In this post I want to address a few main factors that contribute to the growing radical fundamentalism in Pakistan.   When we do not produce lackeys for the empire we are producing fodder for the Taliban. For one meal a day poor Pakistanis send their kids to madressahs which are religious schools and are supposed […]

This is a post I have long wanted to do. I will let the pictures do most of the talking. These are images of government schools in Pakistan. Garbage outside schools poses hazard to children health https://tribune.com.pk/story/1275661/trail-trash-garbage-dumping-spots-adjacent-schools-worry-staff   https://scroll.in/article/835687/cramped-classrooms-long-commutes-dropouts-the-impact-of-rajasthans-school-mergers Literacy in Pakistan – is a stricter legal pursuit required? https://www.globalcitizen.org/fr/content/khyber-pakistan-girls-school-education-access/ https://www.dawn.com/news/1189370 https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2014/5/23/in-pictures-the-bombed-schools-of-pakistan/ https://tnnenglish.com/poor-exam-results-raise-questions-about-government-school-quality-in-kp/

This is a post to unscramble my ideas regarding the direction of my project post-supervision meeting. I think I have had to come to an understanding that what I originally had in mind is perhaps far too complicated, detailed and lengthy for me to accomplish given the time frame that I am working with hence […]

“A mother can’t be an astronaut.”   The ten year old stared at me having made this declaration. We had just had a presentation on female astronauts. (One that included a female astronaut who was a mother.) Why? Because the week ago we had talked about space. I had used the materials the school had […]

This is a post that I wrote up during my first semester, while taking Relationality, Creative Practice and Education. Ever since then this post has been wandering the back alleys of my mind and the drafts here, waiting to be published. This course asked us to design an education intervention – and so I did. […]

During the Learning and Resilience course I explored the effect of war and violent terrorism on school going Pakistani children especially in the wake of the Army Public School Attack in Peshawar.   This involved the effect on the survivors, and the indirect effect of all the other students in the nation.   While the […]

Years passed, but the festering wound remained and so they came back.   Eye for an eye. Body for a body.   This time it was us who buried our children.   I was still a school going student when the Taliban began blowing up schools.   In 2014, on the 16th of December the […]

The Taliban did not win.   But oh how they did not win is another story, one written in the blood of children. You see when they began to lose the army asked them to surrender and let women and children go – for the army pretended to have scruples in a time of war, […]

In July 2007 we double locked every door, shut the windows and stared instead at the glowing telly. The Taliban had taken control of a part of the city, a mosque – which had of course turned into a place to hoard arms and provide a safe haven to radical Islamists. The army descended, tanks […]

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 […]