Established in 2010 below a fragile U.S.-backed Afghan authorities in Kabul, ANIM was Afghanistan’s first and solely faculty of its type.
Unlike colleges through the first Taliban regime, the place college students had been strictly segregated, ANIM allowed girls and boys to share lecture rooms and welcomed youngsters from all walks of life. The institute embraced Afghan tradition and Western music alike.
“It was an entire world for us,” mentioned Zohra, talking alongside Farida in Portugal, including that it made them “dream greater and better.”
The women found their devices — the trumpet for Zohra and the violin for Farida — and their ardour.
And the college thrived for a decade, sending orchestras and ensembles on excursions world wide and enjoying to packed venues.
But their success drew the ire of the Taliban, which plotted a number of assaults on the institute and people related to it and carried out a lethal suicide bombing at a Kabul efficiency in 2014.
The blast killed two individuals and severely injured the college’s founder and director, Ahmad Sarmast, who suffered shrapnel accidents to the pinnacle and non permanent harm to his listening to. He mentioned it took him months to get better.
“We all, someday, shall be gone. I strongly imagine it’s higher to die when you’re standing fairly [than] to be in your knees,” Sarmast advised NBC News in a May 2021 interview, earlier than the Taliban takeover. “There’s a battle between darkish forces and progressive forces of this nation.”
In lower than 4 months, his worst fears can be realized. Believing the college and its college students can be focused, Sarmast mentioned he fired off appeals to authorities officers within the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Portugal asking them for sanctuary.
Fearing a gradual evacuation would endanger any college students and employees left behind, he insisted they depart Afghanistan collectively, united as a college.
“It was everybody who may face the implications,” Sarmast mentioned in an interview earlier this yr. “So, for me, it was essential to save lots of everybody or nobody.”
While lots of the appeals proved unsuccessful, Sarmast remained undeterred. His persistence paid off.
“Portugal was the one authorities world wide that positively and promptly responded,” he mentioned, “and supplied a group-asylum for 284 individuals … your entire faculty neighborhood.”
For Farida and Zohra, the prospect to go away would show bittersweet. On the one hand, they had been relieved to flee the Taliban’s wrath, however on the opposite, they had been leaving their households behind.
Before she left, Zohra mentioned her 63-year-old grandmother, Sabera Yawari, advised her to remain optimistic. “Don’t fear, you will get out of this hell and go examine and obtain your desires,” she mentioned her elder advised her.
Escorted by a relative to Kabul’s primary airport below the watchful eye of the Taliban, the pair smiled and laughed in nervous anticipation of the journey forward whereas additionally experiencing the heartbreak of leaving their family members behind.
“We had been pleased and unhappy on the similar time as a result of we needed to depart our household for a very long time,” mentioned Zohra. “We didn’t know if we had been going to see them ever once more.”
It took 5 flights to get all the weary employees and college students out of Afghanistan to Qatar, the place they’d stay for 2 months earlier than lastly touring to Portugal.
Many had been then positioned in makeshift housing at a former army hospital within the metropolis of Lisbon, earlier than they discovered extra everlasting houses in Braga, a historic metropolis in northeastern Portugal.
“We all went by means of a giant tradition shock,” mentioned Sarmast. “Everything was totally different.”
Though in exile, the orchestra has nonetheless picked up the place it left off at Braga’s Conservatory of Music, a modest constructing that has turn out to be an unlikely refuge for Afghanistan’s wealthy musical traditions.
“We’ve been very lucky to be out of Afghanistan and to get a chance for our college students to dream as soon as once more, to hope as soon as once more,” Sarmast added. “But once more, it’s at all times painful, it’s at all times exhausting if you’re away out of your roots.”
Still, he mentioned, the orchestra has set excessive expectations for itself. Less than three years after it left Afghanistan, the group is enjoying prestigious live performance venues once more, together with two packed U.S. performances in August: one on the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and one other at one in all music’s most hallowed grounds, New York City’s Carnegie Hall.
“Each word that we play immediately, it’s a word of protest and it’s the voices of thousands and thousands of the Afghan who’ve been pressured into silence,” Sarmast mentioned.
More than three years after their transfer, Farida and Zohra keep in touch with their households utilizing patchy video calls.
Much goes unsaid, however Farida mentioned she knew her household was going through mounting struggles. They hardly ever depart the home for concern of the Taliban, she defined, and a crumbling economic system means they will solely afford to eat meat as soon as a month.
Her 11-year-old sister, Shanaz, will possible lose out probably the most. Now within the fifth grade, Shanaz hopes to be a physician someday, however below Taliban rule she is going to solely be allowed another yr of training.
But she and Zohra nonetheless hope to have the ability to return residence someday.
In the meantime, they’re each in search of solace in music.
“When I’m working towards or enjoying the trumpet, I really feel prefer it’s going to be OK,” Zohra mentioned. “My household will come, Taliban shall be gone, and it simply feels good.”
“It’s additionally making me extra robust,” Farida added. “It provides me one thing like optimistic vitality.”
