Building a new life in Canada after fleeing the Taliban remains a struggle for many Afghan women, but a new women-only English class at the Burnaby Public Library is here to help.

Every Sunday morning, nearly 30 Afghan women gather in one of the community rooms of the Tommy Douglas branch, in the heart of the Edmonds neighborhood.

The free course, launched in mid-September, is part of a myriad of services and supports for newcomers and refugees developed by the Burnaby School District’s School Settlement Worker (SWIS) program , funded by the federal government.

Along with learning English, the course is an opportunity for women to connect with others facing the same challenges.

“We have a lot of grief,” said Hasina Ahmadzai, who fled her home country in August 2021 when it fell to the Taliban. “We share our sorrows and we are happy. The Afghans have no other asset than their friends.”

“We are safe”

When the Taliban took power, women and their families had to leave everything behind, including rewarding jobs, according to Gulalai Akbari, who served in the Afghan National Assembly for 16 years.

(Ahmadzai had to give up her career as a high school principal.)

“One thing, we are safe, and that is an important thing, of course,” Akbari said, “but if we compare that with our life in Afghanistan, it is very difficult for us.”

Unemployment and the language barrier are among the toughest challenges, she said.

The new course is a much-needed opportunity to learn and practice English and has proven popular.

It was originally planned to be capped at 17, but it was extended to 27, and some women still had to be turned away, according to retired French immersion teacher Gudrun Susanne Howard, who volunteered to teach it.

Howard said his own parents were displaced from their homes in Latvia because of World War II and his heart goes out to refugees.

“It’s a pleasure to feel useful in this way,” she says.

“Lots of charades”

Howard doesn’t speak Dari or Pashtun, the two main languages ​​spoken in Afghanistan, but she has plenty of experience immersing students in a new language without the help of a language they know.

“It’s an opportunity to be creative,” she said. “Lots of charades, lots of drama, lots of visuals, lots of picture cards.”

She started the class by talking about family.

“A lot of times that’s where you start when you’re teaching a foreign language, what they know,” Howard said. “We all have family.”

Somehow the conversation ended up on the topic of shoes, she said, and the class had an impromptu “fashion show” where the women showed each other their shoes and learned words for colors and types of shoes.

There is a wide range of English skills in the class, which includes women still in their teens as well as grandmothers, and Howard divided the students into two groups during a session in early October.

The group, completely new to English, worked on numbers: throwing dice, counting in English and practicing writing numbers in a notebook.

Those who knew some English were tasked with finding someone in the group they didn’t know, interviewing them and then introducing them to the group – all in English only.

New Afghan arrivals continue to arrive

Afghan newcomers and refugees now represent the largest group of clients served by the school district’s SWIS program, with 424 students in Burnaby schools in September, up from 305 last year, according to coordinator Natalya Khan.

“They’re still coming,” she told the NOW.

But, as the women’s English class shows, the program doesn’t just support children; it also provides settlement services to their families.

During its most recent fiscal year, which runs from April to March, the program provided services to 434 Afghan newcomers and refugees.

In the first five months of this year, this number already stands at 556.

However, so far the program has only one speaker, Mujeeb Khalvatgar, who speaks both Dari and Pashto.

Symbolic meaning

Once a prominent journalist and defender of freedom of expression in his home country, Khalvatgar was also forced to flee when Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021.

He said the new English course has been well received because it gives women the opportunity to learn English and come together.

“I get feedback that they are very happy because of those two things,” he said.

In Afghanistan, women live in close communities, and those who have been forced to flee have lost those connections, according to Khalvatgar.

“In Canada, when they arrive, there is no one to talk to,” he said.

That the class is meeting this need is confirmed by the big smiles on the women’s faces as they enter the class and greet the other women already there – whether Howard has already started the lesson or not.

For Khalvatgar, there is also another reason why class is important: a symbolic reason.

Since taking power, the Taliban have reduced the rights of women and girls in their home country, including passing a new set of laws announced in August that ban women’s voices from being heard in public.

The new promotion shows that women who fled persecution from the fundamentalist government have not been silenced, according to Khalvatgar.

“There is a law in Afghanistan that prohibits women from speaking or expressing themselves outside,” he said. “And now they come to learn English here, in a public library.”

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