abhi jao signal pey jam na karo kal sonch kay aana aur kya chahiyeah…..

GOD BLESS AMERICA

“Come forward as servants of Islam, organise the people economically, socially, educationally and politically and I am sure that you will be a power that will be accepted by everybody.”
- Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah
Presidential Address at the All India Muslim League, Lahore, March 23, 1940

SMEs SMEs SMEs, where are they???

They treated us with homemade butter, kilos of apples and apricots, and bread. And they treated our sore legs with “tomoro qahva” and local herbs. They had plenty of food and love.

On the way back, we found some engineers taking measurements for a road.

I still wonder. If the road is built; they can take their ill to the hospitals faster, and send their children to the school in Gilgit, 100 km away, more safely. But on the downside, someone will walk in, buy their lands, bring down expensive urban merchandise they can’t afford, and finally tell them that they can’t have access to food and animals just because they are too uncultivated.

Education doesn’t only come from books. To know farming is also education. Why should we think only a certain kind of education – the urban-industrial-capitalist variety – should entitle anyone to food and health? It’s a deep, colorless, odorless, undetectable bias that we must become aware of.

Yup the Tiffin wala documentary ran on the BBC.

Many such examples will be found on the World Challenge website; anyone can also request multiple CDs from them + brochure.
http://www.theworldchallenge.co.uk/

In Lahore, Dr. Amjad Saqib is operating an NGO by the name of Akhuwwat (“brotherhood”) on principles of micro-finance + people-to-people help + teach a (wo)man how to fish.

These initiatives are not the job of the government alone. Contemporary thought is that people should help themselves. The World Challenge, and Akhuwwat, amongst many others, are testimony to the truth of this thought.

@SK
P.S. SK, tell us more, of course. I’m mailing you.

The larger forces at play here are:

1) Countrywide levels of poverty, not just Karachi. We know that Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad have higher levels of income but most of the rest of the country is full of millions of poor people. As long as there’s poverty anywhere, people will move to Karachi etc so no matter how many you take off the streets there’ll be an endless flow of people to replace them.

2) It is ultimately the govt.’s responsibility to provide decent quality education to EVERY child in the country, a responsibility in which they have failed miserably. The education budget is still only 33% of what is needed and we’re far from 100% enrolment.

3) The fact of children being abused by adults is an OUTRAGE. Any parent or other who forces a child to beg needs to be in jail. The custody of the child should be taken over by the govt.

4) Beyond that, any parent who just keeps a child, boy or girl, at home and away from school should be penalized. It should be compulsory to go to school till the age of 16, or Metric.

Short of govt. level action we’ll only be touching the problem on the surface.