Female nursing students face transport problems

Female student nurses in the southern city of Kandahar say they could be forced to stop attending lessons due to transport problems. "There is no way my parents will allow me to come here if I don’t have transport," 19-year-old Saddiqa told IRIN in Kandahar city. "They don’t want me to walk on the streets or get into taxis for my own safety." The nursing school, which opened two years ago under the Taliban, was a great achievement as it allowed women to study medicine at a time when all girls over the age of 12 were banned from education and work by the hardline regime. At present, there are 105 female and 50 male students at the school. In order to encourage women to attend the school, they were given 65 kg of wheat from the World Food Programme (WFP). The problem of transport cropped up when the school started selling 15 kg of wheat per person in order to hire three minibuses to transport girls and women to and from the building. "We did this because the students themselves wanted us to do this, otherwise women would not be able to attend," the deputy director of the nursing school, Engineer Mahmud, told IRIN. "WFP has objected to this way of payment, and we have been told that we cannot do this any longer, so we will have to stop transportation for women, because we don’t have the money to pay for this," he said, adding that the cost of hiring the vehicles was US $700 per month. WFP has responded by saying that the sale of its aid by non-beneficiaries is not permitted. "We understand their problem, but this goes against our principles," the programme officer for WFP in Kandahar, Sikender Hyet Khan, told IRIN. "The money has to come from somewhere else. They are in need of vehicles, but we cannot provide them," he added. The school is supported by UN agencies such as the United Nations Children's Fund - UNICEF, which has provided them with stationery, and the World Health Organisation (WHO) has donated electrical equipment and cash for salaries. "We are in need of more stationery, and the computer and photocopier given to us does not work," Mahmud said. "We need more assistance if we are to operate properly and remain open," he maintained, adding that salaries for lecturers also needed to be increased as they were now teaching more classes than when the school first opened. As part of the three-year course at the nursing school, the male and female students attend lectures and practicals in anatomy, physiology, microbiology and medicine, as well as an English language lesson every day. With an estimated population of 450,000 in Kandahar city, there are only 203 doctors, with only 40 of them female. The poor state of the health care in the southern region has also been exacerbated by the fact that there has not been a proper health system in the battered country for more than two decades. However, with the fall of the Taliban and some hope that the new Interim Authority could bring about peace, some local women are determined to push for change in this conservative society. "I want to become a doctor, because it is very difficult for women in our country to become doctors," Saddiqa said. "But I am ready to face that challenge and help the poor and sick Afghans. But we cannot do this without help from the outside world," she added.