Music Echoes Off Walls Once Silenced by Taliban

KABUL, Afghanistan June 20, 2009— -- The girl in the pink pashmina scratches out scales on a battered violin. The screeching careens off the walls of the darkened classroom, but Ahmad Sarmast gushes with pride.

"She's very advanced for having picked up a bow only three weeks ago," he says from his seat in the corner.

He's referring to Frishta. A month ago she was selling plastic bags on Kabul's streets, soupy with diesel fumes. She brought home $25 a month. Her parents claim she is 14 years old; she looks no more than 10.

Sarmast had gone to a local charity called Oceana to select children for his rejuvenated National Institute of Music. It's Afghanistan's only high school music program, and at this point barely so. During the Taliban's reign, thugs had used the drums as planters and the school's priceless concert pianos for kindling. They tossed grenades inside them to make it easier to splinter.

The interior had been gutted, the power cables ripped out. There was neither power nor water.

"They didn't have any musical instruments, not enough learning materials, no specialist music teachers, not the facilities that the students need for a proper music education like soundproofing and rooms," he says.

Currently 35 students share a drum set, and 17 others used the same saxophone.But with an infusion of cash, Sarmast is shepherding the squat, two-story brick building, which looks more barracks than beaux art, through a massive facelift.

Sarmast likes to boast that the school will have state-of-the-art, soundproof music rooms, AV studio and double-glazed windows. But he's mum about how much he's managed to raise. "If I tell," he says, "then donors will stop giving."

Key to it all, says Sarmast, is saving street children and orphans like Frishta.

"Before coming to this school, I had a very tough life selling plastics on the streets," she says, her voice a high whisper. She begins to cry, covering her face in the pink scarf.

It has been an especially difficult day for Frishta. She had interceded in a squabble between two of her fellow violin students. She says that one of the girls "told me to 'butt out, you beggar girl.' But I was never a beggar. I SOLD plastic bags on the streets. I worked," she insists.