Love learning new things!

This photograph is from Mudassir's school. She has herself attended school up till high school. For now she is also running a small business at her house where she stitches clothes for other women in the area. Her stitched clothes are very fine and over the past few months she has been able to take orders from female doctors at the PHC too. She wakes up early and is at the sewing machine at exactly 7 am after sending her children to school. Initially this school was being run in the afternoon but now as more students wanted it early, it is conducted in the morning too. The only problem is that she faces power cuts during the morning in her area and students have to sit without any lights or fans. As you can see they are sitting along the window and doing their work with what little sunlight enters the house. We will get her an emergency light so that the students do not have to strain while working.

One of her students, Saima Tania eagerly wants to finish Math and Urdu so that she can start on with English. Sania's mother works as a cook and her employer used to give her children's books for her children so Saima has learned basic English language form those books on her own. I told her I will get her more English books so that she can practice and continue reading English in her spare time.

This was on the blackboard when I entered this school. They are learning how to join alphabets in Urdu to form words. The top one is Anaar which means pomegranate and the bottom one is Batukh which means duck in English.

This photo is from Bukhtawar's house. She is an exceptionally strong woman who will always greet you with a big smile. On this visit she had to go to the hospital for a follow up so her daughter Noor was conducting the session. She is the one who is standing draped in lime yellow on the right and Shehla Baji is the one in black who visits them everyday to see how the program is running. 

Both these women I talked to are loving the new classes and always demand more homework. To think that just a few days ago most of them did not know how to hold a pencil and now they are writing and reading words and going crazy colouring in their workbooks is so heartening.

The best thing about my visit this Tuesday was Dr Imran Sheikh. He is the new head of Community Health Sciences at the University. He had previously worked for 15 years here in this community with the university but he went abroad for a couple of years. Now that he is back and was visiting the area with us, so many people recognized him and were glad that he will work with the community again. As we have always wanted to include more university students for this program he has a plan of initiating more health awareness sessions that would be conducted by those students who will train the teachers and then they will train the students at their own school. For now we are working on a questioner to be filled out by each school student regarding their base line knowledge regarding disease prevention and then we will fill it out again after a few months after all the awareness sessions are conducted and then we will see if they have retained anything and are actually implementing health promoting habits or not. I am so excited to impart all this to them so that we decrease the disease burden of preventable diseases and they are able to spend money on better things. I have contacted a couple of NGOs regarding health material for these people and I will post what I receive from them.

By Zainab Faiza

Nosheen's School

This video is from the school Nosheen and her sisters are running. Nosheen is 17, has finished high school and is waiting to apply to College. Her mother is uneducated and attends her daughter's classes. After coming to the city their father realized how much education had changed other members of their community in the city and he vowed to educate his children. He did extra jobs to ensure that his children stayed in school. Now two of his daughters have completed Bachelors degrees and one of them is planning to apply to work at Ziauddin Hospital. The other one is planning to get into Government Service after she clears the entrance exam. Nosheen is currently home full time so she is the one mainly running this school.

Being so young it was initially a challenge for her to teach women older than her specially those who had no basic education. Most of them laughed at themselves and at each other because learning to hold a pencil and to trace on dots and then to formulate words was all very new to them. With time they have become confident in their skills and Nosheen has proven to be a very smart teacher who understands each student individually and guides them accordingly.

 The woman in black dress is Shehla. She is the backbone of this entire program. Soon I will write a detailed blog about her, she is my greatest inspiration here. She goes to theses schools everyday and helps teachers and instructs students. Nosheen is the girl sitting on the chair and her mother is the student facing me in pink dress.

Nosheen runs the school in her courtyard. The photographs are from when they had not received the mat to sit on. Most of the women in her school are from the Pathan ethnicity. They are beautiful people inside out and are the most hospitable to their guests. Every single time I visit they make sure I eat with them and if I am there for a short duration, they will give me some food to take away. Most of them follow staunch religious and cultural believes and always cover their faces while being photographed.

 Women who have no one else at home who would look after their children bring them along. We do not discourage them as this would mean that they would stop attending classes. We understand this is all new for them and their families and before this they did not do anything which was for their own selves so now we try to be accommodating just so that they would come and attend school. The seemingly young girl in blue pants is actually 18 and has achondroplasia. Before this she never got any chance to receive education. Her parents believed there was no need to get her educated considering she was disabled. Now since this school was free and her own lane, her mother let her go and she is very excited to learn Urdu and Maths and interact with other students around her.

The students are happy they are learning new things and have others around them who share the same experiences with them. Some of them are super eager and keep on pestering me as to what we will do after we are done with their course work. I have told them that we are learning along them too and we will see how it can then be taken forward in the future and where we will place them then.

By Zainab Faiza