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			<title>Afghan refugees in Pakistan: Bleak Prospects</title>
			<link>https://tribune.com.pk/story/247129/afghan-refugees-in-pakistan-bleak-prospects</link>
			<comments>https://tribune.com.pk/story/247129/afghan-refugees-in-pakistan-bleak-prospects#comments</comments>
			<pubDate>Thu, 08 Sep 11 06:42:41 +0500</pubDate>
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				<![CDATA[maha.mussadaq]]>
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			<category><![CDATA[Pakistan]]></category>
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				<![CDATA[Despite being literate, many Afghan refugees can only expect to be labourers in Pakistan.]]>
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				<![CDATA[Dressed primly in a white shirt and black pants, with his hair slicked back and an apron tied around his waist, 20-year-old Abdullah hurriedly cleans a dinner table with a rugged cloth. He says he hates his job, but has no choice but to stick to it.

Abdullah hails from Afghanistan but received his education in Pakistan. But despite being educated, he could not find a job commensurate with his skills. Thus he was resigned to working as a waiter in Islamabad’s Kabul restaurant.


“We [Afghan refuees] are all educated. Some of us went to Pakistani schools and some to Afghan school set up by Afghan settlers but that education did not help us get better jobs,” says Abdullah. “We can only be part of the labour class now, not in our own country and not in the host country.”

He adds, “We do not get good enough jobs to improve our standard of living, so like the rest of them we just remain in the either low income groups or even lower touching poverty.”

The plight of the Afghans who desire to get educated is significant. Roughly 30,000 of them or more cross the border daily to come to Pakistan for economic, medical or trade purposes. Hundreds of Afghan children, who cannot avail the basic right of education in their own country, cross the border to Pakistan attend school and return in the evening. Most of them study in poorly equipped, substandard schools. Due to the natural disasters in Pakistan’s areas bordering Afghanistan, schools are constantly damaged and destroyed. In Balochistan, all schools are mud buildings and need constant repair.

Over the past decade with the increase in population, these refugees have not only been educated in Pakistan, but have been working and contributing to the economy of Pakistan. But apparently acquiring education bears no fruit for them. Due to Pakistan’s unstable political and economic situation, Afghan refugee children are not really getting much in return for the education that they strive to get. Where some children might get the opportunity to attend schools and learn the basics, all most can expect is a life of menial work.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 8th, 2011.]]>
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			<title>Rooting out illiteracy</title>
			<link>https://tribune.com.pk/story/247123/rooting-out-illiteracy</link>
			<comments>https://tribune.com.pk/story/247123/rooting-out-illiteracy#comments</comments>
			<pubDate>Thu, 08 Sep 11 06:36:55 +0500</pubDate>
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				<![CDATA[samia.saleem]]>
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			<category><![CDATA[Pakistan]]></category>
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				<![CDATA[Despite hurdles, civic educational initiatives are changing lives of underprivileged students.]]>
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				<![CDATA[Nabila, Zahoor and Majida faced the same problem that many of their peers in government-run schools do: they lacked the means to pursue higher education.


But things took a fortunate turn for these ambitious yet underprivileged children. Nabila, who hails from a typical Punjabi family from Minhalla, is now the first member of her family to study to complete her Masters while Zahoor Ahmed from Mauribad has realised his dream of being an electrical engineer. And 14-year-old Majida, after losing her home and family members during the devastating floods in Shahdad Kot, is now able to read and write Urdu.

There are similar other narratives of how students, hampered by financial shortfalls, were given a chance to get educated. For instance, students of Sindh Madrassa Board (SMB) Fatima Jinnah — previously considered a substandard institution — now have the resources and teachers to compete aside the top league of school in Karachi.

The mushrooming of non-governmental organisations and community-based initiatives in the field of education has made these success stories possible. However, the offer for free or subsidised provision of education hardly attracted scores of eager students to these institutions.

In a country where children and women are often fraught with the obligation to financially support their families, even the opportunity of acquiring education gratis is not attractive. Yet despite the odds, the perseverance of the people behind these initiatives helped them survive and achieve the tall order of educating Pakistan’s poor youth.

Quality education in rural and sub-urban areas

The Citizen’s Foundation (TCF), founded with the aim of removing barriers of class and privilege in educational opportunities, apparently struggles every time it is setting up a new school. “We may be an established and reputable name now but the location populations of areas we target are not aware of our existence,” explains TCF’s area manager Syed Nayab Shah.

Referring to his experience of setting up a school in Keti Bunder — a small port town located in Karachi East — he reveals that the most important task after setting up all modalities is ensuring adequate enrollment.

“Why would a family send a potential breadwinner to school?” he questions. “We use examples of educated, successful people from the same community to convince parents to send their children to school.”

Today TCF, which started in 1995, has 730 purpose-built school units nationwide with an impressive enrollment of 102,000 students. The organisation emphasises on career guidance, a modern balanced curriculum and extra-curricular activities to empower its students to compete in all walks of life.

Reforming public schooling

Zindagi Trust, founded by musician-turned-philanthropist Shehzad Roy, adopted SMB Fatima Jinnah Government Girls’ School in 2007. Subsequently, the espousal triggered sweeping reforms to revamp the outdated public institution. The objective was to turn it into a centre of excellence with the hope that government would replicate the model all over Pakistan.

“We replaced government text books with modern ones which enable students to think independently,” says in Shehzad Roy. Moreover, extracurricular activities were made a mandatory feature of the educational program.

Just six months after Zindagi Trust adopted the SMB institution, one of its students won a bronze medal in the 2008 Inter-school Education Olympiad art competition and the school’s rowing team won at the Inter schools Regatta 2008. Currently, Zindagi Trust is sponsoring education of over 2800 children across Pakistan.

Targeting girls’ education

Nearly 41 per cent of girls in Pakistan fail to finish primary education. Thus Oxfam GB decided to remedy the situation by founding the Girls’ Education Program in 2006. Yet getting girls to attend this program proved to be a Herculean task.

Parents simply did not feel the need to educate their daughters. Program coordinator Saeed Ul Hassan says that the organisation had to visit households in communities to convince them to send their girls to school.

“We would tell them that educated mothers make better mothers,” he explains. The organisation faced many other bottlenecks in attracting female students, like the dearth of female teachers.

Currently, Oxfam GB’s educational initiative is currently targeting 105,000 girls in about 250 to 300 schools in four districts of Southern Punjab and two flood affected district of Sindh.

Educating the flood affectees

When Yasmeen Nigar, an educationist, opened her first school for providing free education in New Karachi in 1981, she was dismayed at the lack of student enrollment. She had to visit almost every household located in the Pathan and Punjabi majority areas, to convince families that their daughters would be safe with her.

She is currently providing education to the destitute children, who were affected by last year’s floods, settled in the camps lining the Super Highway. Yasmeen daily transports these children to her own Brittanica School in Surjani town using rented vans every day.

Unique grassroots initiatives

The mobile school is a unique grass-root initiative in the field of education. Such a school bus, which has its interior designed like a classroom with benches and textbooks, educates children of Karachi’s Neelum Colony. Additionally, Shabina Mustafa is running an excellent school in the garage of her own home in Clifton.

The size of these interventions may seem as minute and trivial but adequately educating one child has the potential to change an entire family’s future.

All these initiatives show that Pakistan’s state might have given up on its burgeoning population of children, but civil society has not. They are, albeit on a modest scale, transforming society.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 8th, 2011.]]>
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			<title>One student’s journey from small-town Balochistan to Harvard University</title>
			<link>https://tribune.com.pk/story/247117/wondrous-feats-one-student%e2%80%99s-journey-from-small-town-balochistan-to-harvard-university</link>
			<comments>https://tribune.com.pk/story/247117/wondrous-feats-one-student%e2%80%99s-journey-from-small-town-balochistan-to-harvard-university#comments</comments>
			<pubDate>Thu, 08 Sep 11 06:33:16 +0500</pubDate>
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				<![CDATA[maria.waqar]]>
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				<![CDATA[Karrar Hussain Jaffar’s story is about the great possibilities of equal educational opportunities.]]>
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				<![CDATA[Located on the outskirts of Quetta, is the barren valley of Mariabad where the Hazara lead slow-paced lives. These tribal people, living in narrow brick huts speckled along the rugged hillside, typically sell loose cloth, sweaters or tea for their livelihood. 

Like most poor people, their aspirations rarely go beyond sustaining themselves in this underdeveloped nook of Balochistan. Many of them live and die in Mariabad — unaware of the complex concerns and tremendous pace of life in urban centres like Karachi and Lahore.


But one student — the son of a trader who sold Quaid-e-Azam style caps in Mariabad for a living — dared to tread a radically different path. Karrar Hussain Jaffar transcended the confines of an obscure town in Balochistan, where people rarely educate themselves beyond matriculation, to study at the prestigious Harvard University. His story — a narrative about the wondrous possibilities of equal educational opportunities — is truly inspirational.

“My childhood friends, with whom I spent my youth playing cricket, drive suzukis and rickshaws in Quetta for a living, while I am a PhD student in the US,” says Karrar in a humble tone. “I often wonder why God chose me, out of all the people in my community, to get ahead in life?”

Karrar attributes his educational achievement to his father’s passion for his children’s higher education. He vividly remembers the chilly morning when his father showed him the ad for Lahore University of Management Sciences’ national outreach programme (NOP), which aimed to sponsor education and living expenses for capable students who could not have afford to pay.

“I was doing my FSc at Cadet college and didn’t even know a single thing about LUMS at that point in time,” he fondly recollects. “I didn’t take the ad seriously because LUMS did not offer engineering, the field I was interested in.”

When he returned back to college from his winter break, he attended a presentation by a LUMS’ faculty member, who introduced students to the national outreach programme.

“At the end of the presentation we all took a pre-screening exam,” he explains. “A few weeks later, I got a letter from LUMS inviting me to attend sponsored classes for SAT preparation.”

During the four weeks he spent rigorously studying for the SATs, he fell in love with LUMS. To him the institution seemed otherworldly; its grand building, spacious classrooms and impressive teachers fascinated him.

“I never knew things could be so orderly and perfect; it was like I was in a foreign country,” he remarks.  “I felt very motivated to study hard and join the institution.”

But his herculean struggle with English often left him frustrated.

“I had always dismissed English as a colonial remnant in our country so I really struggled while preparing for the test.”

Yet with utmost dedication, Karrar managed to clear the screening exam at the end of the four-week training and was selected to take the SAT exams, sponsored by the university. After obtaining an impressive score in his SATs, Karrar got admitted in LUMS and was offered a full scholarship and a monthly stipend.

“I came to LUMS in very high spirits,” reminisces the bright student.

But Karrar, who had attended the NOP training program at LUMS during the quiet summer break, had never seen the institution in full semestral bloom. When he saw throngs of students, clad in western wear and fluent in English, emerging from every nook and cranny, his excitement gave way to culture shock.

“I was used to wearing shalwar kamiz, but at LUMS most people were wearing jeans. I would greet people by saying salaam, while the other students would ask ‘what’s up?’” he recollects in an amused tone.

Often feeling like a misfit during his first year at university, Karrar mostly spent his days with other NOP students. “But after a year I managed to befriend other students from Lyceum and Karachi Grammar school.”

He sheepishly adds, “After a year I figured out that ‘what’s up?’ is equivalent to saying salaam.”

Karrar graduated on the Dean’s honour list, with a cumulative grade point average of 3.7 and 3.68 in his majors, Maths and Economics, respectively.

“I got job offers in the banking industry after graduating but I turned them down because I wanted to tread an academic path,” he explains in a categorical tone.

A year after graduating, Karrar got a Fulbright scholarship to study in the US.

“I simply told the interview panel that I want to come back to Balochistan after completing my studies. That’s where my home is; that’s where I belong,” he explains passionately.

But perhaps the most memorable moment in his life — an incident he recalls quite animatedly — was when he found out that he made it to Harvard University.

“I had no internet at home in Mariabad so I walked 15 minutes or so to a nearby internet cafe to check my email for Harvard’s decision,” he explains. “When I saw the acceptance email, I just thought it was too good to be true.”

Yet after he raced back home to reveal the news to his parents, his moment of rapture soon transformed into a session of lengthy clarification.

“My mother asked me what Harvard was and my father asked me to wait for potential offers by other universities” he says with a laugh. “It took a while to convince them that I got into the world’s top university.”

But ironically for a student, who was left disconcerted by the ‘westernised’ student body at LUMS, adjusting to life at an American institution was smooth sailing.

“After LUMS, I was very used to being around different types of people so studying and living in the US was not such a problem.”

Karrar completed his Master’s last year and is currently pursuing a PhD in Economics from the University of Southern California.

What does he want to do with all the knowledge he is amassing?

“I want to increase educational awareness in Balochistan—particularly amongst people from my community,” he says.

The young academic’s goal might seem like the reiteration of the clichéd promise of “development” that many educated Pakistan promise their country. However, Karrar is actually a first-hand witness of how education can revolutionize communities and places.

“Because of all that I achieved, my parents allowed my sister to get college education in Lahore and my brother got the motivation to get a scholarship to study in Australia,” he says with a hint of pride.

Karrar confesses that most of his family and friends cannot even comprehend what his life is like in the US. But he is fairly confident that after he returns, he can change that.

“I can make them realise the value of education,” he says.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 8th, 2011.]]>
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