KABUL, Afghanistan -- The girls enter the dusty yard of Niswan Rahman Mena School, slipping off their burqas and clutching their faded blue book bags like trophies.
They step into newly painted classrooms with cement floors covered in heart-shaped carpets. A teacher strikes a large metal gong with a stone, signaling the start of class. The hallways of the two-story building echo with the shuffling, whispering and giggling of girls.
But not all the girls are laughing.
Upstairs in the principal's office, Sveeta Zalmi, 21, rubs tears from her eyes. After being banned from attending school by the Taliban, Zalmi wanted to join the thousands of girls going back to their studies this spring. But her husband won't let her.
At the very least, Zalmi wants to take an exam to earn a certificate of completion from the education ministry, a process akin to the general equivalency diploma.
The principal, Ghoul Jhan Zakhil, a stern woman with dark eyes and even darker eyebrows, looks through an oversized book with a frayed felt cover. It's the last record of the girls who attended Niswan Rahman Mena before the Taliban closed the school in 1996.
According to the record, Zalmi finished the 10th grade. She would need to complete two more years to earn her diploma. The principal says there is nothing she can do.
Zalmi cannot hold back her tears. She wanted to attend medical school at Kabul University and open her own surgical clinic. But those plans seem far away now.
"He told me to get my certificate, and then we'll see what happens," she says of her husband.
It's been five months since the Taliban's ironclad grip on women was officially lifted. Girls schools have reopened across the country. Women now hold scattered positions in the interim government and in the Loya Jirga, the grand assembly meeting this week to decide the composition of a national government.
But Afghanistan remains a conservative, male-dominated society where women's rights are limited, not so much by the government, as by their families and on the streets.
Located in Kartanaw, a neighborhood crumbled by years of civil war, Niswan Rahman Mena is a kind of oasis for the neary 2,000 girls who attend classes there and the female teachers who instruct them.
The International Security Assistance Force, the peacekeepers stationed in Kabul, provided new desks and coats of paint for Niswan Rahman Mena, the principal says.
Inside the school, the girls and teachers roam the classrooms freely, their faces uncovered. But outside, the vast majority of Afghan women still wear the burqa, a head-to-toe covering with a small mesh screen that allows them to see. Only a handful of women, usually elderly, venture outside without them. Men who are not family are rarely allowed to speak with women in their homes. Women almost always sit in the back seat of taxis and cars, while the men drive. Men dominate jobs in the markets and bazaars.
Zalmi doesn't like wearing the burqa, which she finds sweltering during the hot months. But her husband insists that she don the full-length garment around the city.
"I've heard of women getting mud thrown in their face," says Sveeta's sister, Wazhma Zalmi, 16, who attends Niswan Rahman Mena.
Wazhma Zalmi is married to her sister's brother-in-law, a common arrangement between Afghan families. Both families come from the same Pashtun tribe in Paktia, a southern province on the Pakistan border.
Sveeta Zalmi wants to leave Afghanistan, but her husband insists they remain here. Now that the Western world is helping to rebuild the country, he sees more opportunities for jobs, she says. Zalmi's not happy, but she says she wouldn't dare question her husband.
"I don't want to argue with him. It's not in our culture to argue with our husbands."
As the girls speak in the hallway, their voices grow loud with exasperation. A group of little girls gathers to listen.
A baby-faced soldier in his early 20s approaches the group. He later identifies himself as a member of the Afghan intelligence service, assigned to guard the school. He warns the sisters not to say anything negative about the government to the American reporter.
The sisters say it's time to leave. They pull their burqas over their heads and walk into the sun-drenched schoolyard.
"In America, I know that women can do anything they want," Wazhma Zalmi says on her way out the door. "But we need the permission of our government and our family."
ZARGHONA HALIMI, a teacher at the school, says life under the Taliban was like being buried alive.
"They took all our rights. They put us under the burqa and closed all the gates in front of us," says Halimi, 35.
After teaching literature in a girls school for seven years, the Taliban forced Halimi and other teachers to stay home.
A petite woman with a high-pitched voice, Halimi has circles under her eyes and a tentative smile, which appears only briefly on her mouth, glistening with lip gloss.
During this week in late April, Halimi teaches Pashto to a 10th-grade language class. A cool breeze blows through the open windows, as the girls stand at their desks reciting verses. Halimi interrupts to correct their pronunciation. "Without knowledge," a student reads from a poem, "a person has nothing."
Pashto is one of three languages the girls are supposed to learn in school, including Dari and English. After five years without instruction, their skills are a little rusty, Halimi says.
A part-time teacher, Halimi is happy to be back in the classroom, around other educated women and out of her house. But her husband, mother-in-law and brother-in-law, all of whom live with Halimi and her three children, did not want her to return to work.
"They want me to stay there," she says. "I tell them I'm coming here."
THE NEXT MORNING, Halimi is in trouble. She has shown up for work wearing a green velvet dress, with a matching scarf. The dress reaches all the way to her white high-heeled shoes, scuffed around the edges.
"It's too attractive," Zakhil, the principal, tells her. "You must wear something black, and not attract so much attention."
Halimi apologizes and heads off to class to teach another poetry lesson to her 10th graders. Poetry, she says, was one of her only pleasures during the Taliban.
She writes whatever ideas come into her head, putting down her housework to scribble a verse. Her poems deal with the suffering of Afghans and her own struggles as a woman, she says.
Halimi wanted to publish her poems in a newspaper, but her husband, an army officer, forbade her. When he found two of her notebooks, he tore them up and burned them, she says.
In the afternoon, Halimi excuses herself from the principal's office, where other teachers are chatting after class. She returns a few minutes later with a small scrap of paper containing a poem. She quietly reads the poem aloud, out of earshot of the principal.
I am sitting in a ship that goes to a place where there is a hope and no rough waters.
There is shining love in it.
There is a blind star, which doesn't have eyes.
I will go to forget my sorrow.
The place that doesn't have any pain.
Oh, there is no star for hope, and I go to a place which is hard.
Oh, my ship has gone. It disappears in the water, it goes down. I go to a place of feeling. I can't see. It is dark. Zarghona leaves happiness. Think about doomsday. I forgive you.
Halimi packs her tattered language books into a plastic "Pine" cigarette bag, which serves as her briefcase. She can't linger at school much longer or her husband will become suspicious, she says.
Before leaving, Halimi asks to pass a message to people in the United States. She wants to thank Americans for toppling the Taliban and helping women regain their right to work and go to school.
But for Halimi, that freedom ends at 1 p.m. when she leaves the gates of Niswan Rahman Mena and heads home.
"Women have their freedom in society," she says. "But not in their homes."
