Last to eat, last to learn My life in Afghanistan fighting to educate women

Education activist Durrani's auspicious debut memoir examines the obstacles facing women in Afghanistan and recounts her own efforts to break down those barriers. Raised in a refugee camp in Pakistan, Durrani received an education thanks to her father, a Pashtun tribal leader who opened a girls' school in their camp. "My job was to come back from my private English lessons and immediately teach the girls whatever I learned," Durrani recalls. Interweaving the history of women's education in Afghanistan with the nitty-gritty details of her activism, Durrani notes that when she made her first visit to the country at age 16, she was shocked to see so many women in burqas. She turned down a scholarship to Oxford University to move to Afghanistan, where she interned at various NGOs before launching the advocacy group LEARN and opening a community school in Kandahar Province. Briskly recounting the ins and outs of her quest to make her vision of giving students solar-powered tablets preloaded with lessons and books a reality, Durrani offers a persuasive road map for pursuing gender equality while honoring Afghanistan's religious and cultural traditions. It's an inspiring portrait of a change-maker in action. Agent: Alice Martell, Martell Agency. (May)

A Pashtun girls' education advocate and tribal leader reflects on Afghanistan's uncertain future. Despite being a "third-generation refugee," Durrani considers herself "privileged." The daughter of an influential tribal leader, she grew up in a home large enough to dedicate two rooms to a family-run community school--despite the fact that her family owned land in Pakistan where they could have lived. Although Durrani understood that "educating girls was our family business," it wasn't until her 9-year-old friend and academic rival was forced to drop out of school to marry a widower in his late 30s that Durrani's interest in this field went from professional to personal. "If you're a tribal woman," she writes, "the bar for activism is low. Trained our entire lives to be neither seen nor heard, whenever one of us tries to raise her voice, it becomes a political act." Much to her mother's dismay, the author's dedication to girls' education was so intense that she turned down a prestigious college preparation program at Oxford to start a nonprofit organization that used pre-loaded, solar-powered tablets to deliver educational content to Afghan girls who were unable to access formal schooling. When the pandemic, the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan, and--most devastatingly--her father's unexpected death threatened the group's future and her family's financial security, Durrani was forced to choose between her mission and her life. Written with the assistance of veteran war correspondent Bralo, the text offers consistently adept observations, whether describing a dangerous border crossing as a mission that "required a Beyoncé-like number of wardrobe changes" or trenchantly illustrating how the widely underestimated tribal culture was, in fact, nimbler than the Afghani government and Western aid. Durrani's voice sparkles with humor and grit, and she is a gifted storyteller, equally comfortable analyzing Afghanistan's gender inequity and defending the strengths of the oft-underestimated culture and country she loves. A lovingly narrated, sharply nuanced memoir from a talented activist. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.