Session with Zain

On the 8th of May the women at PHC had their first ever session on Skype. To the younger audience members, technology is not relatively new, they all actively use whatsapp and facebook to make video calls but for the older women in the audience, this was very amusing. As mentioned in our previous posts, the population of Sikanderabad is comprised of families living below the poverty line and most people in the area are uneducated or have just attended primary school. The families who have money are now ensuring that all their children attend school. And for the older uneducated women, we are already running five schools in the area.

The Skype session was conducted by this amazing human being, Zain Maken. Zain and I met in Pune, India, in 2008 at Initiative for Peace conference. This year marked the tenth anniversary of the conference and we decided to do an online event where each one of us would try to collaborate with another participant of the conference. Zain volunteered to do a Skype session with the women of PHC on how parents can give feedback to children at home for academic and non academic tasks. This was a very different and interesting topic for this audience. We had previously talked about health prevention and cultivating compassion so I was very excited to finally have a behavior modification session.

Zain had already emailed me his plan for the talk and I was thrilled to go over it. It was unlike anything I had done at PHC and I was really looking forward to the impact it would create.

The session started a bit later than usual and Zain was kind enough to wait for all the audience members to gather at PHC. The laptop and speakers were set up but unfortunatley he could not hear us. It would have been more fulfilling for him to listen to the audience question him and participate in the discussions, but that is the plan for next time now. During this session I typed back all the responses that he was getting and he continued on from there.

As Sikanderabad is an area where men and women do not engage socially and women cover themselves from head to toe in front of strangers, I informed the women that he could see some of them the way they could see him so if they wished to cover their faces, they should.

I started by introducing Zain, telling that he had worked for this brilliant organization called Teach for Pakistan and how he will share with the audience some of the things he learned while working there. Zain started by sharing an incident. He remembered going to a class where the class teacher proudly introduced the children sitting at the front as being excellent while he called those at the back failures. When the teacher left the room Zain asked a kid at the back a question to which a student from the front bench responded by telling Zain not to ask the question from that kid as he did not know anything. He then paused and asked the women to ponder over what just happened and had they ever heard talk like that or have they ever said something like that. He then asked the audience what they did when their child scored poorly on an exam. He got a variety of responses. One of them said I scold them if they get poor grades and hit them if they fail. One girl said her father did not let her watch TV after she flunked. Another woman said I scold them and give examples of the other siblings who excel in school. One of the responses was that the woman tried to identify the real problem and addressed that. A participant said she could never go to school and now her children have that chance so she makes sure they do not take it lightly. Zain applauded these responses and told them how children learn more at home than at school and everything a parent says or does is important in their learning and their evaluation of themselves. He kept on discussing various scenarios and asked what the audience thought about it and I typed back responses and he discussed them. He then showed how these response can be altered to make them better for their children which would identify the current problem and motivate them to be better next time. He made the talk very relatable and all of the audience members could identify the problems in the scenarios and learned how to best respond to them for better results in the future.

At the end he asked if they had any problems teaching their kids. One of them said that she understands the child is smart and works well when he wants to but often times he gets super lazy and says he will finish work the next day but never does. Another one talked on the same lines saying her daughter is very moody when it comes to studying. One of them said in their Pushto culture they are very blunt in their criticism and we often tell the children they are stupid just like their father or grandfather and how could they stop such talk. Zain answered all these questions very patiently although we were going above his allotted time.

It was incredible to have Zain talk to the women at PHC and I was so grateful for the way they were responding to him and asking great questions. Zain was kind enough to announce that he would do a similar session in the future and asked them to suggest few topic. He got a bunch of requests: "how can mothers train their children properly", "how to motivate stubborn children", "how to reward good behavior", "how can children be more respectful towards their parents" and "how to evaluate the psyche of students". I hope we can set up a session soon after the vacations.

By Zainab Faiza