KARACHI: The olive-green walls with cartoon characters, alphabets and colourful truck art on the gate beckon you. Inside Lyari’s Waja Raheem Bakhsh Sarbazi Girls Secondary School you are greeted by the sweet voices of little girls singing nursery rhymes as they clap their hands, snap their fingers and tap their feet.

“This is our kindergarten section and these are our youngest students,” says Dr Asghar Naqvi while introducing you to the little girls in gray and white uniform thoroughly enjoying their lesson. The teachers and even Dr Naqvi cannot help but clap in sync with the music.

The school, from kindergarten/Montessori to Matric level, has about 450 pupils. Dr Naqvi, who has been involved in social work after retirement, runs two other schools under the umbrella of an NGO. One of his other schools is the Ali Model English School in Korangi and the other is located in village Adam Sultan in Khairpur. They are both co-education schools but the Waja Raheem Bakhsh Sarbazi Girls Secondary School, like its name suggests, is a girls school. He adopted it in October 2018.

Lyari govt school witnesses improvement after being adopted by NGO

He explains that when you adopt a government school, you cannot change its name and the teachers and staff of that school remain government employees. And if you want to make any other changes you do it yourself. Meanwhile, there is an initial agreement for one year under the school development programme but the contract can be extended for more years based on performance. He said that it was most difficult to generate funds, “but when people see good work, they start trusting you and have no problems donating for a good cause”.

Dr Naqvi takes you on a round of the school to show you the changes they have been making to the place. There is a pretty waterfall at the entrance about which he says that it used to be an area where the school’s lower staff used to wash dirty clothes and dishes. “Happy to find abundance of water they would bring loads of dirty clothes and dishes to wash here from home,” he says laughing. “Of course when I learned about this I said nothing doing. This was a school and not a dhobi ghat! So we built a waterfall here.”

They have also installed a reverse osmosis plant in the school premises and there have been taps and a water cooler installed inside and outside the school. “We let anyone take water as long as they are not going to sell it,” he says. He explains that they had earlier got drinking water there tested from a lab and it showed over 1,270 bacterial count while less than 500 is considered drinkable. “We couldn’t risk the children getting waterborne diseases such as typhoid or gastroenteritis hence the RO plant,” he says.

Dr Naqvi was also concerned about good nutrition so the kindergarten and Montessori section is also served brunch by the school during their 10am to 10.30am lunch break. “When we asked the children what they were having for breakfast we found out that they were getting tea and rusk only. Here we serve them wholesome home-cooked food, including eggs. A child’s daily requirement is about 1,200 calories and this way we take care of at least one-fourth of that during school hours,” he says.

Since he felt that physical activity is as important as mental activity, he has also installed swings, etc in the little school ground where they are going to plant grass too.

The bright school corridors lead you into cheerful classrooms on the ground floor, which has been reserved for the primary section. There are huge murals of animals and flowers on the classroom walls. “I found the pictures on the internet and then I called the artist Phool Ji to reproduce them here,” says Dr Naqvi.

The second floor is for the senior classes. But on the purple wall of the stairs landing you run into hundreds of colourful hand impressions with each pupil’s name written with her hand impression. “Imagine these kids growing up and being reminded of their years at this place by looking at their little hand impressions. It creates a kind of bond, a sense of belonging to their school,” he smiles.

The school also has a couple of LCD screens in the classrooms. Nausheen Ali Shah, the principal of the school, says that they are very useful when showing children educational material or documentaries. “The older students also watch science documentaries or when they need to watch frog dissection for biology,” she explains.

Meanwhile, on the second floor they are currently in the process of building a library, an auditorium and a cafeteria. To a comment about the colourful outer walls of the school and truck art on the gate, Dr Naqvi smiles and says that government schools are often called ‘peela schools’. “This one is no more a peela school,” he points out.

Education is the backbone of society. It helps a nation prosper. And Lyari, which some time ago was associated with things such as gang war and drugs, was desperately in need of good schools for girls whose education doesn’t seem to be a priority with many parents. Incidentally, after the fine results in just the first year of the school’s adoption by the NGO, some have pulled out their daughters from neighbouring private schools to have them admitted here. There have been some 100 new admissions already.

Published in Dawn, July 18th, 2019