Unfortunately shortly after their delivery, heavy rains hit Akri, causing a levy to break and the school to be flooded. The ground floor of the school was immersed in 3 feet of water for several months and classes were suspended during this time. Many of our students’ families had to relocate to neighboring villages. Soon after the flooding, Umaimah had the opportunity to chat with some of our students to get their thoughts about receiving the books, what attending the school means to them and how the flooding impacted their lives.

Altaf,grade 3, dreams of becoming a computer engineer: [The books] we got were awesome. They are all at the school. Thank you [to the seattle kids] for sending us such great books. We hope you like the books we like and that we can someday send them to you. We had to rush out [with the flooding], we couldn’t take anything from home. They are saying it will rain again…we are staying in a school in Badin [a nearby town] and will not go home until it’s stopped raining. I love studying at the dreamfly school – it’s more fun than fun!

Noor-Ul-Huda, grade 4, dreams of becoming a doctor: Learning is so fun- we want to become something so we have to work hard. We loved getting [the books}. We read them. I love stories – all kinds of fun stories. Thank you to the kids in Seattle!

Fiza, grade 3, dreams of becoming a doctor and pharmacist: I want to be a doctor who can make her own medicine – yes, a doctor and a pharmacist. [At school she likes} drawing – water color; I participated in a school competition where our teacher asked us to paint whatever we like. I painted mickey mouse all from memory – I had seen mickey mouse somewhere and I “stamped” his picture in memory! I also do pencil color. I’ve painted grapes and all kinds of fruits. I once made a cotton snowman. A real one. Our teacher put it in the classroom but then it got old and dirty. My father is a writer, and I also write a column. I write poems in Sindhi, and once I’m done with Sindhi, I’ll write in Urdu and English also! I read “big” books – when I don’t understand something, I underline the words, and then go ask my father what they mean.

Sughra, grade 4, dreams of being a teacher: I love drawing on the computer and arts; I’ve made houses and bears. I really liked getting the books from Seattle. I like going to school and doing housework. I do help when I am not studying. I like sweeping and cleaning the house. I am telling the truth!

We are happy to report that the school has since re-opened and students are able to attend classes again. Extensive repairs are needed to get the dreamfly campus back to its original state and donations are being accepted through our site. Simply login to Paypal and note “Pakistan” in the cause section of the donation form.

The one thing the flood couldn’t touch was our students’ love for books and the library is still just as popular as ever.  More than just bringing delight to our students, the book drive helped us to connect children in Pakistan with their well-wishers in the US and make strides against our mission for exposure and education. We’d like to thank two of our largest donors to the bookdrive, Rhys Dekle and Jeff Robinson. Without their help, we wouldn’t have been able to make such a wonderful gift to our students. We deeply appreciate their support and helping our book drive be a terrific success.

Stay tuned for more information on our fundraising efforts and how you  can continue our students’ love for learning and books!

Over sixty percent of the Indian population is under the age of twenty-five and within the next decade, India will have a sizable percent of the world’s young population. Our education, skills and employment policies today will inevitably impact global development tomorrow.

While the government has promised to improve academic standards through the introduction of tablets and an increasingly decentralized education system, it is civil society organizations that are ultimately going to make a significant dent in the space. Within education are two major types of players: the private institutes that target upper and middle-income households and the charitable institutes that target low-income households mostly with the support of external donor organizations.

Under the former category are organizations such as TeamLease. The for-profit vocational institute was started as a human resources firm that provided jobs in the retail and hospitality industry. The founder, Manish Sabharwal eventually saw prospect in the education industry, particularly in vocational education, and decided to expand the company’s work.

Consequently, TeamLease is now starting vocational training institutes in Gujarat to train and place individuals in the private sector. TeamLease has grown more than three times in the past ten years and its continued growth only speaks to market demand. However, Team Lease will only attract young people with certain skill level, exposure and family income.

For the majority, those in tier two and three towns, away from the glitz of the city, there are solid organizations such as dreamfly who are working to provide opportunity and exposure to young people. The mission of dreamfly is to work in communities in conflict by bringing together people from diverse backgrounds. In India they have found their niche in Ulubedia in West Bengal.

Ulubedia is a Muslim-dominated community with high unemployment rates and low literacy levels. In the midst of such depressing conditions, dreamfly has taken on the responsibility of building a computer lab where children from diverse backgrounds can come together and learn through technology.

By donating thirty-two Multipoint computers and two laptops, the organizations aims to encourage group-work and expose students to the world beyond Ulubedia.  Dreamfly is a unique organization because they not only focus on improving the quality of education but also encouraging students to open their minds and be accepting of people from different faiths, castes and backgrounds. Thus, ensuring that youth are not only intelligent but also tolerant and civically oriented.

However, to ensure that students remain competitive, dreamfly will also be including Microsoft training program software that will provide older students the opportunity to be certified with the skills for entry-level data work. Dreamfly has worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan and now is expanding its reach to India and Rwanda.

On Wall Street and across the world we are seeing the fight against ‘the big’ come to life: big governments and big businesses. It is ironic that the protest is again the big when in fact there is a need to reconfigure the big with the support of the youth. As India continues to grow, young people will be the lifeline of this country. However, in order to ensure that we are adequately prepared we need to give the skills and training required so that we can empower youth and in turn empower the country. 

You can follow me on twitter @rwitwika. Read more about our India project at http://www.thedreamfly.org/india-2/. 

Daredreaming on the Streets of Pakistan is a compilation of five stories of triumph and will – of children living in the slums of Karachi, the financial and commercial capital of Pakistan and home to over 15 million. Born into poverty and illiteracy, like millions across the country, Khalida, Zareena, Abid, Mumtaz, and Asif have all broken the mold and are on their way to unpredictably promising futures.

View their photos and stories at http://www.thedreamfly.org/daredreaming/.  

Beautifully photographed by our own Umaimah Mendhro, the book was designed by Fareena Chanda with the online experience built by Phil Brondyke. Fiza Asar was also integral to creating this wonderful piece. We’d also like to thank The Citizens Foundation for their support in Pakistan.

Madhia Qureshi worked with Umaimah and Fiza to compile each of the 5 children’s stories in Pakistan and shares her wonderful experience below. We shop you will enjoy Daredreaming as much as we do – please share your thoughts with us through comments on our blog, on our Facebook page or through Twitter.

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When Fiza and Umaimah asked me to be a part of their photo book project almost four years ago, highlighting the stories of five extraordinary young men and women, I couldn’t say no. How could I, when throughout my time with the nonprofit The Citizens Foundation in Karachi, I had seen scores of similar children overcome similar odds, becoming young pioneers in their impoverished, neglected communities, and longed to tell their stories to a world that desperately needs stories like that. Stories of triumph and courage and hope need to be told in the world today. There has to be a counter to all the despondency and pessimism, especially that coming out of and being poured into my unfortunate homeland.

We are in close contact with our partner, The Citizens Foundation, that manages our school operations to keep abreast of the rebuilding efforts. Their current estimate is that the campus will need to be closed for at least 2 months. We are determining what the best course of action for aiding in any reparation efforts and supporting our students. We will send updates with how you can get involved shortly.

Cyangugu (also known as Rusizi) is located in the South Western corner of the country in the Western Province.

One of the coolest places we visited in Rwanda was a Village named Cyingwa in Rusizi District, near the Rwanda- Congo border. We flew to Kamembe Airport in Rusizi District from Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. The area was mostly mountainous – which made for beautiful scenery.

We went to Cyingwa to visit a Coffee Washing Station, where coffee is grown, cleaned, dried, and then shipped all of the over the world. However, we didn’t come to Cyingwa to just learn about how coffee is made.

The Coffee Washing Station is really an exercise in reconciliation! The Coffee Washing Station was setup so that Tutsi and Hutu, genocide survivors and perpetrators could live next to each other and work towards a common cause – a better future for their children and themselves. The Coffee Washing Station encourages people to put their differences aside and focus on cultivating coffee.

Coffee Processing facility - the blue bins in the distance store coffee as it washed. The long rows are drying facilities.

Pierre Munyura, along with Eugene Nyagahene one of the premier entrepreneurs of Rwanda, founded the Coffee Washing Station so that the members of Pierre’s home village could not only earn a living, but also live and work side by side after the horrors of the 1994 genocide. In fact one of the founding principles of the Coffee Washing Station was that it must employ both Hutu and Tutsi villagers.

The Coffee Washing Station provides jobs, funding for clean water and schools, and provides hope for a village that was destroyed after the genocide. In fact, a percentage of every pound of Coffee sold is guaranteed to be used to serve a social cause. This year the focus is on clean water.

The children and parents in village were inspiring as well. They were extremely optimistic about their future and were willing to work to make it real.

Children in Cyingwa being asked if they want to go to Secondary School.

Pierre was gracious enough to escort us to the Coffee Washing Station and give us a personal tour. Along the way Pierre shared with us his personal motivations for starting the Coffee Washing Station after his home village was devastated by the genocide. Even though Pierre was not living in the village at the time, Pierre felt a personal responsibility to ensure that his village came together again and survived.

The Coffee Washing Station employs over a 150 villagers during peak harvest season and produces over 50 tons of coffee a year.

Pierre and Eugene’s coffee business serve as an example of how a for profit enterprise can have a significant positive impact on a community. Their accomplishments serve as an example to social entrepreneurs everywhere.

A note from Pierre about the Coffee business:

I’ll never look at a cup of coffee the same way again!

Varun and I travelled to Rwanda earlier this month to explore opportunities for our next thedreamfly project. (Thank you, Varun, for joining me in this special journey – it meant the world to me…). With dreamfly’s mission being bringing together communities in conflict around common causes, we knew we had to go to Rwanda, a living, breathing embodiment of overcoming a dreadful past in favor of a unified, prosperous, and audaciously ambitious future.

We were absolutely and deeply… moved. We met genocide orphans, perpetrators, and survivors – Hutu and Tutsi families living together in reconciliation villages with their killers, actively working on building a better future together. We met successful business leaders, like Eugene Nyagahene, who heads up Rwanda’s media conglomerate, and his cousin Pierre Munyura, who lost both of his parents and 15 family members in a village by the Congo border in the Rusizi district. Pierre went back and built a coffee plantation in this village so he could show his children, who lived through refugee camps during the genocide without any contact with their father, that he, and all of Rwandans, will actively work to create a better future. He sells his coffee at a ‘social premium,’ revenues that go towards developing the local community, today providing drinking water, tomorrow, perhaps a school with dreamfly.

We visited Pierre’s village and learnt that the children there have made a name for being the smartest in the district! One of them, trying to convince us he needs a better school building, said: “it’s shameful to think that the future Bill Gates (him : )) will come from this building!” As we tried to figure out what the village secret is – we came to learn that the parents in the village built the school with their hands, they have their children study through the year, no summer vacations, paying the teachers extra out-of-pocket, because they want to have their children get a chance at becoming the future leaders of a unified Rwanda.

We met Bishop John Rucyahana, who’s on President Paul Kagame’s advisory council, who encouraged us to “Invest in Transformation.” We met Pastor Deo who lived for months in anger and depression after finding his sister and her five children murdered mercilessly, who then went to see his sister’s murderer in the prison, looked him in the eyes, and told him he forgave him… because he knew of no other way to be able to continue to live. He then became a regular at the prison, praying for the killers, taking other survivors to meet with their murderers. Everyone needed love, and everyone needed to be loved, he told me, as his eyes teared up several times. And we met with the former Mufti of Rwanda and co-leader of Rwanda’s Inter-Faith effort, Sheikh Saleh Habimana, who shared with us his vision for unity amongst the east and the west, amongst those with crinkled and straight hair, and tall and short noses! Every Rwandan we met had us know there’s no Hutu nor Tutsi in Rwanda, there’s only one beautiful Rwanda.

One hundred days. One million lives denigrated, vilified, slandered, lost. The genocide in Rwanda happened in our life-times. Just seventeen years ago. Hearing first-hand stories of people who lost all their loved ones, saw their siblings being murdered, their children separated, it feels incomprehensible how someone could live through that. And it feels to be beyond human capacity to then forgive, reconcile, and love, and let be loved, to build a better future. It’s this living, breathing miracle that is Rwanda that dreamfly would love to take a small part in…

Our next steps are to evaluate the different options we explored on the ground – across two reconciliation villages across Rwanda, the coffee plantation village in Rusizi, interfaith efforts near Kigali, and more – to pursue our dreamfly effort that helps further Rwandan’s vision for their country. I look forward to all of our leadership, creative thinking, and committed action to help build something meaningful, impactful, sustainable, and as extraordinary as are the people of this country – within one year!

Rwanda is a nation still recovering from the infamous 1994 genocide and ethnic fighting, primarily between the country’s Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups.  The Reconciliation Villages are an audacious healing experiment which have been described as “a test of how well the different ethnic groups can live together, [with] victims and perpetrators of the genocide… living side-by-side in a small community”.

Dreamfly's Umaimah writes from Rwanda: "Met most adorable little ones in Mbo Reconciliation Village -- I put out my hand, this one looks at me funny, and gives me a high 5! And then pops in my lap."

The organization behind the Reconciliation Villages is Prison Fellowship Rwanda (PFR), whose chairman, Bishop John Ruchiyana, is a key adviser to Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame.  Bishop John was responsible for introducing Prof. Neipold to Pastor Deo Gashagaza, Executive Director of PFR, who in turn would be Dreamfly’s partner on the ground for our school if we choose to pursue this project.

Currently, we imagine a school at Mbo Reconciliation Village that would serve approximately 30 children and employ locals as teachers and staff.  Preliminary estimates of the cost of creating and launching the school come in at approximately $60,000, with an additional ongoing cost of operating the school at perhaps $5,000 a year (most of that spent on teacher salaries).

Along with the school, we are also exploring the possibility to support microfinance/micro-enterprise efforts, especially around livestock and farming, such that the local community can begin to become self-dependent and look to support the long-term sustainability of the school.

Dreamfy’s Umaimah Mendhro and Varun Bhartia arrived in Rwanda earlier this week to meet with our potential partners on the ground there and see Mbo Reconciliation Village for themselves.  The duo have been publishing updates from their trip via Dreamfly’s Facebook page and on Dreamfly’s new Twitter handle: www.twitter.com/thedreamfly.

Earlier today, they met an elderly Hutu man who told them he killed two Tutsis in the 1994 genocide; they also met a similarly-aged Tutsi woman who lost all her children but one. Yet out of such brutality and suffering, there is hope. Umaimah and Varun write that “today they both live as Rwandan neighbors, neither Hutu nor Tutsi, in the Mbo Reconciliation Village and look towards their prosperous future.”

Please follow Umaimah and Varun’s journey on Facebook and Twitter, and check back with this blog for more detailed updates on the progress of this exciting potential new opportunity for Dreamfly to expand our mission of “bringing together communities in conflict around common causes”!

Meanwhile, for further reading related to Rwanda and the organizations discussed above, please see these links:

• Rwandan Genocide – Wikipedia article with good background on the political and historical factors leading to the 1994 atrocities
• “North Carolina woman blazes trail for senior social entrepreneurs” – news article highlighting Prof. Niepold’s motivation for Nyanya Project
• Prison Fellowship Rwanda – official website of the organization led by Bishop John and Pastor Deo that has built the Reconciliation Villages

The drive was a great success, with dreamfly receiving 80 books for the TCF library – more than double our goal! The books will be flown to Pakistan in early June and delivered to the campus over the summer and we plan to have photos of the books arriving at the campus to share with our dreamfly community. We received so many books that we have the opportunity to donate a title to each student, allowing them to take them home and share with their family. The library is one of the most popular places on campus and these donations will help to increase our students’ love of reading and exploring their imaginations.

Nazeema Ali, Nicole Peterson and Varun Bhartia show their favorite books collected during the book drive. (photo by Umaimah Mendhro)

Thank you to everyone who participated in the book drive – your generosity was unparalleled! An extra special thanks to Nazeema Ali, Varun Bhartia, Rhys Dekle, Umaimah Mendhro and Nicole Peterson for all their efforts in collecting the books from our various donation points. We couldn’t have done it without you.

Stay tuned for photos of the books arriving at the campus in the next few months.

Gender inequality is a problem too, and one which contributes to economic woes.  The report states that less than half of all women in Pakistan have had any schooling, and only about one-third of women in rural areas.  Given that the World Bank has concluded “there is no investment more effective for achieving development goals than educating girls”, this is an inequity the Task Force acknowledges needs to be corrected.

The Task Force’s report, however, does note some encouraging details.  It cites impressive education turnarounds in places such as Chile, the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, and Brazil’s Minas Gerais, that were due to reform efforts.  Indeed, perhaps the most positive detail to emerge from the report is a confirmation that there is a strong belief among Pakistanis in the value of education and a desire for increased educational opportunity.  85% of respondents in a national survey stated their belief that education made “better citizens”, “more effective leaders”, and “reduces extremism”.  A college education, for both boys and girls, has also seen a meteoric rise in desirability:

Survey of Pakistanis: “Yes, Boys/Girls Need to Go to College”

The full report contains many other interesting facts and figures.  For further reading related to this topic, please see the below links:

• Education Emergency Pakistan – the group’s website includes links to the full April 2011 report and other publications by the Task Force
• Dreamfly in Akri – read more about how Dreamfly, in partnership with The Citizens Foundation (TCF), has opened and is running a primary school for nearly 150 boys and girls in a rural village in Pakistan

I saw the London premiere of the film “Addicted in Afghanistan” last week and wrote a review and my thoughts on it for another site, which I am sharing below. It was absolutely the saddest documentary I have seen in a long time and reminds us of our task in Afghanistan and our need to be there for the Afghans. The original piece was published on Project Carousel website and can also be found on my personal blog Chowraha.

Last Thursday, on March 11 2010, SOAS held the London Premiere of the film “Addicted in Afghanistan.” Khalili Lecture Theatre was packed at 6:00 pm from people who had been queing up since 5:15 pm eager to watch Jawed Taiman’s film on the addiction to narcotics in Afghanistan covered via the lives of two young best friends Jabbar and Zahir, boys aged between 14 and 16.

The film was gripping from its very first scene as it took the audience through the journey of these two boys, happy in their childhood but gripped in one of the most sad state of affairs in the world. Both were addicted to opium. What especially saddened me and definitely caught the audience’s emotions was when in the very beginning Jabbar looks to his dad and says (referring to Jawed’s film), “He is going to show this to the world!” to which his dad responds “so what?” and the young boy looks away from the camera saying “its going to bring shame to us.” His dad’s response: “Don’t worry, he will only show it to the important people in London and America, and maybe they will feel sorry for our situation and help us”

The film was phenomenally well-made and definitely worth checking out for those who missed it. It traces the problem of addiction to opium in Afghanistan to its myriad sources of trouble: the allied forces in Afghanistan, the corrupt government and opium lords, the extreme poverty caused by decades of war in the country, the foreign interests in poppy growth in Afghanistan and the usage of resources in not always the right places for the development of the country.

One of the surprising confessions shown in the film was when one of the boys declared with a sense of bitterness “its all because of the foreigners that i am addicted. If the Taliban were to come back, I won’t be addicted anymore – its the foreigners!”. The filmmaker rephrased the young boy’s “strange” (as dubbed by a lady in the audience) expression by pointing out that because the Taliban used the Shariah law (Islamic law and jurisprudence), all they had to say was the cultivation and distribution of poppy is banned from the country and it meant it was banned. Poppy cultivation came down to zero during their governance but ever since their departure has been growing in figures. Jawed Taiman explained that that is the reality the child has seen in front of him and owes his addiction to. m of law), it meant that it was a complete ban.

To another question from the audience, Jawed said what he believed was happening in Afghanistan was the cultivation of two types of poppy fields. One, for the television and the other for business. The poppy fields that were grown for the television were then burnt down in order to show to the world that poppy cultivation in Afghanistan was being stopped. However, those living in Afghanistan know exactly where the ‘real’ poppy cultivation was happening. Even the little children in the movie knew who the distributors were and could easily give opium to any one willing to pay them for it.

The state of poverty in Afghanistan is a striking and heart-breaking feature of the film. The families shown could not afford electricity or bare essentials for survival but were still addicted to opium which was taking whatever little finances they had left. Each sachet of opium cost them $10, an amount quite expensive for those with no food at home. Their homes had cloth and plastic sheets blocking the window spaces in the wall because they could not afford real glass windows. If even one person in the family saved on the one sachet a day, they could easily save $300 which could get them wheat, rice, clothes etc.

The method for detoxification used in Afghanistan is called “cold water treatment” because of the lack of money to buy proper medicines. In this treatment cold water is thrown on the addict that is in pain. The government-controlled detox centres do not have the kind of resources or management to take in enough people claiming that the waiting-list for those willing to be detoxed is too long. Private detox centres require payment and hence cannot keep people for longer than 10 days. Zahir who manages to successfully goes through the 10 day detox returns home to find cold bare floors, no electricity, no food and the responsibility of paying the rent of the house which is due. He is back into the reality which got him addicted in the first place. Jawed pointed out that fancy clinics are set up with lots of money but there are no resources to follow-up on the rehabilitation of those detoxed, in order to ensure that they are not caught in the same vicious cycle again.

It is easy to wonder why people do not make a more concerted effort to control their addiction for the sake of the future. But Jawed does a great job in showing the reality poverty and its frustrations bring to many and where the government and those pouring resources into Afghanistan need to take better actions. It also does a great job in bringing to the audience the behind-the-tv-screens reality of Afghanistan and how easy it is to fall prey to the ‘development’ and ‘aid’ rhetoric our governments seem to want us to believe in.

The trailer of the film can also be seen here