A handful of Afghan graduate students at Syracuse University may go into public schools near Fort Drum, a military reservation about 85 miles north of Syracuse near Watertown, N.Y., in the spring to teach students about parts of Afghan culture they do not usually hear about or see in the media.

The topic of Afghanistan could be a sensitive issue for students in Fort Drum-area schools, said Mary Anne Dobmeier, the assistant superintendent at the Indian River Central School District, the main district for military students in the Fort Drum area. Sixty-three percent of the district’s 4,000-plus students are children of military families, she said.

Before teaching students, two of the graduate students will make a presentation about Afghan culture to Fort Drum-area school administrators and teachers on Monday. Administrators will then talk with parents of students in Indian River schools to gauge their response to the proposed presentations and determine if they should show the same material to students in the spring.

‘It may be something that’s a little bit too sensitive, too close to home for them,’ Dobmeier said.

‘We all know that the predominant placement right now is in Afghanistan,’ she said. ‘So we have to be cognizant of the fact that some students may have a hard time dealing with that, even if the whole goal is just to talk about what life is like in Afghanistan from the commoner’s perspective.’

Habib Sangar and Akbar Quraishi, international relations graduate students, will make the November presentation, which aims to describe Afghan holidays, food, language and daily living. Sangar and Quraishi said they hope to counter the images of gun-toting Taliban members that Americans may associate with Afghanistan, even though they do not represent daily life for the majority of Afghans. 

Sangar worked Friday with Quraishi and Emera Bridger Wilson, the outreach coordinator of SU’s South Asia Center, on the presentation for school administrators from Carthage, Watertown and Indian River school districts. The three districts serve the majority of Fort Drum military students.

‘One of the reasons why we’re doing it with the teachers first before we go into the classrooms is that there is some resistance about us giving these kinds of presentations,’ Wilson said.

Wilson said the program expected this when it approached school districts in September with the idea of bringing Afghan culture into Fort Drum-area classrooms.

Sangar and Quraishi spoke to Fort Drum’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team, known as ‘the Spartans,’ before they were deployed to Afghanistan on Oct. 14. Quraishi said the officers showed intense interest in the discussion because it was firsthand analysis of the situation over there.

Quraishi worked for the Afghan National Security Council before coming to the United States, and Sangar worked in the country’s legislature and for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The graduate students also spoke to students at Pine Grove Middle School in East Syracuse in March. Students had more questions for the graduate students than they had time to answer and especially wanted to know about candy in Afghanistan, Wilson said. The group is planning on bringing a kind of candy popular in Afghanistan called shirpera to the next meeting on Monday. Shirpera is made with a spice called cardamom and milk.

Instead of focusing on Afghan civilians’ attitude toward the war, the graduate students will describe the hobbies of people in Afghanistan, including soccer, one of the country’s most popular sports. 

‘Some focus should be on the family, what’s the culture, how we respect our parents, as well as Afghan languages,’ said Sangar, who teaches a language class at SU on Pashto, also known as ‘Afghan.’ He said he plans to talk about the status of schools in his home country: how they were shut down under Taliban rule but have been rebuilt.

The students are not trying to spread propaganda but rather trying to tell the untold stories, Quraishi said.

‘If your fathers are in Afghanistan,’ he said to a hypothetical school audience, ‘they’re fighting for a good cause.’

abknox@syr.edu

 

Published on November 8, 2010 at 12:00 pm