A small step towards increased literacy

Sometimes, people have so many options to help out people around them. For instance, one can always counsel and teach their domestic workers. A lot of people are helping out the young domestic workers at their homes in learning to read and write, and the trend is growing. I could not reflect on this option until I was narrated the success story of the 18-year-old Basheeran, who is a domestic worker at my neighbour’s. Despite a heavy workload, Basheeran used to find some time to reflect on the lives of children who are in good educational institutions, studying to be someone or something. This used to sadden Basheeran; but not anymore. My neighbours have agreed to fulfill her desire to seek education. To start with, they are offering her tuition at home to help her start learning phonetics in Urdu and English, and as a next step forward, they are willing to get her enrolled in a local school to help her continue her ambition.

This is just one example of helping domestic workers to learn to read and write. A colleague’s mother is also teaching her housemaid. Even working women, who juggle their jobs with housework, can take out at least 30 minutes from their busy lives to teach their domestic servants. The unlearned will get a chance to read and write, and the women will achieve a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction. For the past many years, some of the women I spoke to said they had been thinking of going out and teaching in an orphanage voluntarily but could never manage because of a number of reasons and compulsions. For a newspaper feature on the International Volunteer Day, marked on December 5, I interviewed a number of volunteers at an institution and came to know how ordinary lives become meaningful and satisfying when you give back something to society.

The ratio of success from this effort is encouraging more people, particularly women, to help out domestic workers improve the quality of their lives through education. It is a win-win situation for both parties, the housewives who desire to do something productive are able to fulfill this ambition through rendering their resource for social welfare, which elevates their sense of achievement, while young workers who cannot afford to spend time and money at schools because of extreme poverty, also achieve their goals.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 14^th, 2014.