Razia Jan, 81, Who Built an Enduring Girls' School in Afghanistan, Dies

New York Times

20 hours ago

Razia Jan, a dynamic Afghan-born U.S. citizen and entrepreneur who, in the wake of Sept. 11, founded a school for girls outside Kabul that remains open despite the Taliban's return to power, died on July 20 at her home in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. She was 81.
The cause was congestive heart failure, her son, Lars Jan, said.
Ms. Jan owned a successful dry-cleaning business in Duxbury, Mass., when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked in 2001. She had been in the United States since 1970, and after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, she became an unofficial ambassador for her native country, explaining its culture to bewildered community groups and Rotary clubs. (Ms. Jan was an enthusiastic, longtime Rotarian.)
A single mother, she brought her considerable energy to helping 9/11 victims as well, making fleece blankets for emergency medical workers, and then quilts stitched with portraits of fallen firefighters and policemen.
She also began aiding those in Afghanistan who were being ravaged by yet another war. She met Patti Quigley, whose husband, Patrick, died on 9/11 on United Airlines Flight 175 when it was crashed into the World Trade Center's South Tower; Ms. Quigley was raising money for widows in Afghanistan with Susan Retick, another 9/11 widow, and the three women bonded over their shared missions.
When Ms. Jan opened her school, Ms. Quigley, who had worked in finance, became the executive director of Ms. Jan's foundation, Razia's Ray of Hope.
In 2002, Ms. Jan went home for the first time in more than 30 years. She traveled to schools, orphanages and hospitals, buying rice, flour, notebooks, pens, hospital supplies — whatever was needed.
But what the country needed most, she decided, was girls' education, and she set about raising the money to fund it. In 2005, she found a plot of land in Deh'Subz, a rural community about 30 miles northeast of Kabul, and began to build.
Then she had to convince a suspicious community that the girls there needed to be educated. Under the Taliban rule, from 1996 to 2001, education was banned for women. After the Taliban's ouster, schools for girls sprung up all over the country, but they were risky endeavors. Some schools were set on fire, and some girls who attended them were poisoned or had acid thrown in their faces or were beaten by disapproving male relatives.
Ms. Jan, however, was wily and resourceful, a natural diplomat and skilled linguist who spoke five of the region's languages — Dari, Pashto, Urdu, Punjabi and Balochi — as well as some Arabic. She won over the village patriarchs through endless teas and meetings and sheer will.
'She was charming and relentless,' Ms. Quigley said in an interview.
Ms. Jan's Zabuli Education Center — the free school was named for a donor — opened with more than 100 girls enrolled in kindergarten through fourth grade; as more girls attended, more grade levels were added. One of the first lessons kindergartners learned was how to write their fathers' names, a canny gambit by Ms. Jan to woo the fathers, many of whom were illiterate and signed legal documents with thumbprints.
There were ongoing compromises: Some girls, following tradition, became engaged, married or pregnant as young teenagers. Determined to keep them in school as long as possible, Ms. Jan made allowances accordingly.
When Yalda, a ninth grader, became engaged, her classmates panicked; once married, she would have to leave school. Would it be possible, they asked Ms. Jan, for her to graduate early?
If Yalda doubled up on her studies, Ms. Jan said, she could skip 10th grade, which would allow her to finish high school a year earlier. The whole class decided to try to skip the grade with her. Of the 13 girls in ninth grade, seven passed the test; Yalda was one of them.
Ms. Jan's diplomacy kept the school physically safe as well — the village elders expressed considerable good will as the years went on — though in the beginning, the principal would test the water herself every day to make sure it wasn't tainted.
'If the water is poisoned, I'm just one person,' she told the filmmaker Beth Murphy, who spent eight years making a documentary about the school that aired on PBS in 2016.
That film, 'What Tomorrow Brings,' is sobering as it follows a few young women over nearly a decade. Not all of them thrived.
One student, Pashtana, a feisty 15-year-old who was in seventh grade when Ms. Jan and Ms. Murphy met her, was the first person in her family to learn to read and write. She had been forced into an engagement with a cousin, who had promised to support her impoverished family. She was allowed to stay in school until she married, although her father beat her when she declared her intention to do so. As the wedding date approached, she tried to kill herself with rat poison. After Pashtana graduated, Ms. Murphy said, she and Ms. Jan lost touch with her.
'Every day I pray that nothing goes wrong,' Ms. Jan said in the movie, 'and that they can go forth. I can't really be sure what tomorrow brings, but at least they are in school this year.'
She and Ms. Murphy used the film to raise money for the next dream: a free women's college with a midwifery program, essential in a country with high infant and maternal mortality rates. The same men who had once opposed the lower school laid the foundation stones for the new building, which opened in 2017.
Razia Jan was born on June 5, 1944, in Quetta, a city in present-day Pakistan, one of four children of Zainab Sardar and Sardar Ali Asghar Mohammadzai. Her relatives were landowners, liberal and well-to-do. Razia grew up in a large, multigenerational compound.
She studied early childhood education at the Government College for Women in Quetta, where she earned bachelor's and master's degrees. In the late 1960s, her brother Ashraf was an engineering student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Ms. Jan joined him in Cambridge, Mass., in 1970 to continue her studies in early childhood education, enrolling at Lesley University.
A decade later, she was a single mother in Massachusetts working as a tailor and making clothing she designed and sold at craft festivals and fairs. She soon had her own business, Razia's Tailoring and Dry Cleaners.
In addition to her son, Ms. Jan is survived by Ashraf; another brother, Assif; and a granddaughter.
In 2012, Ms. Jan was one of 10 people honored for their humanitarian work by CNN in its annual broadcast 'CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute.'
When the Taliban returned to power in August 2021 and made it illegal for girls to be educated beyond the sixth-grade level, Ms. Jan shuttered the secondary school and the college. But she was determined to pack the grade school with more girls.
She succeeded. In 2020, there were 703 students enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade, including 57 girls in kindergarten. This year, there are 121 kindergartners, and a total of 810 students are enrolled in kindergarten through sixth grade.
'Razia was totally undeterred by rejection,' Andrea Alberto, the current executive director of Razia's Ray of Hope Foundation, said in an interview. 'She said, 'We'll teach as many of them as we possibly can.''