KARACHI, April 7: Drive through Sujawal, a town in Thatta district, and then turn to the left, taking the dirt road. Barely five minutes after passing a small village, you will see another village, this one called Goth Suleman Kehrai. This village seems as unremarkable as the previous one. All the dwellings look like makeshift structures made out of mud, wood and thatch, even though they are anything but. After all people spend their whole lives in them.

However, look closely and you will discover a crucial difference between the two villages. The difference is the only concrete building of the area — a cream-and-maroon, two-room structure of cement and perhaps some steel. This is the area school, simply and aptly named Government Primary School Suleman Kehrai.

This school was the centre of attention of many people on Thursday. Not only were the local students and education department officials milling around the place but people had also travelled over from Karachi and perhaps also from out of Sindh.

To be sure, they were at the flood-affected school not because of achievements of its pupils or teachers. but simply because it was just that — a school hit by the devastating floods of last year. The school building, although built on a raised platform, was inundated last year during the country’s worst calamity.

And it has yet to recover from the catastrophe. The building is still so dilapidated that students cannot take their classes there. Instead, they have to make do with the two nearby tented “rooms” that nowadays pass off as their “school”, which is run by the education department in collaboration with the Unicef.

It was obvious that to the dozens of Pakistani and foreign officials representing organisations like the Oxford University Press (OUP), Unicef and Sindh Education Department, the tented school (dubbed the Temporary Learning Centre, Sujawal) was the reason why we were there.

But to a rather sceptical journalist like me, it was because of the dilapidated school building that we were there.

Had the building been repaired, the TLC would have been closed by now, forcing the OUP to choose some other place to organise its book-donation ceremony.

But then, had the education department been efficient enough and repaired the 7,000 or so school buildings damaged or destroyed in the calamity we might never have learnt that Unicef had at one point been running 3,300 TLCs across the country — some 2,000 in Sindh alone. (The number of TLCs in the province has now come down to 1,200 for obvious reasons.)

By no stretch of imagination have the TLCs been paragons of education, especially because the teachers working there come from the faulty government-run education system. But they have played the vital role of keeping students linked to education in the worst of times, a feat that deserves praise in itself.

Similarly, the OUP’s act of commissioning, publishing and donating more than 300,000 specially designed story books should be praised.

So the building of Government Primary School Suleman Kehrai stands today not just as a testament to the inability of the education department to resolve its problems on its own, but also to the vibrancy of local and foreign civil society organisations that come to our aid in times of need.