Despite the Taliban’s restrictions on women’s education in Pakistan, a school tucked away in the hills flanking the northern Pakistani village of Aliabad has pledged to provide young women with a safe environment to learn.
University alumnus Christen Romero discovered the academy while studying abroad and hopes to start a student initiative to help the remote institution.
Shadow Girls Academy is a small school that consists of a guardhouse, a small library, two classrooms, a dining area, an administrative office and four 12-person dorm rooms in the distant hills of northern Pakistan.
“I want LSU to play a bigger role there,” Romero said. “We’re 30,000 people strong.”
Romero would like University students to set up an organization to fundraise and gather books to send to the academy, as he will not be able to return there once he begins graduate school.
“Female education in Pakistan is under constant scrutiny from various conservative sectors of the population. Moreover, fathers are often afraid, unwilling or too poor to send their daughters to the centers of education in the larger, more dangerous cities,” the academy website reads.
The Taliban took control of the area in early 2009 and issued an order preventing thousands of young Pakastani women from going to school.
Women who go against the wishes of men are punished and can even be killed with no repercussion, Romero said, as he recalled a young school girl who was strangled to death by her father because she didn’t agree with his marriage arrangements.
In general, women in Pakistan — especially its rural areas — are not educated, Romero said.
“You raise your daughter, you marry her off at 15 or 16 or 17, you might promise her to marriage way before then even,”  Romero said. “And even if she does get an education, you don’t expect her to do much with it.”
Ultimately, a woman’s role in society in Pakistan is to work in the field “and raise 10 kids,” Romero said.
Romero stayed at the academy for several months to teach English and geography to the female students because “to go to university there, you have to know English.”
“They think that Pakistan is this huge country,” Romero said. “They know that England was the colonial power that occupied India and Pakistan, but to show them how small England is and how big Pakistan is, they’re just like, ‘Wait. How did that happen?'”
Romero believes there is still hope for Pakistani girls attending Shadow Girls Academy.
Their kindness and hope warrant help, Romero said.
“It doesn’t take much to run [the school], just a couple thousand dollars a year,” Romero said.
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Contact Julian Tate at [email protected]