No, we do not ride this colorful rickshaw all the way to Gadap, despite the temptation that doing so could have made a more interesting blog post. You see, we’ve all gained a few pounds after several days of feasting during the wedding and, therefore, we could not fit at the back of the rickshaw. The driver refuses to make one or two of us sit in front. “I can’t take all five of you!” he says, driving away as fast as his pretty rickshaw could take him. I totally just made that conversation up. But what I’m going to tell you next is a true story.
Five years ago, when Masood and I visited Karachi for the first time as a couple, we took a rickshaw. I insisted. It was probably the first time that I was sitting in a rickshaw next to him. It was late at night, the moon was full and bright, and I found the idea of sitting there with him strangely romantic. While I was chatting away, Masood suddenly looked out his side of the rickshaw—his head outside the vehicle—and peered down. “What are you doing?!” I tried to pull him back in. “This thing is wobbling!” he said. He checked again and noticed that the wheel was about to come off!
The rickshaw driver, after having been alerted about our dangerous situation, calmly pulled up the side of the road, kicked the wheel in, tightened the bolt, and casually asked us to get back in. We looked around the dark street for a second, decided we weren’t any safer walking the streets of Karachi, and promptly hopped back into the rickshaw.
So much for the romantic ride.
Anyway, so while having dinner at Shan-e-Mughlia—a really nice, open-air, buffet restaurant in Karachi that I really recommend—we make a spur of the moment decision to drive to Gadap the next morning. My sister, Sophia, tells us that her former student, Shahzad, goes there every weekend and that his mom runs a school there.
No, we do not take the bus either. Shahzad comes by bright and early to pick us up, and he is kind enough to be our host, our driver, and our guide. We are all excited for this long drive, a nice break from the wedding parties.
Gadap is a small town north of Karachi. We drive for an hour and a half to get there, which means it’s not really that far. Sophia is slightly disappointed; she is somehow under the impression that we’re going to Balochistan, a neighboring province, and therefore will be driving for approximately ten years or so.
Once we see signs of a potential village scene—narrow roads, goats and buffaloes roaming around, women and children expertly balancing firewood on top their heads, men gathered around an old TV set at a tea shop—we forget everything else and soak up the rural-ness of the place.
H.I.G. Public School, Gadap:
In February 20, 1957 a man named Hajji Ibrahim Gabol donated a parcel of his land in Gadap to the government in order to build a school. Like so many rural areas in Pakistan, a lot of people in Gadap are very conservative and would not send their girls to schools. These people feel that since the girls will eventually be married off at an early age and that seeking a job outside home is unimaginable, there’d be no point in sending them to school. They also felt that the schools in town, few that they were, did not provide a conducive environment in which they could send their girls to. Mr. Gabol strongly felt that it was time someone took a step forward and gave these young girls their right to education.
So it was in the late 1950s that H.I.G Public School opened its doors to the young boys and girls of Gadap. The government helped with the infrastructure and provided teachers. Majority of these teachers are women, since this was the only way parents felt safe to send their daughters to school.
It’s ten in the morning and the breeze is cool, which is a good thing because in Gadap you do not have electricity for most part of the day, or night. I’m sitting in a little room—equipped with a few chairs, a table, a cupboard, and severals trophies—looking up at the pictures of cadets and officers hanging on the wall. I’m with Masood, Sophia, and my mom. Mr. Gabol’s grandson, Shahzad, patiently answers all our questions with a smile. He describes his grandfather as brave, honest, and very strict. “Just like my father,” Shahzad adds.
By the time we enter the school premises and walk into the principal’s office, I notice that the place is suddenly devoid of the usual ruckus created by a bunch of children. “That’s because they learned that Shahzad is here!” says his mom, laughing, “These kids are scared of him.”
After Mr. Gabol, Shahzad’s mom took over the responsibilities of the school. “This is the village’s first English-medium school,” she proudly says. But finding teachers has always been a challenge. The school is quite far from Karachi, but the people in Gadap prefer to have teachers from the city. Then there was the language barrier. The children in Gadap only spoke Balochi and the teachers from Karachi spoke Urdu. They have had to bring in local staff to bridge the gap.
“If the teacher is from the village, people immediately think she’s unqualified, regardless of the fact that she’s a professional,” says the principal. “It’s not easy to recruit teachers from the city,” she adds, “and there’s also the issue that people in Gadap insists on having female teachers, otherwise they won’t send their girls to school.”
We tour the school, take a peek into the classrooms, and see the children read and write. We listen as an adorable little girl reads fluently from an Urdu book. They look at us curiously. The school is now proud to have produced good students who have not only mastered English and Urdu, but have cleared the 10th grade with exceptional grades and are now enrolled in different cadet colleges in the country.
My family and I are truly impressed by the vision, dedication, and hard work of the Gabol family in order to promote literacy in their village.
If you think that you can help this nonprofit institution in any way, please leave a comment below or a message on the contact page and I’ll forward it to Mrs. Gabol. Thank you!