Who wants to waste the summer partying anyway?

KARACHI: At the age of 15, Shazminay Durrani works for seven NGOs and seems almost nonchalant about her working hours.

“It can stretch to almost 12 hours,” she says.

Daily?

“Oh yeah. My friends say I’m ‘khwaar’ but I enjoy working. It gives me a sense of achievement. Who wants to waste summer partying anyway?”

Shazminay’s work ethic is now the norm for an increasing number of teenagers in Karachi today. These young men and women not only want to help communities but also want to help themselves. Language classes for beginners, sports camps, even sewing or cooking classes have cropped up to meet this demand. Holidays are not a break from exams; they are job opportunities.

Fuelling this eagerness for work is the attempt to make college applications as attractive as possible. Most teenagers will soon be applying for A-Levels, Intermediate colleges or for undergraduate programmes and they all want to strike that balance between studying and extracurricular activities.

At the SIUT student volunteer programme, 16-year-old Emad Naqvi could tell the difference between those who joined just to get a certificate and those who joined to actually help out. Invariably it was the ‘certificate wallay’ who were less motivated and had little appreciation for the programme, Emad believed, adding that they never interacted with the patient.

Principal of The International School, Taymur Mirza, stressed the importance of being involved. “Bookish maturity is one thing, a sense of humanity is another,” he said, likening O-Levels students to “wearing blinkers”. Mirza still feels that they are too obsessed with grades.

“Grades don’t make or break you. What was once considered genius, is now commonplace,” he said. “When everyone is the same, what makes you different?” is the question that Mirza believes many teens have realised they need to answer.

He narrated the case of a politician’s son who went on a bus tour to the SOS Village in Malir. Since his mother was afraid he would contract some disease, the boy, in an Armani suit, just stood in a corner all day and interacted with no one. On the third day, however, he was rolling in the mud with the orphans at the village. “Such programmes force people to overcome their fears and become more open,” Mirza said.

Akbar Ahmed, who starts at Yale this year, understands that students need to be ‘human’. “At American colleges you end up studying a range of subjects anyway, so they look more into how complete a person you are, as opposed to being a studying robot,” he pointed out.

At Gulistan Boys Secondary School in Sindhi Muslim Housing Society, more than one-third of the students enrol in English language courses during the summer. “Writing English at school is one thing, but speaking it regularly is another,” said Shaheen Alvi, the school librarian. “The classes are popular because they [students] all want to speak more fluently.”  If not English classes, these students head to Kashmir Complex for judo karate and squash tournaments. “The smarter ones know that holidays should not be wasted playing cricket on the streets,” believes Alvi.

Sakina Lavingia, 17, founded a youth community service club, Interact, and wants to intern at the Acumen Fund as well. “I chose this and I am not going to reject opportunities just because I am feeling sleepy,” she said.

Another teenager who did not wait for an opportunity but went ahead to create one is the 16-year-old Rafeh Mahmud, who is the head of Clockwork Productions, a theatre group in Karachi. Frustrated at the lack of drama culture in the city, Rafeh and his 17-year-old business partner, Ali Aasim, started this student-based NGO and gave meaning to their tagline, “Where age does not matter”.

“At first no one took us seriously and sponsors laughed us off,” Rafeh revealed. “Then tickets for our play Marturia sold out, reviews came in and we gained recognition overnight since we did something no one else had.”

What the parents say

According to Shazminay, who works for seven NGOs, her parents did not exactly encourage her but when she joined these organisations, they were very cooperative. “They let me have the car and roam around,” she said. Other parents are more farsighted. “It is important that classroom education be supplemented with real world experiences because school cannot give you the full flavour,” said the father of a teenage daughter, Ali Habib.

Spenta Mavaalvalah, mother of two teenage daughters, is an enthusiastic supporter of internships. “I would encourage every parent to push their children to do something so that their outlook opens up,” she insisted, “Life isn’t just about the number of As and Bs you get.”

reporting by MEIRYUM ALI

Published in The Express Tribune, July 11^th, 2010.