Traveling on the GT road some where near Hassan Abdal we pulled into this filling station. The tank was almost empty and had to be refilled. A moment later this child appeared at the car window. A beautiful child who could not be more than twelve years old. His face was devoid of any sign of cheerfulness that is generally associated with children of his age. While the car was being filled I decided to have a short conversation with this child. I asked him why he was not in school. His answer was simple. He does not go to school. “Why’ I asked again. “He does not” he repeated his answer and walked away from the car window and stood against the hedge looking the other way. That is when I took this snapping.
This child is no way unique. There are millions of small children in Pakistan like him that do not go to school and spend their day working at tea stalls, bicycle repair shops, as petty hawkers, cleaning boys and the job list goes on. I am posting this picture here on ATP to shake our collective conscience with the same question: Why this child does not go to school?
Is it that his parents do not want him to be educated? Is it that they can not afford for his education? Is it that there is no school near where he lives? What are the reasons that this child does not go to school? Almost all of my Pakistani well-off friends and relatives are forever ready to tell me how wonderfully their children are doing in school. I hear this endless talk about O level and A level. But how many of us, including myself are concerned about these children of lesser god. We could blame the government, system, politicians, mullahs, feudal lords and so forth and so on till we are blue in the face. But my question is that what we have done lately for these unfortunate children except exploiting their poverty and the system by employing them as domestic servants. I am not trying to single them out but from his book ‘Indus Journey’ I got tired of reading how Imran Khan went to Atchison College and Oxford to play cricket. How ‘Daughter of the East’ Benazir Bhutto went to Harvard and Oxford. When are we going to send this twelve years old coconut seller to school?
If we really want to make a difference then here is an opportunity to support “The Citizens Foundation” which has helped 55,000 young kids go to school so far.
http://www.thecitizensfoundation.org/main.php
I hate to be such a pessimist, but I’m sorry…This child will never go to school because his education is secondary to NOURISHMENT. What an arrogant question to ask an innocent child; you probably added to that guilty, hopeless feeling in his stomach that none of us, sitting here comfortably blogging, will ever know. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t ask these questions of ourselves, we all have that responsibility (a truly unselfish few of us can and do actually make a difference). It’s just that, in this case, you should have bought a coconut, and then found a way to get the boy a copy of that photo you took of him, or maybe taught him something about your camera, or maybe let him a photo of you, or maybe taken a photo of the two of you…You see what I’m getting at?
Mudassar, you have been blessed with an opportunity to do the right thing. You can help yourself by helping the young kids who are working at your house. I am sure if you do that, you’ll become a less bitter person. May be you can rekindle the spirit of volunteerism among your friends as well. Good luck.
These children deserve to go to school,and let me tell you that most of them are more intelligent and hardworking then average children.
I think there’re bigger issues here we should worry about… e.g. democracy, restoration of judges. how to remove musharraf. right? right? right?
An alternative POV: the govt. isn’t able to provide enough suitable jobs to existing educated ppl, how would it support the future bulk? it has been a hot discussion topic in my dev economics course.
people have time to write political rants on their blogs, some updates their blogs many times a day (and in all their posts you just read the same political drama) but no one writes about the core issues or suggest any solution to our society’s major problems.
Writer of this post amazed me by asking this kid a very absurd question, everyone knows that why these kids dont attend schools.
teach poor kids in a welfare schools, volunteer yourself give some of your time (few classes a WEEK) to those deserving kids, it would make a big difference.
You know why this child doesn’t go to school, because he may be the youngest brother of four elder sisters, born with the hope of helping the poor parents, just like the boy who accompanies his sisters who work at my house, so that’s what he is selling coco-nuts. Family planning and population control is unislamic but treating people like slaves is moderation or probably providing help to the helpless… because they are found in abundance…yet we follow the west who at least don’t make westerners slaves.
Or he may be the 9 year old abandoned son of his father running after him for acceptance outside SOS village, trying to cross the busy Ferozepur road at peak hours, willing to spend night at Data darbar rather at the mercy of SOS admin, who blame him for stealing…. And who asks me “baap ese hote hain jo bachon ko chor ke chale jaaten hai” and leaves me speechless, yeah possible he can be an abandoned son whose father earned Rs,2500 as security guard and who finally decided to leave his job for tableegh because this life is temporary and the real reward is in the hereafter, yet marrying and having off-springs is a mandatory aspect of our society….
The reason this child doesn’t go to school are many but the only solution this child is going to go to school is if we start considering everyone equal, start living as humans, if we start treating our own people equally then we will have no external threat.
How could this little child tell you why he doesn’t go to school? His heart might have been teared by your question hence he looked the other way. I can feel the melting tears in his heart. I do wanna be a part of the realization of that dream. The dream of sending all of them to schools but this question is reverberating constantly in mind, which is ‘How?’…