Despite bleak prospects following last summer’s floods, we find inspiration in Developments in Literacy schools where children are realising their aspirations.
Readers are the Leaders!
Bougainvillea spills over the walls and yellow zinnias frame the garden of the Indus Resource Centre guest house in Khairpur, our home last night. Outside the walled garden donkeys bray and I can hear the muezzin in the distance as we await a taxi to Sukkur Airport and our return to Lahore.
Today we visited four Developments in Literacy schools in this area ravaged by floods and now struggling to regain the crops and livelihoods it has lost. Life was difficult before, but now the challenges of earning a living off the land are greater than ever.
Despite these bleak prospects, inspiration for the future is found in these four schools, and indeed the 12 others run by DIL in Khairpur.
You can see it in the children’s eagerness to learn, the teachers’ determination that their students flourish, and the principals’ pride in how much has been achieved. It’s obvious in the children’s vibrant artwork and carefully-penned poems adorning the white-washed walls. There it is in their schoolbooks where exercises in maths, social studies, English and Sindhi are meticulously set out. You can hear it when you ask them what they want to be when they grow up – teachers, pilots, lawyers, shopkeepers, soldiers, doctors.
For the majority of them, just being in the classroom is a major accomplishment. Many are faced with poverty so extreme that they must work so their families will survive. They have also conquered deep-rooted prejudices about the value of education—especially for girls.
Painted on the wall of SMS Khuhra School — deep in the Sindh countryside where water buffalos wallow in muddy streams and stooped women gather bundles of kindling wood – is the statement ‘Readers are the Leaders’. If Developments in Literacy realises its aims, we have already met some of the region’s—even the country’s – future leaders.
We’re on our way through the Khairpur countryside to the airport. As we pass along the once-raging Indus River and its devastating aftermath, the significance of the day’s visit hits even harder. Seeing the destruction first-hand, we are touched by the resilience of the people we have encountered and their ability to get on with their lives… and with their learning.
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