Don Speich, Marin IJ
August 20, 2006
Original Article
After news reports of her feats have faded into yesterday, what remains is a middle-aged Mill Valley teacher traveling in a lone car across the rutted roads of Afghanistan on a profoundly personal mission.
Camilla Barry, 52, is teaching Afghan teachers how to teach science - hands-on science - the magic of mixing chemicals in test tubes and creating electrical circuits in a country where learning has been only through rote memorization - never involving the intellectual excitement of learning by doing.
Barry, who has been spotlighted in television, magazine and newspaper reports, has been going to Afghanistan for four weeks each summer for the past three years. She has been going to the capital, Kabul, and then, accompanied by a translator, into the country to smaller towns ringed by jagged mountains with bloody histories, Taliban rebels and warlords - and to children and adults who want to learn.
A resource specialist at Park Elementary School, Barry leaves again today - but this time not alone. Her 21-year-old son, Nicholas, a senior at the University of California at Davis, will accompany her.
And going to a land experiencing a resurgence from the Taliban - the radically anti-western, anti-education, anti-woman Islamic fundamentalist group that ran the country in a state of terror for years and housed Osama Bin Laden during his planning of Sept. 11 - has Nicholas a bit on edge.
"I'm a little bit worried," he said. "We rescheduled the trip (originally slated for June) because there were riots in Kabul, normally where the government has the most control.
"My mother is pretty intrepid. I'm probably a little bit more worried than she is."
If Camilla Barry is worried, it takes a distinct back seat to her need to teach in Afghanistan, a goal sparked by news reports several years ago of the Taliban's persecution of women and prohibition of secular education.
"I was horrified that they wouldn't let their girls go to school," she said in a magazine interview in 2004. "I said I'm going over there and find out if there's something I can do about it."
What she found after the Taliban had been driven from power was acceptance, then respect, then gratitude, which she talks about with a smile.
It's not cheap. Airfare for her son and her alone will cost $4,600; supplies will run about $1,000. She will not receive any income for four weeks from her job. She has paid $1,500 to take classes to prepare her the trip.
She said she is paying for most of these things herself, although she has received some financial help from friends and members of her church, Westminster Presbyterian in Tiburon.
Originally, she said, another group, the Bay Area-based Afghan Friends Network, with whom she had been affiliated in the past, offered to pay airfare because it was sponsoring her trip - the second in two years - to Ghanzi City, which is three hours by car southwest of Kabul.
"Now, however, AFN feels it is too dangerous to fund my Ghanzi City trip," she said.
On one trip she was accompanied to Kabul by her husband, David. They went for a stroll through the streets of the county's capital, finding their way eventually on Chicken Street, a popular center of small businesses and cafes.
"'Camilla, Camilla,'" greeted smiling merchants and others as they spotted her and welcomed her back to their country, she said.
"I have a lot of friends in Kabul now."
She talks of flying into Kabul for the first time three years ago, the starkness of the country from the sky, rocky and beaten down by centuries of blazing summer suns and harsh, bitterly cold winter winds. But amid this bleakness there are long, narrow ribbons of green on either side of the many mountain streams, which blossom into chiseled terraces used for planting - a metaphor for her work.
In Kabul, as well as smaller cities and villages throughout Afghanistan, there are schools where Barry has been planting in teachers the seeds of a new approach to education. The teachers are expected to take what they have learned and pass it on to other teachers to use in classrooms. A rigid and antiquated education system will blossom much like the terraces and farms along the streams and rivers. So goes the premise of Barry's mission.
Last year, she went to Ghanzi City, a former Taliban stronghold. She says the program was a huge success, with more teachers wanting to be included than she thought she could handle, but they were included anyway, and it worked.
Barry was invited by the governor of Ghanzi to lead a teaching-training workshop as his guest.
"This was the first teacher-training ever held in Ghanzi," she said. "I taught hands-on science to 120 teachers, both women and men.
"I told them that I was nervous and, just to be honest, I told them they looked very fierce. They all started laughing."
This year, she was warned away from the city because the Taliban had moved in again.
Instead, she is going to a school in Jaghori, a city in the remote central highlands.
She wrote to a friend, Wahid Omarf, director of education for Afghan4tomorrow, which had sponsored her first trip to the country, telling him of her plans to go despite the increasing turmoil.
"Of course you know me," he e-mailed Barry. "I will tell you not to go, but I also know you, you will go!"
Barry's crusade seems enormous and unwieldy, given the vastness of the sparsely populated country and, most of all, quixotic - that is, until you hear it outlined by Barry. There is a grit to her voice and manner that somehow takes the role of idealism out of the mix, a determination that brooks no patience with notions of impracticality.
On her first visit she taught children as well as teachers, and it is this experience, it seems, that cast aside any doubts she might have had.
"Students wanted to do homework, even the street children," she said, explaining that these children are mostly of parents who cannot work because of injuries suffered during the various conflicts that have crippled the country for so long.
Returning the next year, in 2004, she said she met one of the students she had taught the year before who complained, "'When you left last year, you didn't come back and check the homework,' and I said, 'If you still have it, I will check it now.'"
Asma Eshen of San Francisco is an Afghan American who is a friend of Barry's and was key in getting Barry involved in her work.
Eshen visited Kabul earlier this year and said she told Barry she was missed.
"I have to say the students and teachers are waiting and looking forward to Camilla coming.
"I asked them what they wanted from Camilla and they asked 'if I could ask Camilla to teach us about the human body?'"
Barry's reaction?
"She took a course at UC Davis so she could do it," Eshen said.
Read more Mill Valley stories at the IJ's Mill Valley page.
Contact Don Speich via e-mail at moc.jiniram|hciepsd#moc.jiniram|hciepsd.
