More Afghan kids receive education

UCI CAMPUS — Faizullah Zaki sees an encouraging sight every day in Afghanistan, even as the country struggles to break out of poverty and violence.

That sight is one that people in most parts of the world take for granted: children walking to school in droves.

Zaki, a member of the Afghan parliament and a crusader for education, moved back to his native land in 2001 as international forces overthrew the Taliban government.

Since then, he said, Afghanistan’s problems have hardly gone away, but there are signs of hope as well — including a tenfold increase in the number of children getting an education.

“If you walk in the street, you can see how many kids are going,” said Zaki, who visited UC Irvine Tuesday as part of a weeklong fundraising push through Southern California.

The parliamentarian, who had only been to the United States once before, came to Orange County through a personal connection.

In October 2001, Ellen Mai, a camerawoman for the Travel Channel, was filming in Afghanistan and used Zaki as an interpreter.

Mai later founded a nonprofit agency, Developing Opportunity, to help bring education to impoverished countries, and she invited Zaki this week to help her spread the word about the cause.

Zaki told a gathering of students in the Social Science Plaza about his efforts to promote democracy in an unstable country as well as the advancement of Afghan women and the growth of education — and how the two of them often intertwined.

“Over 1 million girls are going to school,” Zaki said. “This is something we never dreamed of in the past in Afghanistan.”

Afterward, in a news conference, he noted that Afghanistan is still far from shedding its violent history.

The government, he said, has difficulty fighting drug dealers and cracking down on the Taliban, which continues to attack schools and menace civilians.

As a politician, he pushed for more job-creation programs, but rarely with satisfactory results.

Tonight at 5 p.m., Zaki plans to appear at a fundraiser at the Newport Harbor Yacht Club, followed by stops at UCLA, the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica and elsewhere.

Mai, who accompanied him to UCI, said she hoped to raise several hundred thousand dollars to fund some of her nonprofit’s planned programs — including an English-language school and a women’s center.

The idea for the nonprofit, she said, came from her first visit to Afghanistan, when the local children told her they wanted an education more than anything else.

“I just remember standing there in the freezing weather thinking, ‘He has no food, he has no clothes, and all he wants to do is go to school,’ ” Mai said.