Eighteen year old Shabana Basij-Rasikh is a sophomore at Middlebury College, but her home is Kabul, Afghanistan. As a young child living under Taliban rule she attended a ‘secret school,’ because education for women was prohibited. In 2002, after the US-led coalition overthrew the Taliban, she was able to go to public school.
She won a scholarship from the American Council for International Education and studied in Wisconsin as a high school senior. At Middlebury she’s working in Middle Eastern Studies and women and gender studies.
She has also worked for the Aid organization that first sent her to the U.S. and last summer she won a $10-thousand dollar grant from the Davis Peace Project to dig wells in her home city.
She spoke with VPR’s Jane Lindholm about the shifting situation in her country.