The Current - Learning in secret: An Afghan teacher’s quiet resistance

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

When the Taliban banned girls from attending school beyond Grade 6, Hazrat Wahriz knew what was coming and quietly began preparing. A former Afghan diplomat and educator now living in Canada, Wahriz helped launch Daricha, a network of underground schools run from homes and supported by local communities across Afghanistan. In this conversation, he talks about teaching under constant risk, why real change has to come from within a society, and what keeps him hopeful  even as he knows he may never see the full results of his work.

Hey there, I'm Gavin Crawford, and if you're the type of person who would have enjoyed the band on the Titanic, well, you're going to love the Because News podcast. Each week, I quiz comedians about the headlines, and they try to get the answers, mostly wrong. This week is Jennifer Whalen from the TV show Small Achievable Goals, along with Andrew Fung and Grieslin Kung. Why are we listening to the Imperial March from Star Wars? What was the new category added to the Golden Globes? And when is a good time to get your toilet to call your family? That's related to a news story, I swear. You can get all the answers from this week's episode simply by following the Because News podcast. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast.

In August of 2021, the Taliban swept back into power in Afghanistan, and within weeks, girls were banned from schools beyond the sixth grade. For millions of girls, the future narrowed almost overnight. But education did not vanish everywhere in that country. In some places, learning went underground, into living rooms, basements, and borrowed spaces, thanks to teachers and families willing to take enormous risks. My next guest is one of the people behind that initiative. Hazrat Wadiqariz is the founder and CEO of Dadichas schools. He's from Afghanistan, now lives here in Canada. And after the Taliban takeover, he felt compelled to help build a network of underground schools for girls in that country. Haswat Warris joins us in our Toronto studio as part of

a series of conversations with interesting Canadians doing interesting things. How's right? Good morning. Good morning. Tell me a little bit about your background. You were a university instructor. Yes. You also worked in Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Afghanistan.

Yes, I was head of the Center for Strategic Sadis of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a Chancellor of the Institute of Diplomacy of that ministry. When did you understand the power of education and what education can do for people? Well, my field of studies was education. So I was preparing myself to become a teacher from the very beginning when I was a teenager. Really? Yes. I saw how my teachers from the very beginning, how they impacted my life.

and I wanted to do the same thing to change lives of new generation for better. What did teachers do for you? I mean, how did they shape your life? Well, they were very kind. They were, so they're willing to shape,

teaching us, they were shaping the future they were dreaming of. So I wanted to have the same impact. You know, I was a child labor in Kabul streets, but I was lucky enough to get the chance to study and to have very good teachers who impacted me and who made me decide to become a teacher. And that's what I'm doing right now. Do you remember any of those teachers? I mean, there's one teacher that stands at you?

Yes, yes. My first teacher, Hamidajan, she was my first teacher. teacher in 1979. And she kind of opened your mind to all sorts of other things? Yes, yes, yes. So when you, given all of that, when you heard that the Taliban, not just was sweeping back into power, but that they had shut down schools again and shut girls out of schools in particular, what went through your mind? Well, giving my background as an employee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at that position. I was in a position to predict what was going on there.

So we anticipated the collapse of the previous corrupted, ethnocentric government. And actually we knew we could see that this government is preparing all the conditions for Taliban to take over. So long before that, August 15, I contacted my former students, my former colleagues, because we could predict that the Taliban would not act differently from the previous time they were in rule in Afghanistan. So we prepared this underground schools. We started preparing this long before the Taliban took over. and we were the first group that initiated those underground classrooms, 45 days after the collapse of the previous government. But knowing what you knew about the power of education,

you must have been heartbroken to know that those girls would be shut out of the schools that could have changed their lives like they changed your life. It was, you know, it is a very sensitive issue for me personally, not only because I'm a professional teacher, and I know the role of education in people's life, but especially for future moms, I had access to high-ranked people in Afghanistan who had access to classified information.

And from there, I knew that none of those captured, failed suicide attackers, captured by the security forces of Afghanistan. None of them was born to a literated woman mother. I'm not talking about educated mothers. But illiterate. Yes, yes. So children of this kind of mothers are very much capable to get brainwashed and to commit suicide attacks.

And you think that education is the kind of thing that could keep people like that out of that? Exactly. Out of that. If somebody comes from an educated family, a literate family, that that is enough to keep them out of that sort of destructive behavior? Yes, because they learn to love life. They learn how to make life in this unstable, poor and degraded society like Afghanistan.

And so why, I mean, in some ways that answers the question, but why did you feel as this was happening? You know what, I have to start a network of schools. You could be despondent, you could be upset by what you're seeing, but you actually went ahead and created something. What was the spark to do that? Well, Rumi, the great poet of Farsi language, that was born in Afghanistan, by the way.

He says that everyone comes to this world for a purpose. And I felt my purpose was that to prevent the future moms, to have children that are capable to do suicide attacks. You know, right now, the schools for boys turned into religious mattresses. And what is the consequence of this? The Taliban themselves, they are product of the brainwashing project in the 80s to radicalize the society. and make people of Afghanistan fight against the Soviet Union, the infidel Soviet Union.

In other words, US and Western allies just wanted to revenge for the defeat the experience in Vietnam War, and Afghanistan was a very good opportunity for them. So they invested heavily to brainwash people and to make them radicals. Taliban is the direct result of that investment in the 80s. So I knew that. So to make society resistant to that, we needed to educate future moms. I know what we do is very small, relative to a country that is around 40 million people,

just having 6,000, more than 6,000 students, it is not a considerable number. But it is the first step. This is what individuals can do, and that's what we are doing. Let me ask you about these schools. They're called derichia. That means window, is that right? Yes, yes, exactly.

What is the window that you're opening with these schools, do you think? A window to a better future, a window to a society where there is alternative options where there is the possibility of saying no, of asking why. So I hope our students in some stage will be capable to ask these questions why and say no to what they are imposed to do. These are underground schools. What does that mean in the context of Afghanistan in 2026? It is home-based classrooms. Our classes are located at our teachers' houses, and girls come to those classes and get their normal secular lessons.

And yeah, that's it. What's the curriculum? We have all the subjects. that previously were adopted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the previous government, but we excluded some ideological, some subjects that were ideologically influenced and were prepared by the pro-Taliban authors even within that Ministry of Education. But the girls would be learning what specific? Chemistry, physics, algebra, English language, all these ordinary.

subjects. But for instance, instead of history of Afghanistan, the official history of Afghanistan, we teach a history of human civilization, how we started from our lives, from the caves, and came up to the stage where when we have the possibility to send spacecrafts to other planets and to study our universe and so on and so forth. mentioned these classes are held in the homes of the teachers, and you have to do that because the schools were shut down for girls. Yes. These are underground schools. How dangerous is it

for people who are participating in this? Well, if they are caught, it is dangerous. There is a danger for their safety. They can be detained. They can be arrested, tortured, and so on and so But since we have a strong community support that prevents our schools to face this kind of dangerous. How do you, I mean, without putting people in jeopardy, how do you go about protecting people? How do you go about ensuring that those students and the teachers are safe? First of all, our schools, our classrooms are in a faraway villages, are small towns, where there is no concentration of the Taliban. And besides, since we have the community support, our teachers, our school goals, get aware long before the Taliban can enter our classrooms.

So there's a kind of a neighborhood watch. People are kind of telling if this is, you know, there are signs if the Taliban is getting close to shut things down. Yes. That is why we didn't have a single incident since October 4, 2021. How do you understand that community support? That takes trust. It takes people investing in the idea that girls' education is important. How do you understand that? Well, you know, there is a misconception about Afghanistan.

Whenever someone hears the word Afghanistan, the picture, the image that appears in their mind is a conservative dark age community, which is partially true, but it is not the whole truth. people in Afghanistan want change for better. They proved that they are ready to accept democracy, human rights, all these universal values. I recall the first presidential election in 2004 and I saw an elderly woman who made her way. It took three hours of her two. to get to the pooling station. And when she was asked why she was there, she said,

I'm here to appoint our president. So this is the understanding of the democracy by ordinary people. That woman was not educated. And she lived in a faraway village. But she was able to understand the possibility of positive change. And she was ready to do that. The same thing is happening with our schools. We are not going somewhere to offer that we want to open a school or an underground classroom here or there.

Parents themselves, they approach us. They ask us to open classrooms for them. And they help us to maintain those classrooms. There's a real appetite for this. That is. Things at the precinct haven't been the same. I know we've been understaffed since Ellis left, but maybe today things will turn around.

But now, the most unlikely fare is back on the case. Hey, Max, you miss me? The dream team is back together. Yeah, I guess it is. And on each other's. Are you going to be able to keep it together on this one? I am nothing if not perfesh. Wildcars.

New season. Watch free on CBC Jam. Do I have this right, that the teachers do this work for free? No. The teachers are paid. Yes. At the beginning, we were getting some funding from SAP UN organizations, but they stopped helping us because we were not registered under the government of the Taliban.

So that is, of course, ridiculous because we could not get registration there to violate the holy decree of their holy leader. But now we find some ways approaching our friends, our family members, to take responsibility of financing one teacher in their own area from where they originally are. Why do you think the teachers do this? I mean, there's great danger that they put themselves in doing this. Why do they think that this is important? They want change.

This is the meaningful way of resistance against the barbaric rule of the Taliban. And secondly, it gives them the meaning of life what they need in this situation. The meaning of life. The meaning of life, yes. They were studying to become teachers. And now they are banned from going to. school and teaching as they are females. All our teachers are females.

So they understand that keeping those girls in our schools prevent at least forced marriage. It gives them a perspective for their lives. We have 49 students that graduates that right now study abroad, including U.S., Indonesia, Bangladesh and some other countries. So these girls serve as role model for the rest of our school girls. Tell me about the scale of this. You have, what did you say, 6,500 students? More than 6,000.

More than 6,000? How many schools? We have 175 classrooms. We count like this, not as schools here. And how many teachers involved? 175. 175. Yes.

It must make you enormously proud to see. not just the appetite, but to see this working against all the odds. It is the most meaningful thing I've done in my entire life. I worked in different fields, diplomacy, journalism, and so on and so forth. But this is the most meaningful thing in my entire life. Tell me about the success stories. You mentioned you have students that are studying abroad. But, I mean, this is changing people's lives.

It is. What have you learned about that? What have you learned about how the lives of some of these girls have been changed because of the thing that you have helped create? Well, it gives meaning of life not only to our teachers, to me as well. You know, to make those girls capable to get admission, scholarships, outside. It means saving their life.

I mean it literally because otherwise those girls have no many options apart from getting married, either by force or by their own choice. And it is not a very good option for an 18, 20 years old girl. What makes me proud, like I was influenced by Hamidajan, my first teacher. Most of these students that right now are studying abroad, they study education. They have chosen education. That's the field that they want to go back into? Yes. And one of these girls, she succeeded in consolidating more than 600 volunteer students from all over the world, including Canada.

This volunteers help online. They are tutoring our 12th grade, 11th grade, and graduates to find a way to get admission somewhere else to continue their studies. Did you ever talk to these students? Yes, yes. I'm getting emails. I'm getting messages. You have a big smile as you say this. Yes, yes.

What does that like for you to hear from them? it's really emotional to hear about the impact that this has. Yes, you know, I'm very emotional when I'm talking about the achievements of our schoolgirls. When I see the videos they send of the ceremony of their graduation, when I see their literary works, they understand that right now they are in a very unique condition. and they need to register this, they need to write and to tell the future generation about the circumstances they lived,

they are living right now. So looking at their poems, at their drawings, paintings, they are cultivating plants, they do some handicrafts and so on and so forth. Looking at them, yeah, it makes me proud. For so many people from Afghanistan, I mean, what has happened since 2021 has been heartbreaking because they have seen power disappear, rights being stripped away, progress being rolled back.

And they don't see hope and they don't see opportunity. They see what has been lost in some ways. How has what you have done and the success that you have had, how has that shaped how you think about the possibility for change? Yeah, you know, we started with three classrooms, with 75 students only. But in six months, because the world spread quite quickly, and we were able to expand our activities in other provinces. And pretty soon in six months, we were about 1,500 school goals we had.

And this initiative was other people, other individuals in Afghanistan, that are doing the same thing. So from the grow of 75 to more than 6,000, it indicates that change is possible. And besides, the mentality of people in Afghanistan is shaped in a way that nothing is. there forever. Not communism, not barbaric Islamism, not democracy,

when it is imposed from outside. So the Soviets tried to make us a communist country, they failed. The version of democracy that the US

wanted to impose there, it failed because first of all, they They counted on, I don't know, they were very genius to find the most corrective people to rule that government and to lose the opportunity of positive change there. And it is the second time that Taliban are in rule. And yeah, people in Afghanistan understand that this is not forever as well. You're here in Canada kind of overseeing this and coordinating this work.

What is your hope for Afghanistan? Well, I think that, first of all, as a person from Canada with this initiative, I think I keep the Canadian presence there in a way. Second, I do the job that indeed is needed there. So overthrowing a government is not something difficult in Afghanistan. But what is important to be done there is to make people ready for changes. And that can be achieved through their education. Could you imagine a time when you'll go back to Afghanistan?

I'm afraid it is not possible now and in near future. But you look forward to that day? Do you think that day will come? Yes. I know that. Well, in Canada, I have not lots of things to offer to Canadian labor market. But there, as an educated person and with experience of living and seeing, visiting 44 countries, I have lots of things to offer there.

I think you have a lot to offer here. I mean, I think there's a real lesson in what you've been able to do for all of us. Do you know what I mean? Thank you. Yes, I think here in Canada we take everything for grant. While it is not the case in many, many countries, people are struggling for just having the opportunity to talk to each other, to go outside for a picnic, for camping, for a beauty salon, for reading a book.

Yes, I think it will be good if we in Canada, especially younger generation, we realize that what we have, it is a bless, and we need to appreciate this, because it is very easy to lose what we today have. I'm really glad to have a chance to talk to you about the work that you're doing. Congratulations on that work. and thank you for being here. Thank you very much, Matt.

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. How's what? What are you? As the founder and CEO of Dadichas Schools, he was with me in our studio in Toronto. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway.

Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.