Unlike what many people believe, ignorance is not always bliss. In fact, the ignorant often know the true value of something others might otherwise take for granted.
Rahmatullah, 32, is a father of two young boys and a waiter at a hotel in Taiser Town. “Who knows the importance of education better than me?” he asks. “If I was educated what would I be doing here?”
Rehmatullah does not want his children to spend their lives waiting on tables. He wants Muzammil and Yasir to have an education, but that does not seem possible.
The school the boys used to go to was shut down a year ago along with other government schools in Taiser Town, painting a bleak picture for the future of 6,500 young girls and boys.
For most families, this is an end for their children’s education as they don’t earn enough to pay the fees of private schools. “I want my children to get an education and be successful,” says Rehmatullah. “But I am too poor to send them to a private school.” Instead, Muzammil and Yasir go to a local madrassa.
Taiser Town is part of the Lyari Expressway Resettlement Project. When work on the expressway began, the federal government relocated existing residents to Taiser Town, Baldia Town and parts of Hawkes Bay. Most of the people who resettled in these areas were from Sohrab Goth and its surrounding areas.
The mega project was being built under the supervision of the National Highway Authority.
The project director of Lyari Expressway Resettlement Project, Salman Akhtar Faridi, told The Express Tribune that the federal government had not given any funds for the project for the last two years. The project used to be under federal authority but was devolved to the Sindh government after the 18th Amendment. But Faridi hoped that the federal government will release a billion rupees for the project and the schools will reopen by the end of January.
Faizullah Kakar, a social worker and a resident of Taiser Town, said that the area has 23 government schools but they had been closed since July 2010 because the teachers were not paid. “We contacted the project director and other authorities for the issue. We were told that funds were not released by the federal government,” he said.
According to Kakar, most of the families in Taiser Town are Pakhtun, with a smattering of Bengali and Urdu-speaking families. But most of them are daily-wage earners and cannot afford to send their children to private schools. Only a handful of children go to schools while the others play in the streets.
A teacher at one of the government schools, Shazia, said that she had not received her salary for the last 18 months. She said that the project directors told them [the school staff] to shut down the school. “The children have already wasted one whole academic year and the second is about to end,” she said. “The futures of these children are being ruined.” Shazia herself has eight school-going children who now go to a madrassa or stay at home.
Shazia and six other teachers whom The Express Tribune talked to demanded that the schools be handed over to the Sindh education department and they be regularised.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 10th, 2012.
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