Silence and Ideas
I am publishing my drafts that I never published – this is from summer 2024.
After a silence of many months I have woken up and realised that I need to catch up with my blogging for KIPP.
I have a lot of tangled thoughts as I haven’t written in forever, there are a lot of ideas all stepping on each other’s toes, jam packed in a railway carriage, lurching with each turn of my imagination, elbowing one another to escape.
I would like to talk about the Educating for a Challenging Future, a core course for the Education Futures programme. This was the first time that I was expose to the term “wicked problems”. Problems which are challenging, have multiple stakeholders and no easy solution. The more I read the more I felt that this was a description of all that ails my country, Pakistan.
Let me paint you a picture.
It is 8.00 am, you’re on your school bus – you shouldn’t be here, you shouldn’t be going to school at all for today, the news showed the city in a state of great unrest. But you have been out of school for 7 months out of the academic year already. Your mother insisted that you don’t miss more school, even though they do nothing in school; the teachers are underpaid and do not bother to teach, the students joke around knowing that the real studying will take place at night at “academies” and tuition centres. The schools are for looking good, having a fancy private academic institution on your profile and of course the schools operate as brokers between Cambridge International and the students, you have to register for you O and A Levels through the private schools.
Gunshots are fired. The road is occupied, and they refuse to let the school bus through. See? Never should have bothered getting up for school. The bus is being turned around.
50% if not more of the population is illiterate, unemployed or in disguised unemployment, while millions are starving but the fiasco today is a Canadian returned Pakistani inciting reform (religious-reform) in the middle of the roads. The power of social media let him convince a great part of the Pakistani population that he was the solution, and he in Canada from his throne planned for a takeover, a reform, a return.
It must be easy to do in Canada. You can’t feel the heat burn the oil under your skin in Canada, you don’t have to dig wells in your backyard because the government refuses to supply water or eat all the contents of your fridge in a day because it has been 36 hours without electricity.
It must be easy when you are not huddled around choking on the smoke of kerosene heaters to stay warm, as you write your homework essays by candlelight. Occasionally exiting the room to escape the smoke that fills your lungs causing you to choke but returning quite fast, because the rest of the house is a solid 10 degrees 24/7. No gas, no electricity, no water. It is quite understandable not to bathe in winter unless you’re aiming for pneumonia.
But at 10 pm there is a ruckus at your gate, it is your neighbours shooting stones with a rubber sling at your tied-up-in-the-yard pet dogs, no sense of respect, boundaries, privacy, private property or animal cruelty. You exit angry and screaming and they yell torrents of abuse back justifying their behaviour under the damning flag of religion. Are you really surprised?
The rest of them are worse. The girl dragged off in the town square, she wore shorts, and was beaten to death for it by two religious women. The student at a local university who was lynched by his peers for having a liberal blog. This is the country where we unforgivingly beat to death any good and innocence.
To survive here is a miracle, and a testament to your resilience.
