KOTRI: Class I students excitedly rise from their seats, chiming “As Salamooo Alaiqum Miiisss” in chorus. At the Kotri 1 campus of The Citizens Foundation (TCF), their eyes shine with hope and enthusiasm. All is well.
But at the TCF Habib Farms campus, the area looks desolate. The handful of students present look around in dismay. A two-feet-high wet border from the ground up the walls marks the flooding that swept away everything from the school. And while it opened four days ago, only four children have showed up - three of who are from one family.
Nonetheless, some of the damage has been repaired. The charts and paintings made by the students that were swept away have been replaced and the plants in the open area are growing again. There is new furniture.
Waqas Waqil, a kindergarten student, missed the school dearly. “I am here because I don’t like to stay at home. I like to study,” he says with a smile. He has to travel almost a mile every day to reach the school. His people, who belonged to Panwar Goth, climbed up a nearby hill when the water came on August 14.
In the kindergarten classes, where teachers keep student bags in school, Waqas is one of the very few lucky students who got his books and belongings back. He is more upset about losing his mustard uniform in the floodwaters than his mud house.
His elder sister, Naheed Waqil, a class I student, recalls that they had just reached home after attending the Independence Day celebrations at school when they saw the water gushing into the area. “Amma abba (mother and father) just told us to pick up whatever we could and rush to the top of the mountain.”
Writing down her arithmetic tables and colouring shapes in her book, Naheed says that she wants to become a doctor so that she can “cure everyone”. Her motivation developed during the disaster. When they were living on top of the hill, Naheed and her two sisters broke into a high fever but could not be taken to the doctor at the foot of the cliff because he only cured the Brohi people, a tribe considered superior to the Panhwars. She had to go to the doctor in the city - an ordeal for both her parents and herself in the flooded terrain.
For Amjad Khan, Waqas’s neighbour and a class III student, the school is the path to his dreams. “I will become a big man if I study,” he says. ‘Big man’ means either a soldier or an engineer, he explains.
However, the fear of falling objects haunts him. “I am afraid that the flood will come again someday and wash us away with the building.”
The few students present are from Panwar Goth. But the majority of the 240 students are Brohis who will only start coming once the back wall is rebuilt, their elders communicated to the principal.
The wall was broken by the pressure of the water. “The Brohis [are] very conservative and egoistic and they will only let their girls enter the school once they see all the boundaries are intact,” explains Mehrunissa, the principal of the primary school campus.
However, teachers are less worried about repairs, broken infrastructure, scant attendance, or the forgotten lessons. They are more worried about the fear the water has instilled in the children. “There are many who are afraid, like Amjad, and it will take a lot of time and effort to make them forget the devastation,” says Major (retd) Tahir Farooqui, the area manager.
The principal says that teachers, most of who came from unaffected areas, cleaned the entire school and redecorated it with posters and motivational messages to divert the children’s’ attention from the bad memories. But even though the third phase of rehabilitation of TCF schools has started, some, like the one in Dadu, are still submerged, TCF president and CEO Syed Asaad Ayub Ahmad tells The Express Tribune.
Meanwhile, Lt Col Agha Mahmood Ahmed, a senior manager at TCF, has plenty of happy stories to tell. He says there were people who protected schools by risking their own lives. In almost all the campuses in under-threat zones, they carried the furniture on their backs to the top floor. “All of this just to save the cause of education.”
Published in The Express Tribune, October 18th, 2010.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 18, 2010
Due to a transcription error, an earlier version of this article misstated the name of Major (retd) Tahir Farooqui as Major (retd) Ahsan Farooqui.
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