The Russo Gallery, John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding

 

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Rianna Starheim '14 spent this past summer on an independent project in Kabul, Afghanistan, teaching at the School of Leadership Afghanistan (SOLA), the only boarding school in the country. At SOLA, she taught English, guitar, yoga and leadership classes to 30 teenage Afghan girls. She was in Afghanistan during the drawn-out, contentious 2014 Presidential election that ended in mid-September in a power-sharing deal between Afghanistan’s current president Ashraf Ghani and current CEO Abdullah Abdullah. The elections marked the first democratic shift of power in the country’s history, and it wasn’t always pretty. In seeing Afghanistan through the lens of its youth, she saw many beautiful sides of a country that has a lot of rough edges. The SOLA girls saw the world with a bewildering mix of naiveté and clarity. They talked politics over dinner and struggled immensely with trauma, but they also slapped each other (usually jokingly), burned the rice, and cried over their homework just like children everywhere in the world. Afghanistan has been war-torn for more than 30 years, and there isn’t a child—or any Afghan—whose life hasn’t been touched by that violence. The hardest part of Rianna's trip wasn’t the volatile environment or the nearby magnetic bombs that would blow out the windows of the school, but rather watching how children reacted to the violence that so often brushed their lives.

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View a Flickr album of the show here.