A small courtyard somewhere in the outskirts of Kabul.

Outside, the sun is beating down on the dusty streets early in the morning.

Inside, behind the high wall, the air is still cool.

Two small fruit trees provide pleasant shade, including a few sunflowers craning their lanky necks.

Further back, a staircase leads up to a terrace where a new room has been created under a canvas roof.

Here, at six in the morning, Roya sits on soft carpets with five girls and explores with them what happens to water when it reaches the boiling point.

Alexander Haneke

Editor in Politics.

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Chemistry class at a secret girls' school in Kabul.

The children take turns reading the explanations in their exercise books, while Roya draws three boxes on the blackboard to represent the physical states.

Solid - liquid - gaseous.

Five pairs of eyes look intently at their teacher.

From six to eight in the morning, 21-year-old Roya teaches children from the neighborhood here.

It was her little sister's tears that made her set up her own little school under the tent roof, says Roya.

In mid-March, the Taliban promised to allow girls in the upper classes to go back to school.

But then the Taliban hardliners prevailed and the schoolgirls were sent home again.

And Roya had to do something.

So she collected with friends what was needed for a classroom.

They carpeted the terrace, with a flat table in the middle around which the girls sit.

A white tin board on the wall and a shelf they made themselves, which they filled with donated books.

A school in the neighborhood gave Roya exercise books and video data with online courses that the teachers had recorded during the corona pandemic.

You can't explain everything, says Roya.

If she gets stuck, she plays the lessons on her computer.

When everything was ready, Roya went to the local mosque, where girls were sitting in a Koran class during Ramadan, and asked who wanted to study with her.

"In the beginning there were only four who came, but over time the number grew," she says.

Roya, whose real name is different but chose this name here, had studied International Relations for a few semesters.

But at some point she realized that this noble theory had absolutely nothing to do with the reality in Afghanistan.

She was involved in a project for street children and worked for a seamstress.

Roya says she was always interested in art.

With her large checked shirt, the ocher tone of which is reflected in the pattern of her blue skirt, the pearl-studded glasses strap and the turquoise painted fingernails, she could be seen in the hipster districts of any big city.

During the day she now works in a goldsmith workshop.

But before that, in the morning from six to eight, six days a week, she teaches two classes in all subjects in her small school,

"I have to put pressure on them to make them grow"

It's only when you look more closely that you can see the tiredness in her big brown eyes.

Late in the evening, Roya prepares the lessons for the next day.

What she doesn't understand, she looks at in the online courses or researches on the internet.

"But the children give me so much energy." Only one student has had to stop teaching so far.

The girl was married off by her parents to a distant province when she was 14.

"It made me incredibly sad," says Roya.