Photo by Paaz PG

Living Wisdom International High School — Afghanistan Program

Community Projects, ROOM 6.26

At the heart of EFL is a single, luminous idea: The overarching goal of the system is to help each student develop maturity—defined as “the ability to relate appropriately to realities other than one’s own.” And from that maturity flows something even more precious: true success, defined as the ability to face life’s challenges with joy, wisdom, and inner strength—creating a life that is both personally fulfilling and beneficial to others.

Photo by Mahmoud Hamdi

The Journey from the First Afghan Student to the First Afghan Teacher at Living Wisdom

Community Projects, ROOM 6.26

It was January 2023. Life in Afghanistan had become unbearably difficult for girls. For us, education was not just about books or classrooms. It was our only path to freedom, to dreams, to proving to our community that we too could build our country alongside our brothers. For me, school was more than a building; it was a sanctuary of hope. I dreamed of becoming a doctor, of healing the sick and giving families a reason to believe in tomorrow.

Photo by Daniel Obscura

We Are the Light: No. 5

We Are the Light, ROOM 6.26

We are the Light is a forum and gathering place offering free and open expression to women from around the world whose voices are seldom heard and whose futures are threatened. The education and health of women, attention paid to the development of girls and women, and inclusion of the outlooks of women are critical to the welfare of the world.

The Shepherd by Shaparak

We Are the Light: No. 4

We Are the Light

We are the Light is a forum and gathering place offering free and open expression to women from around the world whose voices are seldom heard and whose futures are threatened. The education and health of women, attention paid to the development of girls and women, and inclusion of the outlooks of women are critical to the welfare of the world.

We Are the Light: No. 3

We Are the Light

We are the Light is a forum and gathering place offering free and open expression to women from around the world whose voices are seldom heard and whose futures are threatened. The education and health of women, attention paid to the development of girls and women, and inclusion of the outlooks of women are critical to the welfare of the world.

The Writing on the Wall by Hattie Myers

Editorials

Each of the writers in ROOM 6.25 has captured, in their own way, something of this extraordinary moment we are all living through. This is not easy. In his essay Why I Write, Thomas Ogden explains why. “Part of the difficulty of writing well lies in the fact that writing any sort of analytic essay, literary essay, poetry, fiction is autobiographical,”  Ogden writes; “I must find a way of capturing a situation in my own way, a way that bears my own mark.” This unique issue of ROOM bears the mark of multitudes and holds the scars of generations.   

We Are the Light: No. 1

We Are the Light: No. 2

We Are the Light

We are the Light is a forum and gathering place offering free and open expression to women from around the world whose voices are seldom heard and whose futures are threatened. The education and health of women, attention paid to the development of girls and women, and inclusion of the outlooks of women are critical to the welfare of the world.

In the Midst by Hattie Myers

Editorials

The writers and artists in ROOM 2.25 bear witness to what must happen in ourselves, our communities, and our political movements for truth to be faced and change to occur. Some write from amidst genocide, others from their country’s fascist turn, and still others from the impact of environmental catastrophe. Each of these life-threatening events inscribes itself differently on our souls. We live in terrifying times.

ROOM 10.24

Toward a New Collectivity by Hattie Myers

Editorials

In Kara Walker’s words, “history is the oft-repeated fable; power is the oft-repeated script.” From Walker’s art in THSLNWN: In the Colorless Light of Day, to Karim Dajani and Eyal Rozmarin’s conversation in Speaking of Home: An Intimate Exchange on Israel-Palestine, ROOM 10.24 is a testament to our collective heartbreak and resilience. Exactly one week after the 2016 US election, we created ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action. We knew that to “live out,” in Sartre’s words, “that unbearable, heart-rending situation known as the human condition in a candid unvarnished way,” we needed to do it together. For the last eight years, ROOM’s worldwide community has engaged in a collective struggle for recognition and authenticity across generations, culture, and political pressure. Now, just one week after the re-election of Donald Trump, ROOM 10.24 could not be more prescient.

The Afghanistan Story by Sara Taber

The Afghanistan Story by Sara Taber

Essays

The story of Afghanistan, my young women informants have taught me, is yet more complicated even than a battle between communism, democracy, and Islamic forces or a battle over women’s position in society. Stories upon stories, I have learned, compose the story of a country. But just being a woman of a certain generation is not the whole story, either. My young informants have disabused me of the notion that there is one Afghanistan story.

We Are the Light: No. 1

We Are the Light: No. 1

We Are the Light

We are the Light is a forum and gathering place offering free and open expression to women from around the world whose voices are seldom heard and whose futures are threatened. The education and health of women, attention paid to the development of girls and women, and inclusion of the outlooks of women are critical to the welfare of the world.

Beyond Reason by John Alderdice

Essays

For some years I have been warning publicly that we are heading into a third global conflict, and this, at times, led me to feel quite down about the prospects for humanity. This third global conflict is not simply a rerun of the disasters of the twentieth century, for before 1945, however terrible a war was and however many people died, the world would repair itself and in time the population of the world could be restored. With the threat of nuclear war and the reality of climate change, humankind has brought about the very real danger of our own demise.

A World Not Good Enough by Abdel Aziz Al Bawab

Essays

The demand for Palestinian erasure arises from a larger socio-historical structure, present mentally as a blueprint that maps out people’s presupposed positions in the world. Positions imposed historically through violence and valued differentially according to colonial logics. This map is unconsciously pulled upon to be reproduced externally, in an injurious gesture echoing the original colonial trauma that birthed the world attempting to be reproduced.

Pages in the Park by Josephine Wright

Essays

[…]I had been photographing rain within the hearts and throats of flowers when I saw the pages on the wet bench that overlooked the West Side Highway and beyond to the racing waters of the Hudson. Looking more closely, I recognized the pages as the play Antigone. The two pages on top, 206 and 229, upside down from each other, were not consecutive. Had the reader taken the chunk of the book containing missing pages 207–228 because they had particular significance? Or was the intent to highlight these two remaining pages in the hope that a passerby would pause to read them. To alert them—me?…