Afghan Girl Scouts: A History in Our Own Words

By Fifi

I didn’t want my Eagle Scout project to be about me.

I wanted it to be about the girls I grew up with — the ones who wore Scout uniforms in Kabul, who organized book drives and literacy programs, who showed up early and stayed late because they believed in service. A lot of people don’t even know girls’ Scouting existed in Afghanistan. I do. I was there.

So I decided to document it.

My project is a published journal built around first-person interviews with former Afghan girl Scouts. Every story is told in her own words. I’m not rewriting their experiences or polishing them into something neat. I want to preserve them as they are — honest, unique, and real.

When I was a Scout in Kabul, we didn’t have merit badges or ranks. We focused on serving our communities. I helped lead a book drive that placed thousands of books into elementary and high schools. We organized supply distributions and literacy efforts. We were building something steady and hopeful.

When the Taliban returned, that work became dangerous. The program dissolved. Uniforms were burned. Some girls left the country. Others couldn’t. What we had built scattered quickly.

After I arrived in the U.S., I joined Troop 39 in Chapel Hill and started again from the beginning. I had less than two years to complete every requirement before turning 18. I moved through the ranks one by one — camping trips, leadership roles, merit badges, service hours — while carrying the memory of where I started.

This project feels like a continuation of that first Scout experience in Kabul. Back then, I helped distribute books. Now, I’m helping create one.

The journal will be displayed at the National Scouting Museum and the World Scouting Museum, which means the story of Afghan girls in Scouting will have a visible, permanent place in the broader history of Scouting. That matters to me. Our existence won’t be a footnote. It will be part of the record.

Most people have never heard about Afghan girl Scouts. They don’t know what the program looked like or what it meant to us. Through these interviews, readers will see that we led projects, organized communities, and took responsibility for the places we lived. We weren’t symbolic. We were active.

I’m close to earning the rank of Eagle

Scout. If everything goes as planned, I’ll be the first Afghan to do so. But the rank isn’t the part I think about most. I think about the girls whose stories are now written down. I think about future Scouts walking through a museum and realizing that Afghan girls stood in this movement too.

None of this would have been possible without the generosity of donors like you.

Your support gave me the chance to step back into a classroom and onward into my future.

If you want to help more students like me reclaim their education and chase their dreams, please consider donating today.

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