Our school- Written by Nader Musavi

While we used this house as a school, every other day the landlord’s kids were causing us some sort of trouble. Everyday something disappeared from school; from heater and hose to classrooms’ light bulbs. wrenches, screwdrivers and other tools that I bought for the school as well as chairs & children gifts that we’re donated or anything else that was worth something and were in their reach.
Although the good thing about school is that it does not have much other than desks, benches and blackboards.
A few times my brother got close to getting into a fight with them.

One time one of the shopkeepers next door that rented his place from the same landlord told me “Mr. teacher don’t go head to head with these guys, they chop you like a carrot. If a thief wants to steal something in this neighborhood he needs their permission before doing anything. Hope they won’t hurt you”.

With years of experience I still made a great mistake and stayed in this house for another year. Perhaps for two reasons. First, in the summer of 1387 (2008) that landlord’s son who was the true owner of the house showed up and other children did not show their faces as often. Second, the location of the school was very good. It was in the center of all the neighborhoods that students were coming from and the yard was huge and I doubt another house with the same situation could be found in this area.
That’s why in that summer instead of thinking about finding a new place I started painting the classrooms and cementing the floors of rooms and the yard. I also built two large classrooms in the corner of the yard with plaster walls, another one was built as well to be utilized for financial matters of school.
All of the summer of 1387 (2008) I was involved with construction of classes and yard.
Repairs cost was roughly around 3 million Toman. All classes were painted, what needed cementing was repaired and fixed. We also cemented the other half of the yard that was not cemented. All the broken doors were fixed. I painted all the walls and doors of the yard with the beautiful color I had picked. I also painted the outside facing side of the school’s door with 3 colors of black, red and green that were the colors of Afghanistan’s flag, it ended up very nice.

I was happy that this year students are studying in a large, beautiful and clean environment. But I did not realize that this is just the start and a lot of problems are awaiting me and soon they will close this one too.