Last to Eat, Last to Learn
My Life in Afghanistan Fighting to Educate Women
-
-
4.5 • 6 Ratings
-
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
A Ms. Magazine Pick for Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2023
“Pashtana’s story highlights the resourcefulness and bravery of young women in Afghanistan. I hope readers will be inspired by her mission to give every girl the education she deserves and the opportunity to pursue her dreams.”—Malala Yousafzai
In the spirit of I am Malala and Our House is On Fire by Greta Thunberg, this is the astonishing true story of the Malala Fund Education Champion Award-winner, founder of the NGO LEARN, and women’s education activist whose advocacy for the disappearing girls of rural Afghanistan has led to her being ruthlessly targeted by the Taliban.
Inspired by generations of her family’s unwavering belief in the power of education, Pashtana Durrani recognized her calling early in life: to educate Afghanistan’s girls and young women, raised in a society where learning is forbidden. In a country devastated by war and violence, where girls are often married off before reaching their teenage years and prohibited from leaving their homes, heeding that call seemed both impossible and dangerous.
Pashtana was raised in an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan where her father, a tribal leader, founded a community school for girls within their home. Fueled by his insistence that despite being a girl, she mattered and deserved an education, Pashtana was sixteen when, against impossible odds, she was granted a path out of the refugee camp: admittance to a preparatory program at Oxford. Unthinkably and to her parents’ horror, she chose a different path. She chose Afghanistan.
Pashtana founded the nonprofit LEARN and developed a program for getting educational materials directly into the hands of girls in remote areas of the country, training teachers in digital literacy. Her commitment to education has made her a target of the Taliban. Still, she continues to fight for women’s education and autonomy in Afghanistan and beyond.
Courageous and inspiring, Last to Eat, Last to Learn is the story of how just one person can transform a family, a tribe, a country. It reminds us of the emancipatory power of learning and the transformational potential that lies within each of us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Education activist Durrani's auspicious debut memoir examines the obstacles facing women in Afghanistan and recounts her own efforts to break down those barriers. Raised in a refugee camp in Pakistan, Durrani received an education thanks to her father, a Pashtun tribal leader who opened a girls' school in their camp. "My job was to come back from my private English lessons and immediately teach the girls whatever I learned," Durrani recalls. Interweaving the history of women's education in Afghanistan with the nitty-gritty details of her activism, Durrani notes that when she made her first visit to the country at age 16, she was shocked to see so many women in burqas. She turned down a scholarship to Oxford University to move to Afghanistan, where she interned at various NGOs before launching the advocacy group LEARN and opening a community school in Kandahar Province. Briskly recounting the ins and outs of her quest to make her vision of giving students solar-powered tablets preloaded with lessons and books a reality, Durrani offers a persuasive road map for pursuing gender equality while honoring Afghanistan's religious and cultural traditions. It's an inspiring portrait of a change-maker in action.
