By Jahanara Shiraz | Director, Academics - Non-Formal Education
Abid is a twelve-year-old studying in the fourth grade. He is the son of a labourer who works on daily wages and struggles to earn a meager income to support Abid and his five sisters, who live in Kot Lakhpat, an urban slum in Lahore.
Abid has grown up around extreme poverty, one of the cruelest realities of big-city life. His circumstances forced him to seek a job as staff help in a general store near home, where he works in the morning. In the afternoon, Abid and three of his sisters go to the Peco Road School, established and run by Zindagi Trust under the Paid to Learn program for mainstreaming working children into primary education.
Abid is a keen student who never misses a day of school. His teachers find him to be one of the brighter children at school – he scored above 95% on his last term exams. Showing maturity and self-introspection beyond his years, he tells us that he always questions himself before taking decisions and that this practice has helped him understand himself.
He lives by the motto that if you believe in yourself, the world can be yours. He has written his favorite Urdu saying at the entrance of the school:
‘Do what you want to do and do not limit yourself because what you believe, you can achieve’
He wants to grow up to be a pilot.
On behalf of Zindagi Trust, a big Thank You to all our supporters around the world for making it possible for Abid and other children like him to go to school, to dream, and to believe.
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
