PANJWAI, Afghanistan — At first glance, it is not much
of a library: two shelves of about 1,600 books and magazines in a
basement room deep into a dusty alley of adobe homes in rural
Panjwai District, in southern Afghanistan The mattresses and
blankets stacked in the corner still give the vibe of the guest
quarters the room once was.
But the register shows how parts of the community here,
particularly younger residents, have come to value any chance to
indulge their curiosity, in a place that was at the heart of the
original Taliban uprising in the 1990s and became a watchword for
the tragedy and deprivation brought by war.
Hassanullah, 18, checked out “General History.”
Muhammad Rahim, 27, came for “The Fires of Hell,” which he returned
the next day; it was soon borrowed by a 12-year-old named Nabi.
Taher Agha, 15, preferred “Of Love and the Beloved,” keeping it for
10 days. Another young man, about to marry, called ahead to make
sure there was a copy of “Homemaking.” He rode his bicycle six
miles to pick it up.
The library here in Panjwai is largely the work of
Matiullah Wesa, a 22-year-old student from Kandahar who is in India
finishing a degree in political science. For about eight years, the
Pen Path, the volunteer organization that Mr. Wesa started as a
teenager, has been working to reopen schools closed because of
violence and to bring books to some of the worst-affected conflict
areas.
After opening in January, the Panjwai library had about
24 visitors in its first month, said Muhammad Nasim Haidary, who
looks after the library and whose family houses it.
But the interest of a couple of female readers, who
approached women in the Haidary family about their interest in the
books, has caused a small dilemma in a society that frowns upon
even sharing the names of women in public: How can the library keep
track of who took the books out if it cannot write the women’s
names?
One proposal was to use pseudonyms for the women
instead of writing their real names in the register, but that would
create another problem: How would poor Mr. Haidary remember which
pseudonym belongs to whom?
The fighting over the past 14 years has
disproportionately affected the southern and eastern parts of
Afghanistan, and Kandahar Province, which includes Panjwai, has
been among the hardest hit. As district after district changed
hands back and forth between the Taliban and the Afghan government
and its American allies, survival became the priority. Education,
which had always been scarce here, fell to the bottom of the list,
and in many places schools have remained closed even after the
insurgents were pushed out.
Pervasive corruption has also had an effect, with many
of the schools that are listed on government budgets not actually
function at all — “ghost school” set up to allow officials to
gobble up development aid without delivering any services.
“The problem is that so much of the effort has focused
on the cities,” Mr. Wesa said during a visit to Panjwai last month.
“We have to start from the village. If this library was in the
city, we would have 100 visitors a day. But to me, the five
visitors in the village are more important than the 100 in the
city.”
Mr. Wesa’s organization began a national book drive
last year, collecting about 20,000 books in a campaign that focused
on social media. The competition for social status runs deep in
this country, and Mr. Wesa banked on that to encourage
contributions. Even the smallest donation of just a couple of books
was celebrated online, with a picture of the donor and a word of
gratitude.
The books have helped establish seven modest libraries
in provinces with a reputation for some of the worst violence of
the war: Helmand, Kandahar, Khost, Kunar and Wardak.
To Westerners, Panjwai, about an hour’s drive from the
city of Kandahar, is most closely associated with a gruesome
atrocity: the massacre of 16
civilians by an American Army sergeant who walked off his base
before dawn one morning in March 2012. But for the residents, the
place turned to hell years before that.
“Panjwai was like a bakery oven: You burned if you
entered,” Mr. Haidary said. “If you said you were from Panjwai,
people would get scared of you.”
Recently, though, the district has been relatively
quiet. Even as the Taliban exert pressure in neighboring provinces,
gobbling territory, the reach of government has been maintained in
Kandahar, though it has often been disapppointing or abusive.
“A few years ago, I don’t think I would have agreed to
house a library here,” said Hazrat-Wali Haidary, the eldest son of
the family hosting the library, who is training to be a doctor.
“Everyone was suspicious of everything, and I wouldn’t have wanted
to welcome trouble. But now, relative to other places, it is
peaceful here over the past three years, and there is an atmosphere
for the people to turn to education and books.”
Mr. Wesa’s journey into education activism began in his
home district, Maruf, which is now contested by the Taliban. His
father opened one of the first schools there, before violence
forced their family to relocate to Spinbaldak, a border commercial
hub.
But the seed had already been planted. Mr. Wesa, one of
11 children, continued accumulating books for a family library they
brought with them when they moved.
“Every time he got his hands on money, we would see him
returning with more books,” said his older brother, Wali Muhammad,
an army officer.
The family library in Spinbaldak, which is now open to
the public as part of Mr. Wesa’s volunteer organization, has nearly
4,000 books organized on neat metal shelves. In the middle of the
carpeted room is a gas heater for winter reading and an ashtray and
a spittoon for those who may need a smoke or a pinch of smokeless
tobacco.
The circulation at the Spinbaldak library runs largely
on an honor system. Bookkeeping is minimal, partly because another
brother of Mr. Wesa’s, who is the library’s caretaker, Atta
Muhammad, has only very basic literacy.
“If it is a person I know well, I just write down the
number of books he took, not the details of all the books,” Atta
Muhammad said.
When the books are not returned on time, Mr. Muhammad
finds himself making phone calls or visiting the borrowers’ homes.
Despite his efforts, several dozen books have been lost, most of
them never returned after being checked out.
Mr. Wesa plans to open several other small libraries in
the coming year and to expand the book drive to a more organized
network of volunteers across the country. How far he is willing to
go to promote reading was best displayed in a recent conversation
he had with a wealthy businessman in eastern Afghanistan. The man
made an offer: He would donate 20,000 books to a library in his
part of the country, on the condition that it be named for his
father.
In his excitement, Mr. Wesa cared little about cultural
taboos and what is socially acceptable in giving his answer: “I
told him I would even name it after his mother — whatever it takes
to get the books.”