Despite attacks, more children going to school in Afghanistan

Schools have been burned, students threatened and girls doused with acid.
But even as learning to read becomes a more dangerous proposition, the number of children attending school in Kandahar is climbing.
Hajim Anwar, director of education in this province, said the success is a tribute to parents who want better lives for their children.
"There is good education and the education is increasing, not decreasing," he said.
Although he does not have hard numbers, Anwar said school enrolment went up by 15 percent to 20 percent across the province in the past year.
But there is still a huge gender disparity: Nearly all of the new students are boys, he said.
Most of the overall increase has occurred in the rural districts outside the relative security of Kandahar city, where large numbers of children have been enrolled for some time.
And even in the city, the number of students at the Sazal Kandahari high school climbed to 1,900 from 1,200 this year while enrolment at the Zarghona Anna elementary school jumped to 2,500 from 2,170.
The schools "are overflowing," said Drew Gilmour, director of Development Works, an aid agency in Kandahar.
The Mirwais Mina high school, where men on motorbikes sprayed the faces of girls and teachers with acid last November, is bulging at the seams.
Enrolment increased from 800 to nearly 1,300 in one year and, although students stayed away immediately after the attack, nearly all have returned.
Anwar acknowledges threats against the Kandahar school system have had a devastating effect.
In the district of Ghowrak, in the far northwest, there has been no school for more than a month since the school commissioner and police fled to Kandahar city.
Students at the Abdul Habi Bawai school in Kandahar city have been killed and the school has been burned and vandalized.
And many parents in the districts of Panjwai and Zhari say they have been forced to keep their children at home after threats by the Taliban.
But Anwar said new schools have opened even as others have closed.
For instance, in Shorabak in the southeastern part of Kandahar province, he said, there were no schools a year ago and now there are seven.
Anwar said he wants to open more schools, but the fighting has limited his ability to expand.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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