Corinne Lestch

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

May 6, 2009

St. Louis — The idea behind showing students a brief documentary at Soldan International Studies High School was to heighten their awareness of global conflicts.

As they watched the film about kamlaris, or Nepalese girls sold into servitude, the students were transported to a different part of the world thousands of miles away.

What they didn't know was that a girl in their own class had a similar story to share about her childhood in Afghanistan.

The film was part of a program sponsored by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which seeks to expose American high school students to global issues such as poverty, domestic abuse and child violence. But rather than lecturing students on those distant hardships, the program puts students face to face with the reporters who have dug up the stories firsthand.

So when San Francisco Chronicle reporter Meredith May told Soldan students about the kam-laris in Nepal, she spoke from authority. For nine days, May was in Nepal, documenting the adversities faced by women and children.

"Oftentimes they're beaten and abused, raped ... they don't have their own room, they have to sleep on the floor, and this treatment has to do with the caste system," May said to the 13 students, their desks arranged in a semicircle around her. "Do you know what the caste system is?"

They nodded their heads, along with Gulmakai Zulmai, who may know better than anyone else.

Gulmakai grew up in Afghanistan with her parents and four siblings. When she was about 5 years old, she was coming home from a cousin's funeral with her family on a bus when civil war broke out and gunshots were fired. Five people on the crowded bus survived, including Gulmakai's family. But she was shot in the leg and it had to be amputated. Six months later, her father died and her mother remarried.

Gulmakai stopped going to school after first grade to work with her stepfather in his restaurant, cleaning and sweeping the floors. Gulmakai felt trapped and was constantly berated by her stepfather. "He really hated me. He told me I'm disabled and my life is useless, and as long as I'm living I need to do whatever he wants me," she said.

And though she hasn't told friends or family the specifics, Gulmakai said she was the victim of abuse and routine sexual harassment. Hearing about the children in Nepal brought back memories.

"The stories that I read about the girls in Nepal, I just remember my old self," she said.

In a sense, that's the kind of connection that the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting is seeking as it attempts to engage American students with lives across the planet.

More typically, the program reaches students who know little about global issues. To rectify that, it relies on an interactive website called the Pulitzer Global Gateway, which links students with articles, videos and an online forum to communicate with the children they've been learning about.

"I could have given them a lecture on what's going on in Nepal and they wouldn't have any interest to learn about it," said Hamid Azimiaraghi, a Soldan teacher. "But here, they go themselves. They look at the website and they interact with the reporter."

This year, the Gateway focused on conflicts in Iraq, Nepal and Africa, and three journalists spoke with students at 15 St. Louis high schools about their reporting in each of these places.

At Soldan, teacher Kelly Moore helped students navigate through the Gateway website. While discussing women's and children's issues in Nepal and in different countries in Moore's class, some of Gulmakai's past came out in conversation, and Moore asked her if she would write it in an essay. Gulmakai did, but ultimately did not feel comfortable presenting it to her class.

But she has been slowly revealing parts of her past here and there, by writing it down and in conversation to different people.

"I think it was so great for her to share her information," Azimiaraghi said. "It was something she kept in her heart for so many years and finally she decided to talk about it. I believe something you talk about that happened in the past, it just helps you to cope."

Gulmakai and her family were able to escape the abuse and war when they came to the United States from Pakistan in 2002. They have been living in St. Louis for seven years.

Gulmakai said she thinks it's important for students to learn about global conflicts and praises journalists like May who travel to other countries to report on injustices.

"I think they should do it more," she said.

See the article as it ran in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Visit Women-Children-Crisis for more information on Meredith May's reporting and the Global Gateway

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