9999

9999, a documentary filmed at Merksplas, a maximum security prison in Belgium. Home to mentally ill inmates who have no guarantee of ever seeing freedom again; their release date: 31/12/9999.

9999_Trailer English from Associate Directors on Vimeo.

This documentary by Ellen Vermeulen granted fantastic access to one of the most timeless places on Earth. Where the only thing to do each day is watch shadows disappear from the wall and listen to the slow knocking of pipes. It is tragic, to see so many people unsure of their futures. Unsure of their present. They are granted no access to psychiatric help, no proper advice or control of medication and essentially left to be forgotten about in prison until either they kill themselves or die naturally. These men have made mistakes, but Vermeulen's characters are remorseful and it is heart-breaking to watch as they sit confined to their tiny rooms, that have become their only world, as their mental health and emotions fluctuate. One man explains the story of how he came to be here. He had done wrong and was scared that his father would send him to prison for fear that he would be admitted to a prison like Merksplas and left to rot, so he attacks him and leaves him for dead. He powerfully states, 'because I wanted to keep my life, I lost my life'. He knows he did wrong and he has had many years to confront this decision.

Another young man was trying to seek help for his mental health but being turned away from a clinic, he set fire to a bike to get attention. He did not receive the help he was seeking, instead he was incarcerated and has been in prison without therapy for 8 years.

The Human Rights Commission condemns the Belgian government by serving fines to them. The government merely pays the fine for the breach in human rights, and continues, business as usual, whilst approx 900 people remain in prison, without a release date.

After the showing of this incredible documentary, we were treated to a Q&A with director Ellen Vermeulen. Here's what happened:

Aud: A really powerful film with amazing access.

It's only afterwards when the media said to me, this is really absurd that you can make this, that I realise this is maybe strange, that they allow me.

Aud: So it was a challenge? You knew it was a challenge to try and make this film?

Dir: I think the challenge was not that much, how to make this film but how to be honest with what I saw and to capture this kind of, their lives. What will I show to show how their life is? I think that was the most difficult thing.

Aud: Could you tell us a little bit about how you made, why you chose to make the film as you did in the sense of locking off the camera, filming people mostly as they're doing things and keeping most of the, well keeping the interviews off camera.

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Dir: Yeh, very important moment was when, to find funding I had to shoot a trailer so I filmed myself. Afterwards I worked with a cameraman so I filmed myself. And as I was very close to my characters I filmed like very close and when i looked at it I felt bad because it was, you know a very famous dutch film-maker says 'when you have poor children with a little dirt on their mouth you feel sad for them', you feel it's like exotic and I didn't want to do that. I wanted to respect them and show them in their strength. This is one thing. but also you want to film the space. I am not a filmmaker with lots of words, I want to show. So my idea was I want to make this film and if you turn off the sound you can also see the film. But before I worked for one year and a half doing research. So the moment I filmed it was very obvious what I wanted to film, I only shot for 4 days. So I did research for one year and a half and filmed for four days. I knew how they would react when something was happening. There was one moment there was a fight between one of the prisoners and the guard. And I thought I cannot film this because if I film this I have to show tomorrow, this relationship with this guard and my film is not about that, my film is about the timelessness of their being. So, it was all very clear and that's why I think the shooting was very strict, very obvious for me.

Aud: Did you actually film the interviews or just record the sound?

Dir: Both. there are some interviews I did before I recorded them myself when I was alone.

Aud: And so the period of research, you worked without a camera did you?

Dir: Yeh, I only want to film when I'm tired of talking. The characters also said finished, stop.

Aud: Stop the research?

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Dir: We were tired talking to each other I new every spot on the wall I knew everything. I had been there for so many times so long time and I had to film. I was so upset I had to film, I had to film something with what I saw.

Aud: Have they seen the film?

Dir: Sure. They have seen it I think three times and they were really also tired of it. Yeh but it's very important because it was screened on telvsion twice in belgium and I was so afraid. They are in this little room alone and they look at television and they see themselves and this is so difficult for them. So I wanted to make sure that they knew everythign by heart. They had to know it so good because one day they are good, the next day they can be ill. And I wanted to show the film in every stage of their, every stage as much as possible.

Aud: So you also made a decision not to film, or put in the film, any sequences where they were less in control of their lives. Less well?

Dir: These are the moments that I'm not going to film because I'm there with them and there is something happening I am not a film-maker. I'm not the kind of film-maker who wants to film err, this in my reality. I didn't put the camera for 24hrs. It's the way I see their lives and it's a confusion maybe. Of course there are moments when you really see that they are ill. It's hard to film and I'm not going to show them in their weakest moment. But, I think you can feel that there is something happening with them so I wanted to give the feeling and not show everything. A judge said to me, if you see the film you can realise how much worse it is in reality and I think he's right. This is very, ok. Their life is good when you see this film. In reality it's much worse.

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Aud: There were a couple of moments in the film, when people address you. Was that, were you questioning him. Or did he know he wanted to make a statement?

Dir: Yeh he wanted to make a statement and it's also about who is watching who. You are watching him all the time and I think at one moment he's like, I'm like a character in a fiction film, but he's playing with that all the time. When I entered his room he always had something for me, like I'm from the mafia. He was addressing, always symbolic to me and I think this moment is a very important moment because as a spectator you are confronted with your position of watching them and being on the outside. I was not asking anything I think this is the moment that lots of people would cut, I was just like not watching him coz I don't want him to react to me.

Aud: You say the film has been shown on TV, judges have watched it. Has the film had any impact, any debate at least?

Dir: Yeh. Things are changing. I'm not going to say it's completely because of the film but I think this film also had an impact. I showed this film for example in the European Court of Human Rights and that's very nice because lots of judges said to me, we are reading these files and now for the first time we see faces. It's like the same with judges, they say we send people to prison and now, we see what's happening in prison. The European Court is judging individuals and one month after this film, they judged the complete, they gave a fine to Belgium for everybody, not only individual anymore. So, this maybe the film, and also there is one of these guys not in my film but one of these guys who asked for euthanasia, to end his life, so it was a huge thing in Europe and it was shameful for Belgium. I think these things are, helping to change, because they now have a building for 200 people, and there are now 800-900 left. Also what is strange is that some months after the first screening, the characters were put in psychiatry, after 16yrs, 15yrs of prison, something - I don't say it's my film. but I say, it's strange.

Aud: All your 5 characters got therapy?

Dir: Yes. Very strange. Yeh, you say applause but for me it's hard because then I should have made a film about 1100 people. It's very sad that I chose them and not others.

Aud: Why did you choose those 5 people?

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Dir: Very early I wanted to film them. Four of them didn't want to be int eh film, they said no I don't want to be filmed. I think so many other people asked, can I please be in your film but they are very angry and they shout at the guard and they say, it's all their fault, no it's not. And also I wanted people to have, they have to know that they did something wrong. I met people who were proud of what they did and that was very difficult. I have to like my characters. And very early in my process I decided I wanted to film them. Like Wilfried, everybody said to me, the guards, they said 'don't talk to him, he will play with you, he will play games' and for one year and a half he has played games. he has teased me, he has offended me, he has attacked me. there was one, in my head I think there was a changing point. I was in his room and I touched the door and it closes and I couldn't go out anymore. I think I was there for 15minutes. He said to me, 'now you are depending on me, I can do whatever I want, you have to trust me'. And I was really relaxed, I am happy for that and I said 'Wilfried I totally trust you' and this was the first time I could show it to him. And I think from that moment on he had a different way of reacting to me. There were some moments he shouted at me and I never panicked, I said 'you're right', I also shout. So I thin that made him like 'ok she comes back every week, she doesn't hate me for that'. So it has been a long process.

Aud: So you talk about 8months research. Were you there once a week?

Dir: Yeh. I was there once a week, a whole day that was enough. It was not funny time, it was horrible to be there. I could not explain to anybody what is happening and now I have the feeling I can show it with this film. there was one nice thing in the European court also, there was a woman from I think Latvia and she cried and said, 'for years I am trying to explain to people what is happening and now I don't have to explain any more'. This is, it's impossible to explain, these people, whats happening. It's impossible for them to live in this way.

Aud: Do you think that in the time you were there that they found the therapy they were lacking, through you? 

Dir: Yeh, I think. I think, it's also very hard to know, they only see two kinds of people; people who judge them for what they did, like criminals and people who treat them like mentally ill people who are, who have to be treated. And I was I think the only person in their, in a long time, who was just there not judging them, not saying you are ill. I just talked to them like human beings and I think that was very nice but also very hard when I left I think. When I left I was very emotional and they were like, (happily) 'bye-bye'.

Aud: You say you wrote it, I just wondered how you call yourself a writer when this is a documentary?

Dir: Oh but this is a very directed film.

Aud: The writing aspect?

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Dir: Yeh I wrote every scene, I. It's not I know this will happen but I know this is what I'm searching for. After so many times of being there i know when I do this, how they will react so I knew for example, every scene has to have timelessness. There can be no chronology. so, the only moment there is someone saying something, is the moment the boy leaves the prison. The rest of the film is built without scenes of chronology. Even inside the scenes. this was very important for me, to write scenes that have this timelessness. So, when I make a film I know exactly what I want and I write everything down so this is a very directed film. I put people there and I say. There is one scene that I didn't know and I don't like it at all, this scene. But it was very hot in Belgium, this bit on medication. This was the first news, there was big news in Belgium, and this is the scene I really don't like and I didn't want to put in the film because it has something 'now', somebody is coming inside the room and this is not. It's very concrete what's happening there.

Aud: When they're discussing when he's going to take his medicine, today, tomorrow?

Dir: And also it was not presented, I didn't know, it was out of my control. So when this guard was coming in I was like shit, my morning scene is gone. And then, we kept on filming and then afterwards I saw that it was very hard to see because this was against the law but I really fought against my editor because I didn't want to have it in the film.

Aud: When you say it's hard to see because it's against the norm, what do you mean?

Dir: Somebody who is mentally ill in prison has to have the same treatment as somebody outside the prison, but then you see no, they have to be responsible for their own medication. So there is a doctor, a psychiatrist that says you have to take your medication. Wilfried is collecting all his pills and sometimes he says 'I'm going to kill myself one day so I collect them, it's my only freedom'. Sometimes he puts them in his toilet and he says 'eat', 'bon a petit, have a nice meal' to his toilet.

Aud: I have a question about the environment. I was amazed to see they were locked in with glass glazed doors, and was wondering about the safety aspect of that. In prison here, those safety things would never be allowed, like the stack of chairs in another scene, that could be used as weapons.

Dir: It's a very old prison, it's good for my film of course. In a very modern hospital it could be different. When I was there were some moments when there were a lot of guards who had to attack somebody who was aggressive but er, I cannot really answer your question, because they have never attacked me.

Aud: In a British prison there'd be no glass.

Dir: Wilfried says that they will happy if I kill myself coz they have the room for somebody else, and I think he's right. Nobody takes care of them, they don't mind. So I can just say that, if somebody kills themselves - next one.

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Aud: When you showed the film, was there any sense from the people running the prison that this was actually, there was something shocking here.

Dir: I made one decision that was, when you make a film people have to sign a contract. I accept that I'm in your film etc. I said to them you have to sign this contract when you have seen the film and you like it, otherwise you don't sign it. They don't have any rights, they don't have any control in their lives, I said to them I give you back something which was a huge risk for me as well because they have their strange moments as well, so I was a little bit afraid. Also with the prison itself I said to them only afterwards you have to sign and if you don't like it...but I'm not somebody who will offend the prison itself. So I show them the film, to the prisoners and nobody, they were sad to see themselves. One said, I am sad but this one is very bad, I'm ok. So it's funny to see how they react on their neighbours. And the head of the prison itself, said it's shocking but it's reality so we cannot say anything. The head of the prison was at my screening and she took the mic and she talked to the audience which was also very nice. They said, we don't like what's happening, we hope something will change.

Aud: Has anyone tried to escape?

Dir: there was one very strange moment, I made jokes about it when I was there. I said 'next time I'll bring white sheets and I'll help you escape' but no. There was one very strange moment with Wilfried, he said to me, 'this weekend you have to watch the news because somebody will be killed who is responsible for my situation, so you have to watch the news'. And then I didn't, it was very difficult for me to decide what to do because I cannot be responsible for this. I was quite sure that he would not do that but if I would share it with somebody and he knows it, then I would lose his trust. So, it happened that people said things to me, where I had to make some ethical decisions. But nobody, no, they are too weak to escape I think. They can't run.

Aud: When you say they can't run, do mean in a state of mind where they can't escape or physically unable to run? Is it the medicine?

Dir: You have seen Salem in the film, the French speaking man, that says 'I'm lost'? This man, I knew he was between 9-10 o'clock in the morning I could a little bit, we could communicate a little bit. And then it finished for the rest of the day he's sleeping, it's impossible to really talk to him. So after the film one month after the film, after shooting the film, I visited him again and maybe at 2 o'clock he was very ok, and I said 'what's happening with you Salem, it's very nice to talk but what's happening'. He said, 'I don't know, they changed my medication'. So maybe he's there 8yrs, so maybe for 8 years he had been like this, and somebody decides we'll try something else and, he woke up. They don't have anybody to defend them so they are, completely lost.

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Aud: Did your research include talking to psychiatrists to see how they SHOULD be treated?

Dir: Yes but limited. Because I really decided to show their situation from inside and I thought I don't really know the situation with law and so on. Once I talked to them, I decide now I have to shut myself off from the outside world. Of course before I could talk to them, and spoke to the guards and the people around them. So I talked a lot to them in the beginning. I had to be positive about this film because, the day I said to Wilfried a little bit from outside, I said 'I will start filming', he said 'oh you cannot'. After one year and a half he said, 'no, forget it'. And I stayed calm and I said ,'ok I'll find somebody else'. And he said 'no, no, no film us'.

Aud: how come you chose not to interview the guards?

Dir: I'm not interested int their situation. My film is about them. Every information has to be. I'm not a journalist, I hate objective films, I hate it. I want to make subjective films and I don't want if somebody says, if somebody gives an a, somebody has to give a b - no, I'm not interested in that. It's the spectator who has to make their own story and there are so many.. I'm not interested at all in showing the opinion of everybody.

Aud: Comment on the sound scape. Was it almost all, filmed in the room?

Dir: A little bit composing but the challenge was, how can we reduce the sound because in reality, there is so much sound and so we had to put filters on it to reduce the sound. And so we decided, me and the editor decided, to put some details on it, to make it there. You don't want to be in a bath of sound, you want some little points to point out some feelings. Like the toilet, the water in the pipes, this is re-constructed. it's impossible, you stand there with the mic, it's not always reality but I'm sure it's like... And sometimes I wanted to have this effect of being in their head.

What Tomorrow Brings Q&A

At the 19th London Human Rights Watch Film festival, film-maker Beth Murphy and senior women's rights researcher for Human Rights Watch, Heather Barr, attended the second UK screening of 'What Tomorrow Brings' to engage in a Q&A session with the audience to take questions on the film and issue in hand.

For more about the making of the film, and Beth’s journey in doing so, read this brilliantly written blog by Beth herself http://principlepictures.com/blog/category/what-tomorrow-brings/ or scroll down to continue reading!

Q: Could you tell us a little bit about the background of the film and how it came to be?

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Beth: So I first met Razia Jan when I was filming another documentary that had a big focus in Afghanistan. That film was titled, ‘Beyond Belief’, and it was the story of two Sept 11^th widows, in America. They were both pregnant on 9/11 and their husbands were each in one of the two planes that were flown into the World Trade Centre towers. After they went through that tragedy, they found each and they started to learn about life in Afghanistan and they couldn’t believe that really America was embarking on a policy that would create more widows in that country. And they learned about what life was like for widows there and there it’s kind of the beginning of the end. They felt actually that they were lucky, if I can use that word, as widows because although they had this horrible tragedy, their lives pretty much remained the same. The kids stayed in the same school, there was life insurance, they stayed in the same home and when a woman becomes a widow in Afghanistan, it’s kind of the beginning of the end, it’s the unraveling of the entire life. And if she would want to get remarried, often times that would require her leaving the children with the dead husband’s family, so with her in-laws. So it’s really often why a lot of times you see the widow marrying a brother-in-law so she stays within that same family. But there’s really, there’s no support network. So, these two American women decided they wanted to help widows in Afghanistan and the way that they raised a large amount of money to do that, is that they made a bike ride from ground zero, New York, back to Boston where they live. So I filmed that bike ride that they did and when they returned to Boston, they had a lot of people waiting for them and cheering them on and there to celebrate with them. And Razia Jan was one of those people. And that was the day that I met her. That was on the 5^th anniversary of September 11^th. 

Q: Could you give us a little update on the school and the students featured, particularly Pashtana?

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Beth: So I realise it’s a little unclear how she gets back to school, so she’s not allowed to go by the family but then there she is having this conversation with Zia in the principal’s office. So she, actually her father who had been pretty opposed to her going to school has really had an about-face and he’s been very supportive recently about her going to school. There was a lot of pressure from other family members, so she mentioned the uncle. In Rahila’s case eve, her father doesn’t really care if she wears the Burkha or not but her uncle has insisted that that happens. So many men in the girls’ lives can weigh in and put these different pressures on, and force them to do things. So Pashtana, she has two sisters all of whom are in school and doing well. She graduated 15^th in her class out of about 35 girls. So you know she’s right there in the middle and moving ahead. Rahila unfortunately is out of school. Her timeline may seem a little bit confusing in the film, I don’t know how you found that, because one minute she’s 18 in fifth grade and then she’s 23 Razia says and then her friend says, ‘we’re going be in 11^th grade next year’ and that’s because all those years have passed. When she was in 10^th grade, her father took the young wife, so that’s the year which all of that happened. So, she’s had this really back and forth, with going to schools and right now unfortunately it looks like she will be home for good. It’s really unusual the fact that she was 23 years old and in the school in 10^th grade, moving into 11th grade, it’s pretty remarkable that she hasn’t been engaged yet. Sadly it looks like she probably won’t graduate. The first graduation is happening this November which is really exciting. 

Q: On the subject of marriage, what does the future look like for these girls after school?

Heather: Well, first of all thank you so much, it’s such a great film. I feel like child marriage and forced marriage is sort of a theme running through a lot of it. It reminded me a little bit of the first week I was in Afghanistan. I lived in Afghanistan for 6 years and the first week that I was there I was working for the United Nations and the group of Afghan women in same unit I was working in, they said ‘come and have lunch with us’. I think there were four of them and we sat at a table in the cafeteria and I’d already told them that I was divorced and they sort of smiled and said, ‘oh you’re so lucky’. And then they went around the table and then one at a time they told me about their marriages, and these were very educated urban elite women. Some of them had master’s degrees from overseas universities and studied in the UK. And they all said the same thing, they said ‘you have to understand, our marriages were not arranged, our marriages were forced’.

One of the other women that I worked with in that office, she was actually my boss, very educated woman, very, very smart. She was the most senior Afghan woman working for the UN in Afghanistan at the time and her story was that she had resisted for years marrying a cousin who she didn’t want to marry, who her father wanted her to marry. Her mother had said to her, ‘well find someone you want to marry and tell me who it is and I’ll try and arrange it’, but she didn’t really want to get married so she never found anyone that she wanted to marry. She had come back to Afghanistan after 2001 after the fall of the Taliban, her family were still in Pakistan where they’d been refuges, and she went back to visit her family in Pakistan and when she arrived, the house was all decorated. She said, ‘what’s happening’ and they said, ‘oh we’re having some people over’ and then one of her female cousins said, ‘let’s go out and buy new dresses’. So they went and bought new dresses and came back and were changing into their dresses when her mother came in and said, ‘this is your engagement party’.

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BETH So on the subject of the themes of the film, forced marriage and second wives, let me say one more thing.

There’s a female parliamentarian, Shukria Barakzai who I met actually, during the filming of the other documentary, back in 2006. Just a really elite family, very, very wealthy family, she’d been educated outside of the country. She and her husband, it was not an arranged marriage  they fell in love and they had ultimately what is a very unusual story in the country and they both ran for office and she won, he lost. Then she was invited by President Karzai to go to Germany, and they had a group of parliamentarians who were helping to rewrite the constitution and she was one of those people that went as part of that group. When she came home, her husband had taken a second wife. To see, if that’s where it’s happening in society, the people who are living at the top, those at a lesser level and below, just don’t have a chance.

Heather: Just to add, Shukria is someone I know well too, but I mean her story is – I mean we’ll talk a little later about the state of women’s rights in Afghanistan – but Shukria is an illustration of one of the things that is really alarming which is that women have risen to these heights and gotten involved in public life and are in a lot of danger. Shukria survived a bombing, a car bombing about 6 months ago. So she’s alive still but she was wounded and is recovering.

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Q: When Western governments are facing criticism for their intervention, they’ll often say well look at the advances in education, a lot of that is down to us. How far is that valid, and how far is the movement self-generated in Afghanistan? Secondly, while the Taliban has gained some footholds around claims that the governments are working more for one section of the Muslim community and less for the other. How is that reflected in your experiences of how children are treated at school? Are some given more of a chance than others?

Beth: Maybe a combination. I mean I would just say that without foreign dollars the educational system would not have been possible, to build it as much as it has been built up. But there’s a huge difference between having a school and having a good education, so there’s a massive disparity there. Also a number of districts, there are dozens and dozens of districts where there are no educational opportunities at all. There are no schools that exist. And this is true for boys and girls. The quality of the education in most cases is very, very poor. The case with this school is that it is the only free private education in the country actually. So, on all of the dollars, for this particular school are coming from the US and support from donors there. But the amount of money that USA ID has pumped into rebuilding schools in the country, it might seem like a lot of money but compared to the overall dollars that have been spent, there’s just so much corruption that so many of the foreign dollars are going places that they shouldn’t. So the infrastructure is kind of collapsing around them. 

Heather: On the sectarian issue, Afghanistan is quite different to Pakistan where you see such sectarian conflict. In Afghanistan it really tends to break down along ethnic lines rather than along Sunni/Shi’a lines. Of course, ethnicity in some cases is linked to religion but I think the inequalities in terms of how money is spent in Afghanistan have largely been created by foreigners and we see that in a sense that when the international forces came in they divided the country up into different areas controlled by different militaries. Some of those militaries had a lot of money to spend in that area and some didn’t. There was real focus on parts of the country that were particularly volatile and where there was a lot of conflict with the consequence, that some areas that were very, very peaceful got very, very little aid in comparison.

When I was working for the UN, we had a project in a place called Ghor province and the provincial reconstruction team, the military that was responsible for Ghor province, was Lithuania. Colleagues of mine, they’d come back from Ghor and would say, ‘oh, the governor said again why can’t we have a real army’. So you ended up with a very illogical patchwork because of those kinds of military driven decisions.

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About the questions about has America brought women’s rights to Afghanistan. You know, I was living in New York in 9/11 and I went to a peace rally on Sept 14^th, in union square. And I think we all knew already that someone was going to get bombed, we just weren’t quite clear yet on who it was going to be. So, it was funny to go from protesting for peace 4 days after 9/11 to spending 6 years in Afghanistan.  I think it’s very hard to look back and say what would have happened in Afghanistan if 9/11 hadn’t happened, if the international invasion hadn’t happened. I don’t think there’s any way to know. But I think that, maybe people would have risen up, the Taliban would have been toppled in a sort of organic way. There’s no way to know but regardless of what you think about whether military intervention was a good idea or not, I think there’s a very powerful argument about both, ‘you broke it, you fix it’ and also, ‘you made a lot of promises and you used Afghan women, these pictures of Afghan workers to justify intervention and so, now you better not pack up your things and leave and forget about them and forget about the promises that you made’. Girls education and everything else that supports women’s rights is really in danger at this moment because the UK government, the US government, everyone’s really tired of Afghanistan and wrapping up and running for the door and there’s lots of other things going on globally that obviously are taking people’s attention away. One of our real messages over the last couple of years has been, ‘you’re not done, you’re not done’. And it makes a huge difference. I mean Afghan women, Afghan girls, they need money to keep the schools open but they also need political pressure on the government because the government of Afghanistan, the old, the new, doesn’t matter which one, will not be pushing forward with supporting women’s rights without international pressure. 

indiatoday.intoday.in

Q: Can I ask what’s happening in relation to educating boys about women’s rights in schools? One of the things that really strikes me, as a nominal Muslim and a woman, it’s not just the case that studying is not a sin, in Islam it is the case that if you have the means to educate only one child and you have a boy and a girl, the religion actually says you educate the girl because logically the man goes out to work, the education stops with him. If you educate the girl, she becomes a mother, there’s a chance the education gets passed down. You wouldn’t know that in the Muslim world that, that is actually what the religion says. So I’m curious, as to what is happening to educate boys, about a girl’s right to education.

Beth: I mean I think that that’s starting in the home. It’s not like there’s a programme that exists in their more formal education to do that and again, the educational opportunities for boys, similarly for girls who are going to public schools, where they’re going for 2-3 hours a day and they’re going in shifts and they don’t have enough chairs and desks and books and pencils. I mean they’re sharing books and studying in a tent and there’s really just huge challenges. They’re barely getting the basics of reading, math and science, never mind human rights, women’s rights training. But I think where it can be really powerful and where I’ve seen it – you know, my experience is limited to the village in terms of what I’ve actually witnessed – but in Deh Subz, the men in the community are so supportive of the school. Especially, the boys who are in the home, in the family, in many cases they’ve seen the transition, they’ve seen the fathers who were against the school, didn’t want it to be built. Then when it was built, fighting to have it be a boy’s school and then that fight was lost. And they see that, they’ve seen their sisters coming home from school and knowing how to read and write, sometimes better than they can because their education is more superior here. So, that’s happening and in such an organic way, it’s really incredible. I’ve heard this really most amazing interview, with the documentary film-maker who did ‘India’s daughter’. The sentiment that she expressed really applies here when she said, that people say that life would be better if we caught the bad apples, the ones who carried out this horrific rape and sentenced them to death. She said, ‘well it’s not as simple as they’re just a few bad apples in the barrel. The whole barrel is rotten’. It’s kind of like that in Afghanistan. If the boys are growing up seeing that the girls are the last to eat, or they don’t get anything if the food has run out. They’re the ones who don’t get to go to school and doing all the work. I mean, that’s what they grow up with. How can you expect them to behave any differently than the previous generation? So you know, in cases like this where the boys are seeing something very different happening in their home, is the beginning of the mindset change.

cnn.com

Q: Can you tell us a bit about the background of Razia Jan, and how she was able to start the school and the means she had to build it? It sounds like she really pushed forward and got it done and I was really curious as to how that came about.

Beth: So Razia was, she grew up in Kandahar and she was visiting the US because her brother was studying at MIT when she was much younger. When she was in the US, in Boston visiting him, that’s when Russia invaded Afghanistan and her family told her that she really shouldn’t/couldn’t come back home. So as the years dragged on, she’d keep asking and the answer was always no. She ended up building a life for herself in and around the Boston area. She got married, had a son, started a small tailoring business and her husband sadly died when her son was 2. She continued raising him as a single mum throughout, she never remarried or had a relationship again and just worked really hard at her tailoring business and focusing on raising her son. It was when 9/11 happened, that she just became so overwhelmed by the response. She wasn’t sure what was going to happen, and what any kind of backlash might be in her community, towards her and towards her business because we’ve all heard of cases where there were negative things happening, that people were attacking Muslim businesses. Instead what she got was really an outpouring of support and love and she was very connected in her community, had been a rotarian for many, many years, at that point. What she saw around 9/11, she became very supportive of the emergency workers. For example she heard they might need blankets, so she made a lot of blankets. She made an enormous American flag that had the names on it, of all the victims.

portal.clubrunner.ca

So these are the kinds of things that she was inspired to do at that time and then she decided that she wanted to go back home to Afghanistan and do something back home but she wasn’t quite sure what that would be. At one point she collected like 30,000 pairs of shoes and those were distributed. She was working pretty closely with the US military actually, at that time to bring supplies over. She went over herself finally and she became focused on working in some orphanages and it was in the orphanages that she saw and was so shocked by the difference between the way that girls and boys were treated in society. It was so different to what she had experienced and seen growing up in the country. It was a country that she felt she no longer recognized.  She was in an orphanage one day and she saw that there were toys that were being taken away from the girls and given to the boys so that they could play. That was the moment that she decided that she really wanted to focus on girls and the she really wanted to focus on education, believing as we all probably do, that if you can educate a generation and change, you can change a generation. So it was an initial gift from rotary, her local rotary club, of 30,000 dollars that was the seed money for building the school and then later, she started a foundation called, ‘Razia’s Ray of Hope Foundation’. That foundation is now the support foundation for the school. She also very recently, well 2yrs ago, she was named a top 10 CNN hero, and all the top tens receive a good chunk of money and have the opportunity to organize a lot of fundraising activities around that. It’s a huge infrastructure that CNN has to do that. Most of the people who are nominated have some connection to a non-profit organization and they get a lot of support to help them grow and set out their strategic plan  for 5, 10 and 15yrs and so through that they were able to raise a lot of money and that was the money that was used to build  the third floor.

protection.org

Host: You know, she’s so brave with what she’s doing, and clearly it’s not 100% safe. Lots of people go out to attack the school. I was wondering if you could share a little about the global campaign that you’ve been working on.

Heather: That scene in the film where they’re talking about, ‘what if the Taliban comes’. You (Beth) explained last night that part of the reason they wanted to windows high is because they were imagining how much more dangerous it would be for them if the Taliban took over the school and the windows were lower. That might seem like a crazy thing to worry about but Human Rights Watch actually co-ordinates a thing called, ‘protect education from attack’ and there’s some information in the brochure. The reason that campaign exists is because what often happens in a situation where you have conflict, and soldiers coming into a community who haven’t been there before, whether they’re anti-government soldiers or government soldiers. They’ll arrive in the village and they’ll take new ground and ask where are we going to base ourselves? We need a building that’s sturdy and secure and has a good vantage point and often that’s the school. So we see a lot of situations in a lot of countries were there’s an ongoing conflict where soldiers have actually based themselves in schools and that’s really endangered students. Sometimes it just disrupts their education and they can’t study at all, sometimes it makes them vulnerable to sexual exploitation or to recruitment and all types of problems so we’re really trying to advocate for special attention to protecting schools during conflict.

aquila-style.com

Q: I understand that Razia is a good mediator but she is still limited. What’s the protocol if a child discloses abuse or violence at home, like we saw in the film?

Beth: You know things have changed quite dramatically during the course of the filming. It used to be that when a girl was absent from school, regardless of the reason, it could just be doing housework, she had to cook and clean, having relatives in, you name the problem. To the more extreme situations. That, Razia would go and Zia would also go and they would fight really hard to get the girls back in school. I mean really hard, they would go time and time again, offer things to the family. Say well, if it’s because you’re experiencing such economic hardship that you really need the help of the girls, maybe we can help. We can bring you food each month, maybe a little bit of money, some fabric for clothing if it was too much to clothe them to go to school, or if they need shoes or a winter coat. They still do some of those things, I mean any girl who needs a winter coat, will be given one by Razia and the teachers. Shoes, the same thing. Clothes, the same thing. Food, often times. But what they found was that they were starting to create friction in the community by fighting. If the family were saying, ‘no, we don’t want the girls to go’, it was becoming the harder they fought, the more problems that they might be creating. And Razia, she said at one point, ‘by saving one we can lose a lot’.

So the situation with Rahila for example, she has three other sisters who are in the school and they were really pushing hard to get her back. They knew, they knew what was going on when it was going on but they pretended not to. They would contact the father, so he knew that they cared about her and that they were going to keep checking in and that they were there as a support. Just that someone was out there watching out for her. But they never confronted him directly. They made that decision based on previous interactions when she’d been in and out of school, and the fear that, if they fight so hard to get her back, not only will they not get her back anyway, but that he’ll pull the three other daughters from the school. Having someone like him, in such a powerful position, who is sending his daughters and is showing support, for the school, that would be a crushing blow if he were to turn against the school. You can envision that a lot of others would also be turned against the school.

epacha.org

So the protocol really has changed. Razia says in the film, ‘I know my limits’ and the girls, they know their limits too. She’s kind of had to redefine her limits over the years and what she did the first couple of years in the school is not what she does today. I also wanted to just add something. I mentioned that she was working very closely early-on with the US military. In the first couple of years of the school opening, the US military would come and visit the school and it was this really great fanfare and it was really exciting and they’d distribute a lot of supplies. That’s something that got that realization of ‘oh my gosh, I could be putting the school in really great danger by showing any kind of affiliation with the US military in particular’. So that was stopped as well and there was definitely some worry about what that could mean for the school and the support from the village elders.

raziasrayofhope,org

Q: Just before we finish up, where can we find out more, are there things that you would recommend looking at?

Beth: So we’re looking to have the premiere of the final, final film, in the fall. We’ll be rolling out, so it will be about a year on the festival circuit around the world and then it will start airing on television. We’ll be rolling out an impact campaign with the film, starting in June. And the dream, Razia’s dream is, to build a centre for higher education because most of the girls graduating won’t be able to go on to college. So, since they can’t go to it, Razia wants to bring it to them and so that will be the focus of our impact campaign with the film: to build really what will be the first ever college in a rural Afghan village.

Heather: Well, take a look at the information on the brochure about the global campaign. Obviously you can support Razia’s foundation if you want. The most important thing I would say is, tell your politicians, that they haven’t solved everything in Afghanistan you know. Enough patting themselves on the back and I know there’s an election coming up here. I don’t imagine Afghanistan is going to be much of an issue in the election…

Audience Member: We’ve just had a church service at St. Paul’s to celebrate the pulling out of all our troops…

Heather: …Don’t get me started. I mean George Bush wins for most embarrassing victory moment ever but your politicians aren’t THAT far behind. So yeh, to the extent that you’re involved in politics and watching what your government does. Remind them that declaring victory and that they solved all the problems of women’s rights in Afghanistan, is somewhat untrue.

Q: How long were you there and where did you stay?

Beth: So, I stayed in Kabul actually, at Razia’s house, she has a home there now. I mean I was there for a couple of months at a time usually. So we were driving in and out. I’d go sometimes in the teacher van, sometimes Zia would drive. Sometimes Razia would drive which was always fascinating because she was like the 30^th woman in Kabul to get a driver’s licence, so a lot of stares. Very unusual to see a woman driver. So we went back and forth, I didn’t stay in the village although I always wanted to. I don’t think it would be possible but I would love to go and live at Rahila’s house for like a year. It was pretty comfortable I mean, bare bones but comfortable.

principlepictures.com

Q: Did you being American ever help or hinder what you were trying to film?

Beth: I mean, I was always very covered and there was no walking about or anything like that. Everything we did kind of happened behind closed doors and you’d get in the car and behind the gate and then you know, you could be out. I always travelled in local, beat-up kind of cars, without drawing attention.

Also it’s an environment where you’re so used to seeing foreigners actually, there’s so many foreigners in the country, particularly in Kabul. I don’t know, there’s always so much uncertainty. For all the people who are happy to have the troops there, and happy for Americans to be there, there are a number of people who really hate us. I just didn’t want to do anything to step on toes. So you never know. For example, there’s a restaurant we’d go to all the time a [Lebanese] restaurant, and it was recently bombed. There’s just like no safe place, you never know what can happen at any time. But it was a nice environment in which to stay. I had stayed once, a long time ago, I’d stayed at a guest house and I really liked being able to stay at a home.