KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Two weeks after the Taliban's defeat, this city reached a milestone last week as its top school reopened — this time for girls as well as boys, and with no stern mullahs to dictate what is taught.
Hundreds of happy relatives — bearded fathers in turbans, mothers and older sisters in head-to-toe burkas — swept into the Albirona school last Saturday with children in hand, registering them for the first normal classes in seven years.
"I'm uneducated myself, but I'm very proud to bring in my daughters and son to get an education," said Ayatullah, 40, who escorted his two daughters, 7 and 8, and his son, 11.
The mood was buoyant at the school, which will teach boys and girls together through the sixth grade, then boys only in high school. Girls who finish primary school will attend a separate high school for girls, which was supposed to reopen last Saturday as well.
No one was more ecstatic than the teachers, men and women who often found themselves idled and scorned in the reign of the poorly educated Taliban.
Earlier last week, at the Kandahar education office, more than a hundred overjoyed, almost disbelieving teachers crammed into a room, men and women together for a change, planning how to rebuild the school system.
When the Taliban conquered Kandahar in 1994, making it their headquarters and imposing their harsh fantasy of Islamic rule, they closed most schools, imposed religious subjects and second-rate mullahs on the rest and banned learning for girls. Public funds were directed instead to the madrassas, religious centers that trained boys to become warriors for the faith.
"We've all been praying for this day," said Hama Sofia, 58, a leading educator, at the planning meeting. "I always had faith that it would come."
The teachers were eager to reopen at least these two schools immediately despite a shortage of textbooks, and many have worked day and night to fix classrooms in shambles.
The planning meeting was convened by Muhammad Daoud Barak, 65, who was director of Kandahar schools before the Taliban reign and was reappointed last week.
"We're starting from zero," Barak said in an interview. "Most of our schools were destroyed. A generation has lost the chance for education."
Barak asked for rapid international aid. "The world should remember that it was the lack of education among our people that led to these tragedies," he said.
Several teachers were eager to tell a visitor their stories of humiliation and hardship under the Taliban.
"Now we can feel like we are human beings instead of animals," Rahma Tullah Amin, 57, said.
Amin said he survived the past six years by working as a cashier in a shop run by a barely literate man. "We can be teachers again, and a part of society," he said.