Calendar of Events
Guest speaker Dr. Mohammad Khan Kharoti
On Wednesday, March 30, Coe will welcome Dr. Mohammad Khan Kharoti, an alumnus from some 30 years ago, for a talk. A native of Afghanistan, Dr. Kharoti will talk about his school-building project, https://www.greenvillageschools.ngo, and about being in Afghanistan this past fall when the Taliban took over the parts of the country that it didn't already control.
The presentation is free.
Sponsors of the visit include Coe's Muslim Students Association, Alumni Office and Committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
Biography
Dr. Mohammad Khan Kharoti is the son of nomadic Afghans who were forced to settle in Helmand Province when he was seven years old. He was the first in Shin Kalay village to read and write at age 12 and to finish primary school and nursing school in Lashkar Gah. He so impressed an American physician in Lashkar Gah with his work ethic that he was given the opportunity to attend secondary school in Lebanon, a pre-med program at Coe College in the US, and medical school in Jalalabad before practicing general surgery in Lashkar Gah. In 1987 he was forced to flee with his family to Pakistan, where he worked for Mercy Corps teaching paramedics and treating wounded Mujahideen, and for the American consulate helping Afghan refugees. In 1989 his family came to the US as refugees themselves, so he retrained and worked as a nuclear medicine technician while watching his four children thrive in school. With his encouragement, they have successful careers as an interventional radiologist, a dentist, an accountant, and an interpreter.
When he returned to Afghanistan and Shin Kalay in 1999, he saw the children of his own village working in poppy fields, none of them in school. There were no schools. No one in the village of 11,000 could read or write. Returning again in 2001, Mohammad got formal permission from the Taliban in Kabul to start a school for boys and girls in his family compound, taught by two literate women from the district. With the help of admiring coworkers and patients at Kaiser Permanente in Oregon, he started Green Village Schools (GVS, 501C3 status) and began raising money to build a school. The school became a reality, and its enrollment grew to 1200 students, including 400 girls, but in 2008 the entire infrastructure was destroyed not by the Taliban but by armed Urdu-speaking men with uncertain motives, likely from Pakistan.
The school by then was known across Afghanistan and in the northern border area of Pakistan (Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa), from which Mohammad received calls of condolence. The school’s classrooms, library, well and water tower, and the corridors where students once played, were destroyed by men ignorant of education’s larger purpose, but the memory of the school could not be destroyed. Any student who had sat in its classrooms, read in its library, and awaited with hope the completion of the computer lab, would never be the same. The culprits were role models for a world that no longer existed in Shin Kalay. The concept of education had made an inroad to rural Helmand Province, and nothing could reverse the community’s expectations for its children or the province’s admiration for the school.
With the generous help of The Afghan Appeal Fund in London, in 2012 Mohammad and GVS began rebuilding the school which would eventually have over 50 classrooms, an auditorium, two rooms wired for computers still awaiting installation of solar panels for energy, a library with books in Pashto in one room and English in another, and an auditorium. Enrollment reached 1600 boys and 1100 girls. In the meantime, GVS established an Advanced Education Center in Lashkar Gah for computer and English literacy. Over the course of three years, several hundred teachers and secondary-school students, male and female, attended the center, many of them communicating via VSAT internet connection with boys and girls in New Mexico. Students went on to colleges and universities in Afghanistan to become midwives, physicians (four girls), and teachers. Six girls enrolled in the School of Leadership Afghanistan (SOLA).
Mohammad has worked with the office of President Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan Ministry of Education at all levels, village elders, girls’ parents, and periodically the Taliban, to irreversibly alter the educational landscape in Helmand Province, opening unlimited opportunity for boys and girls whose parents are still illiterate. He was working on projects at the school last summer when the Taliban took over the government. He spent a month in Kabul after the evacuation deadline before getting on the manifest of a chartered flight to Qatar and returning home. In his talk today he will describe an unusual relationship he has had with the Taliban which has invited not only their tolerance of the school but their full support and promotion.