Jahantap Ahmadi’s dream has finally come true. The 25-year-old woman with three children under the age of five and a husband who could neither read or write had a dream to go to the college and study. Though she had a high school degree and it was enough to get her a teaching job at the only elementary school in her village in central Afghanistan — in an open field — but she wanted more.
And she got it.
Jahantap’s photo in which she was nursing her baby while writing the university entrance exam became a viral on social media. On March 15, cheered on by her husband, she set out for the Daikundi provincial capital of Nili to take the exam. Her feet were blistered and bruised. She sat for ten hours with her infant daughter, Khezran, cradled on her lap in a rickety bus over rugged rocky roads.
She scored a decent 152 out of 200.