female information
technology students said that in most of their classes, all of the other
students were male and that some of their friends and relatives had no idea
what they were studying — or why.
“Some of them tell us to change majors, to do
something more acceptable like nursing or arts,” said Shamim Ali, 26, whose
dream is to start her own IT company. “This is a traditional society, and even
the concept of IT is strange. People think we are going to become mechanics or
electricians and climb up on ladders.”
When it comes to studying abroad, there are
many opportunities, such as the Fulbright program, which has sent 535 Afghan
students — among them, 102 women — to the United States since 2002. There are
also closer international universities in countries such as India, Iran and
Bangladesh, which Afghan officials are promoting as cheaper, more comfortable
places to study at a time of growing anti-Muslim sentiment in the West.
Yet even accomplished female students can be
thwarted by family resistance and competing cultural priorities. Education
officials described cases in which applicants for foreign scholarships turned
out to be married, pregnant and unable to accept by the time their tickets and
visas came through.
One woman in Kabul named Raihana, 27, who
obtained a scholarship to study economics in Bangladesh, said her older
brother, the senior male in the family, at first refused to let her go, but her
younger and more liberal brother finally persuaded him.
“Since my father was dead, he felt he had to
take responsibility for me and my safety,” the woman said, “but the real reason
was that he was married and he did not want his wife to study or travel. If I
went, she would be jealous and complain.”
The members of the robotics team said they,
too, encountered resistance from their parents — not only to travel to the
United States for the robotics contest but also to fly cross-country to Kabul, with
its news of insurgent bombings, to apply for their visas.
“We finally convinced them, and in the end
they were very happy, but it was a difficult path,” said Yasamin Yasinzada, 16,
who said her dream is to “be a pioneer in robotics and set an example for other
girls.”
She said it was “much easier for boys, because
they are allowed to travel, but it helped that our coach was going with us.”
Despite her disappointment at being turned
down to visit the United States, where the robot will appear at the competition
without its creators, Yasinzada said she still hopes to study abroad.
“The specific place doesn’t matter,” she
said. “I just want to learn, interact, see other ways of life, come back home
and put it all into practice.”
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