What I Learned About Taboo by Teaching It in a Culture that Isn’t Mine
By Belsem Aljobory
The classroom was warm in the way that classrooms near Livingstone tend to be. Not from any heater, but from the simple density of bodies and attention packed into a room with windows that you could see other students peeking in from. I had been in Zambia for less than a week on a research fellowship focused on girls' education and community-based learning, and I was standing in front of a group of students about to teach a lesson on the menstrual cycle and consent. I remember feeling, very specifically, like I had no business being the one to teach it.
I was wrong about that, but it took the lesson itself to show me why.
I had come to Zambia to study education policy from the ground up, to understand the reality of enrollment statistics and charts of funding for actual schools, actual teachers, actual kids. What I got instead was a crash course in something policy briefs rarely mention. How do you talk about the things nobody wants to talk about? Not the budget gaps or the teacher shortages, which are
hard problems but at least nameable ones. I mean the unnamed ones. Periods. Bodies. Consent. The stuff that gets quietly skipped over in health curricula from Livingstone to Lahore because someone, somewhere, decided it was inappropriate, embarrassing, or dangerous to say out loud.
The lesson itself didn't open with biology. It opened with a story, something close enough to the students' own lives that nobody could dismiss it as a lecture from outsiders, but distant enough that no one had to claim it as their own experience and risk the embarrassment of being seen. The other volunteer and I used our own bodies and experiences to describe our comfort or discomfort with being touched in different areas on our bodies. That it was OK to say no to a hug. Only after the story had done its work did we move into the more direct material in the upcoming days, what a menstrual cycle actually is, why it happens, and, woven into the same conversation, deliberately, what consent means and why a person's right to say no matters regardless of age, gender, or relationship. I watched the room's posture change in real time as the other volunteers and I sang songs of what consent was, and made jokes with each other and the students. In the beginning, no hands wanted to go up; I’m guessing in fear of getting the concepts wrong. After our lessons, which engaged students through songs, dances, and rhymes, hands went up.
I took notes that day not as a researcher but as someone almost plotting. I run a small nonprofit back in Pakistan but based in the United States, named the As We Rise Foundation, and I have spent more hours than I'd like to admit trying to figure out how to get a room full of young girls to engage with exactly this kind of material without the conversation shutting down before it starts. Conservative settings (and I'd put both the community near Livingstone and my own context in Pakistan under that umbrella) despite the very different religions, ethnicities, and
histories that shape each, tend to treat certain subjects as inherently unspeakable. No matter who’s teaching it. Not because people don't care, but because the cost of speaking carelessly feels higher than the cost of staying silent. What I saw in that classroom was a workaround.
Indirection instead of confrontation, story instead of lecture, shared values instead of imported ones. Nobody was asked to abandon their culture or their religion. Students were invited to find the topic already living inside it.
I don't want to make this sound tidier than it was. The lesson worked, but the whole arrangement around it was more complicated than a single afternoon of good teaching could resolve.
For one thing, I was acutely aware of being watched in a different way than I was watching. The students were generous, almost startlingly so. They wanted to talk, to ask questions about where I was from, to take photos, to touch my hair, which apparently read to them as novel in a way I hadn't anticipated. I was, genuinely, fine with all of it. But the adults running our program weren't, and they asked us to hold a boundary anyway. No selfies, no hair-touching, even when we as visitors had no objection ourselves. At first this felt like an odd kind of caution, why restrict a harmless, mutually enjoyable interaction? But the longer I sat with it, the more I understood the logic. The boundary wasn't really about us. It was about what kind of relationship between foreigners and students the program wanted to model going forward, long after we'd left. Our personal comfort was beside the point. What mattered was whether the next group of visitors, and the one after that, would be received by students who saw them as people to learn alongside, rather than curiosities to perform for.
The other complication is harder to sit with, and I think it's important to say plainly: the program I was part of was good, but it was also narrow. The instructional time with students was shorter than I wished and was told it would be; the kind of brevity that makes you wonder what you didn't get to see, what questions never had room to surface and what reality was being shown. And the school itself was a non-governmental one, serving a particular, somewhat self-selected population. It was not, and could not have been, a representative slice of what education near Livingstone actually looks like across age groups, income levels, or geography. I left wondering how much of what felt like insight was actually a curated glimpse, a well-run program showing me its best version of itself, which is not the same thing as showing me the fuller, messier reality of education in that region. I don't think that diminishes what I learned. But I think it would be dishonest to write about this experience as though I'd seen all of "Zambian education” as a whole, rather than one specific, intentionally structured slice of it.
I left the country six days earlier than planned, worried enough about my potential illness that the early flight home was non-negotiable. It was a frustrating way to end a trip I'd spent months preparing for, and for a while I treated the early departure as a personal failure rather than just a fact of the trip. But research conducted in the field is rarely as clean as the proposal that precedes it, and learning to make peace with a shortened timeline–to ask what depth I could still claim rather than mourning the rest I'd lost–turned out to be its own lesson in flexibility.
When I reflect back to the trip, I keep coming back to the classroom. Not because it solved anything, but because it modeled something I hadn't quite known how to picture before, that the hardest conversations don't have to be the loudest or the most obvious ones. They can be the most carefully built where the story is first, shared ground between teacher and student is second, and third, the actual subject only once the room has decided it's safe to speak of and listen. I came to Zambia to study education policy. I'm going home with something closer to a method. Whether I can make it work in a classroom in Pakistan, with a different set of taboos and a different set of students, is the next thing I have to find out. But I have a better idea than I did months ago of where to start.
