Building starts on one woman’s lifetime dream

25 Jul 2009

Building starts on one woman’s lifetime dream

KABUL - The groundbreaking ceremony for a new library in Kabul took place today – the result of a dedication to Afghanistan’s history by one woman.

Since arriving in Afghanistan in the 1960s Nancy Hatch Dupree, 81, has dedicated her work to collecting anything and everything ever written about Afghanistan.

From storing books and official reports in Peshawar, Pakistan in the 1980s and 1990s, Mrs Dupree has now seen a lifelong dream fulfilled with the first stones, and five coins for luck, being laid for the new Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University.

“All the people of Afghanistan need access to knowledge and if you give them knowledge they will very soon move forward and stand on their own feet,” said Mrs Dupree.

Mrs Dupree, has written five books on Afghanistan and with her husband Louis, who died in 1989, the couple were a formidable team and leading authorities on Afghanistan’s history, archaeology and anthropology.

The Afghanistan Centre will be a one floor building with reading and conference rooms.

The centre will house more than 30,000 volumes of work cataloguing the political and social life of Afghanistan in the last thirty years.

Omara Khan Masoudi, the director of the Kabul Museum said: “It will be very useful for the young generation especially the university students for their future. I think this is very important for all our people.”

The Minister of Higher Education Dr Mohammad Azam Dadfar joined Mrs Dupree, centre board members and others today to lay the first stones for the building work.

The construction is expected to take less than a year.

By Dominic Medley, UNAMA

Website: Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University