Posted on 01/11/2003 10:08:34 AM PST by a_Turk
KABUL, Afghanistan - Students studying in the well-worn classrooms of Kabul University used to get their class materials by straining to hear professors dictate pages of notes and scribbling feverishly to keep up.
Those days were left behind Saturday with the opening of a little, freshly painted yellow building — a $75,000 photocopying and computer center, courtesy of the Turkish contingent to Kabul's International Security Assistance Force.
It's a small step, but a sign of progress for an institution battered by decades of war and neglect. Kabul University, like the city that surrounds it, is trying to bring back a semblance of normalcy, even when that means something as basic as making a photocopy.
"It was such a waste of time," said Mohammad Kazem Ahang, dean of the journalism department. "You spent half your hours dictating or scrambling to find some way to make copies."
The building next to the engineering department has three new photocopiers and three computers with printers and flatbed scanners. That's no small luxury in a town where power is spotty and sometimes nonexistent.
No one knows when the university last had a photocopier, but many believe it was looted during the warfare of the 1990s — a time when furniture, lab equipment, and even electrical wires from the walls were pilfered. Everyone agrees the copier was particularly missed.
"This need was the most pressing," said Kabul University's president, Mohammad Akbar Popun.
Turkish engineering instructor Mohammad Aarash Masoun, who helped set up the center, said it should "just about" meet the needs of the university's students. There are 16,900 in the freshman class alone.
Masoun hopes to hook the computers up to the Internet but access is expensive and funding is scarce.
To reach the university, located in western Kabul, is to drive past pure desolation — unremitting wreckage from murderous block-to-block fighting between ethnic factions from 1992-1996. Surrounding houses have been reduced to piles of clay bricks. Roofs and walls were pounded into rubble years ago by rockets and artillery fired point-blank at crowded neighborhoods.
The Taliban, the hard-line regime that took over Kabul in 1996, discouraged most education other than religious training and did little to repair the damage. They banned female students and professors, censored the curriculum and destroyed hundreds of books deemed to contain un-Islamic teachings or illustrations.
Since the Taliban were deposed in late 2001, students, faculty and money — albeit not much — have all gradually returned to campus. The road has not been easy, though.
In November, four students died when police fired on a crowd of 1,500 protesting a lack of food, electricity and heat in their dilapidated dormitories. Dozens were injured in the disturbance, which reflected a frustration over poverty that many had hoped the international community would ease. Police were accused of beating, torturing and detaining others following the protest.
Today, many of the university's buildings have new glass. The grounds are being spruced up during the winter holiday, which runs through mid-February.
And in the small yellow building beside the engineering department, the new machines are ensuring that ideas — the central products of any institution of higher learning — are making their way around the school faster than ever, page by photocopied page.
"Now," said Ahang, the journalism dean, "we are sure the university will come back to life again."
Thanks,
Bill.
Windows is looking for the IDE controller that isn't installed. People have been bitching about this since the dawn of NTFS, microsoft STILL hasn't fixed it. They just started calling it a security feature
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