Amu: The day Setara, a young woman in Badakhshan Province in northeastern Afghanistan, passed the university entrance exam was the day she believed her life would begin. Instead, it ended in a poppy field. Once dreaming of becoming a teacher, the young woman from Badakhshan, whose name has been changed in this story to protect her identity, now spends her days bent over poppy plants, collecting raw opium for local traffickers. It is not a life she chose, she said, but one she was pushed into after the Taliban banned higher education for women and barred them from most forms of work. “If the schools had stayed open, I would be graduating from university now,” she said. “Instead, I’m working in the poppy fields. We know it’s wrong. We feel ashamed. But we have to survive.” Click here to read more (external link).