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
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