70 refugees will learn Portuguese
Amina well remembers the day the Taliban arrived in Kabul. It wasn’t yet eight in the morning when people worked out frantically knocking on each other’s doors, screaming to get away that the Taliban were arriving in the city. Not knowing what to expect, the family of this 22-year-old Afghan girl has taken refuge with friends. A day later they returned home, from which Amina did not leave, except to leave Afghanistan – “I was afraid. In our street there were five girls who beat their legs with a whip, in the street, because they were not covered, dressed in a burka “
Amina was born in Bamiyan Province (the one of the Buddhas the Taliban destroyed two decades ago, and which the young woman has seen once before), but she emerged in Kabul. I had joined a university a month ago when the Taliban arrived and closed the school. – and everything else. The fact of belonging to a music group frightened her even more.
Amina’s story is told in Lisbon, at the Hindu Community Center of Portugal, at Lumiar, where yesterday the session was held to welcome the 70 Afghan refugees who appeared, just yesterday, to take Portuguese language classes. Four classes in addition to the five that have been in operation since October, with 90 students, in the Hindu Center and elsewhere in the capital, with refugees and migrants from various origins, from Bangladesh to Pakistan, from India to Nepal, but also from Ukraine and Peru.
In a ceremony attended by representatives of the Hindu and Ismaili communities, it is Maria João Tomás, a professor at ISCTE and a researcher in Maghreb and Middle East affairs – and one of the main faces behind this project – who tells the collective story of this group that now starts learning Portuguese. From different origins, they have in common the fact that they are Ismaili Shiites, apostate in the eyes of the Taliban: “These people could be convicted of apostasy in Afghanistan, they fled death“. They were rescued either from Afghanistan or from refugee camps, some already in Turkey or Greece, where they had fled, and brought to Portugal by the Ismaili community, which took on the task of welcoming and integrating these refugees. critical and essential “to achieve the objective of the economy is precisely the learning of the language, underlined the representative of the Ismaili community.
A project that was born with a… book
Before classes, there was a library. “This project was born with a book”, says Maria João Tomás, before specifying: “It wasn’t one, there were 500”. The number of copies it started with in the Middle East and North Africa Public Library – which has already passed the thousand copies – in the Lisbon parish of Arroios. From the library to teaching Portuguese to migrants and refugees, it was just a distance from an idea, put into practice with the Hindu Community Center, with classes that also take place at the Ismaelite Center in Lisbon, in São Domingos de Benfica and at the Bangladeshi embassy, in Belem.
But more needs to be done, argues Maria João Tomás, who argues that greater dynamics are needed in teaching Portuguese to foreigners, so as not to discourage those who learn. “There is a big gap between what is reality and what is the offer”, warns the professor, noting that she has a waiting list of 400 people. Classes for Afghan refugees will consist of modules of 25 hours, each of which will have a diploma, which will increase in degree with the accumulation of modules.
DN Maria João Tomás anticipates that a task that began yesterday will not be easy. Among the Afghan refugees there are those who cannot read and write in the language, the Dari. It is a path that must be followed: before the ceremony that marked the beginning of classes, the researcher was at the embassy of Iran to ask for the donation of bilingual books in english and in Farsi – a language close to Dari. Due to these difficulties and many others, this is “a job that needs help to continue”, argues this specialist in Middle East issues.
In the auditorium of the Hindu Community Center – a huge space that once received the vaccination against covid-19 – families with small children and babies in arms sit. Many only speak Dari. One of the exceptions, in addition to Amina, is 28-year-old Abdul Wahid, who is, incidentally, licensed in English. He says that his first memories of the Taliban date back to two decades ago, when “night turned to day” with street fighting. Abdul’s family then emigrated to Pakistan and only returned to Afghanistan seven years later. “We had a good life,” he laments, although he also adds that the Taliban never escape being there – “make schools, hospitals, maternity hospitals”. They don’t have a shred of humanity, accuses the young Afghan, saying that “each Taliban has its own law. Deciding whether to kill, deciding whether to beat, deciding whether to take girls from their homes and their family.”
As you might expect, Amina and Abdul want to be able to return to Afghanistan one day. The House. But it’s a wish with a big “if” – only if the Taliban don’t care about power. Until then, they say, the route will be done in Portugal and the first step on the way is to learn Portuguese.