In many ways, life for women and girls in Afghanistan is only getting harder, Marblehead’s Robert McNulty reports unhappily.
“What is happening in Afghanistan is a human rights violation on a scale unparalleled in recent decades,” he says.
Not satisfied with prohibiting girls from furthering their education, the Taliban has also banned women from going out in public without an escort. If a woman is heard speaking or laughing in public, that too is sanctionable.
For girls who knew life before Taliban rule, the situation is particularly difficult, McNulty adds.
“These are girls who grew up in a time when they were told that you can be anything you want to be,” he says.
While he cannot change how Afghanistan is governed, McNulty and the school he founded, Pax Populi Academy, are trying to push back in the opposite direction.
Pax Populi Academy was founded in 2010 and for 11 years offered a co-educational English language learning program, which connected volunteers worldwide with Afghan students in various cities.
Due to safety concerns, Pax Populi now looks dramatically different. Classes are held online with cameras off. The modified Pax Populi relaunched a year ago as a full-time, comprehensive online school for Afghan women and girls in grades 8-12. The curriculum is modeled on international standards for college preparedness.
The new Pax Populi started small with 10 students in the fall of 2023. It grew to 25 students in January and now serves 60 students, including a couple of recent high school graduates who are preparing to apply to universities abroad.
Overwhelming demand
Expanding the enrollment so rapidly was not necessarily the plan when Pax Populi advertised the availability of additional seats in the program on a website advertising educational opportunities, typically overseas.
Within two days, one of McNulty’s colleagues told him they had received 200 applications. McNulty instructed her to take the advertisement down, which she did — only to have the website reach out to report that they were receiving complaints because it had been pulled down prematurely.
Back up it went, and by the time the dust settled, Pax Populi had 586 applications.
McNulty and his colleagues made their way through the pile as best they could, a process that culminated with the Zoom or Skype interviews with the parents of prospective students to ensure that the student will have the necessary family support.
“It’s just been incredible to see the degree of commitment and enthusiasm,” McNulty says.
McNulty personally has 25 students in a philosophy class, the subject in which he holds a Ph.D., though not typically one studied by high school students.
“These kids are so smart that they’re rising to the occasion, and they’re full of questions,” he says.
In addition to classroom work, Pax Populi has, despite the circumstances, tried to salvage for the students some semblance of an extracurricular experience as well. Pax Populi maintains clubs for art, business and wellness.
“They’re dealing with such trauma, and they’re bottling it all up, and they need to be able to unload a bit,” McNulty says. “We don’t have professional psychologists there, but we have and they have each other.”
Safe landing
Another important development for Pax Populi in the past year is that it has been able to bring to America Fayaz Noori, an administrator and English and biology teacher to whom Pax Populi previously referred as “U” for security reasons. Noori is now living in Indiana with six family members, including his mother and two of his sisters.
Noori and his family members had already relocated once, fleeing to Pakistan about a year ago “because they were definitely on the wrong political side of the equation,” McNulty says.
Pax Populi raised the money to bring the family to the United States, and one of McNulty’s colleagues helped them through the process of obtaining humanitarian parole through U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
McNulty visited Noori and his family about a month and a half ago.
“It was incredibly touching,” he says. “They prepared a feast for me.”
Noori is now taking classes at the University of Tulsa, making him the third Pax Populi graduate to enroll at American universities, joining students at Oberlin College and Cornell.
‘Teachers, I love you so much’
McNulty says he is hopeful that Pax Populi’s efforts to bring Afghan students to the United States will not be affected too severely, even if the Trump administration adopts more aggressive immigration policies, as promised.
“If politics somehow adversely impacts this, it’d be sad but we’ll have to try to find other locations,” perhaps in Europe or Canada, McNulty says.
He adds, “Americans have expressed a lot of discontent with our immigration policy, and I hope that sentiment won’t be transferred from those who have illegally crossed the border to those young women who are really struggling from a country where we were involved for two decades. It’s just not the same thing, and I sure hope people would recognize that.”
Afghanistan in 2024 “is in a state of utter economic collapse,” and every one of Pax Populi’s students is impoverished, according to McNulty. They are participating in the program using smartphones or in some cases laptops, but they would not be able to access the WiFi they need without “financial aid” — McNulty taking out the nonprofit’s credit card to cover monthly internet bills, which he acknowledges is straining the organization’s budget.
As challenging as making ends meet can be, the rewards are worth it, McNulty says.
Back in October, McNulty got invited to what he was told was a virtual faculty meeting. He says he was concerned that because he had been out of the classroom for a while, he might be getting some constructive criticism of his pedagogical skills.
What he walked in on instead “was like Woodstock for teachers.” It was International Teachers Day, and the Pax Populi community decided to do it big.
“I don’t think if you went to a match.com conference you could hear the word ‘love’ used more often than I heard it used during that hour and a half,” he says. “One student after another [said], ‘Teachers, I love you so much. You helped me so much. You’re so kind. You’re so patient.’ I was crying.”
To learn more about Pax Populi, see paxpopuli.org.
