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Assalamu Alaikum is no longer answered with Jai Shri Ram at the school that philanthropists and child rights activists had set up inside a Hindu temple in the Rehman Colony shanty town of Karachi’s Jamshed Town municipality.
Students and teachers used to exchange these greetings on a daily basis for almost four years. A year has passed since the school’s closure, and such greetings have not been exchanged between Muslims and Hindus there. The school ran from March 2017 to the end of 2020.
Renowned Naat Khwan Anum Agha, a former teacher at the school, does not visit there any more. She, and her employer and friends had vowed to change the lives of hundreds of out-of-school Hindu children, who at that time had had no access to basic education, and they still do not.
Together no more
Back then they had been looking for a suitable place to set up a school for Hindu children, but they could find no empty space there. Community elders later offered them to start the school inside their temple.
A few months after setting up the school, Anum and her Muslim colleagues were not only teaching their Hindu students but also celebrating the minority community’s festivals — such as Holi, Raksha Bandhan and Diwali — with them. But for the past year, they have celebrated no such event together.
The school’s furniture is still there, and the students still get together hoping that one day classes would be resumed at their school. This year the students and their parents missed the children’s teachers on the occasion of Diwali, the preparations for which used to be started together weeks before the festival.
“It was like ‘a king’s favour is not an inheritance’ when the donor organisation — Save the Children — stopped funding the school, and then it eventually closed for good,” said Rana Asif Habib, child rights activist and former president of the Initiator Human Development Foundation (IHDF), which ran the school with the financial assistance of Save the Children.
Back to the old lives
In Rehman Colony, more than 120 Hindu families have been surviving for the past few decades in their makeshift homes. Among the population, the number of children is much higher than that of adults and youth. Four hundred children currently live there with their parents.
Back in 2017, the parents had breathed a sigh of relief when they had heard that the IHDF would be setting up a school for their children.
“We thought our children would at least learn to write their names, and read the utility bills and medicine prescriptions. But after the school’s closure, our expectations can surely never be turned into reality,” said 37-year-old Maya, whose four children had been enrolled at the school.
She said her children now collect recyclable pieces from heaps of garbage in the nearby neighbourhoods, and sometimes sell flowers at traffic signals. She herself works long hours at the bungalows in the area adjacent to the upmarket DHA neighbourhood. “All day I’m thinking about my children, where they are and what they’re doing at the traffic signals.”
Habib said that almost all the children have returned to their old jobs. “The parents fear their children could be easy victims for child traffickers. If they survive that, drug peddlers could use them. Some of them could become drug addicts and some could lose their lives. This is a proven fact.”
Shattered hopes
The IHDF had initially hired psychiatrists, health counsellors, social workers and teachers to guide the children and enable them to get access to education in formal schools. After completing basic lessons, they would be enrolled at public schools by the organisation.
“We were expecting that in a few years we would be able to enrol all the children in formal schools located close to the shanty town. They were learning and taking interest in their studies. Twenty-five per cent of the 350 students had been shifted to public schools. But in mid-2019 our financial assistance was suddenly stopped,” said Habib.
Afterward, he and his friends managed to run the school for the next six months. But after the emergence of Covid-19, their success proved to be only momentary.
The kids will return
Forty-year-old Kanwal Ram said: “Our children would start begging. Their teacher had just enrolled them at the school and we were very excited about it. Now no one is concerned about their future.”
He said that their settlement lacks an educational environment. “The children follow the youth, who are addicted to drugs. We beg the higher authorities, philanthropists and social workers to reopen the school and save our children. If someone starts the school again, we would bring all the children back for enrolment.”
Forty-five-year-old Sham Lal said: “No one out of the 120 families can teach these children. The government has never asked us why our children beg instead of getting an education.”
Bias not a problem
“Facing discrimination at schools is not a new phenomenon for children, especially for those who belong to scheduled caste families. They suffer it even in India. However, these children, after completing the basics at the temple school, regularly attended formal schools and ignored the bullying,” said Habib.
Maya said: “It was not a big problem for us that Muslim children didn’t prefer to sit side by side with our children, or that teachers made them sit separately from Muslim students in classes.”
She said that if somebody believes they should not sit with people belonging to different faiths, it is their belief. “We respect them. We the poor people believe in respecting everyone and their faiths.”
Girls’ futures at risk
According to Maya, the number of girls in their settlement is more than that of boys. She said the girls who studied their basics at the temple school and got enrolled at public schools competed with one another in studies.
However, she lamented, school closures during the pandemic put an end to their hopes and wishes of studying. All of those girls are not attending their schools any more, she pointed out. “Their parents are working at factories, bungalows and on the streets, and their growing girls are waiting at home all day. This situation sometimes causes disputes among families. A number of girls have married without their parents’ permission, and some have also gone missing.”
Maya said their schooling is the only way for them to survive. “If anybody reopens the school and motivates these girls to get an education, it would prevent a number of social problems. Moreover, the lives of each of these children might change one day.”