Where the world begins again

On the outskirts of Karachi, barely a stone’s throw from the city, the world opens up differently. The air is stiller. The pace is slower. Time seems to have made a different choice here or perhaps the city simply never arrived.

It is in this in-between landscape, straddling the familiar and the forgotten, that Shirin and Shahab Husain have spent the better part of five years building something that defies easy description. Not a charity, exactly. Not a school system in the conventional sense. Something closer to a sustained act of faith - patient, unglamorous and entirely serious about its purpose.

They call it the Sindh Singhar Initiative - the pride of Sindh.

The story begins, as so many important ones do, with an unplanned detour. During the first lockdown in 2020, a resident of Darya Khan Goth named Salim urged the Husains to visit his village. They agreed without hesitation. What they did not anticipate was how deep into the interior the journey would take them.

When they arrived and met the community, something wordless happened. There was no meeting, no formal proposal and no strategic plan drawn up over a conference table. There were children. And there was a steady, unshakeable certainty that education might be the answer to many of the disturbing realities they were witnessing. They decided on the spot and never looked back.

Shirin Husain is an acclaimed educator with decades of experience in grassroots education, both in Pakistan and internationally. She brought that depth of knowledge to these schools, which were built with the tightest of means and without an architect - though you would never guess it while standing inside one. Her husband, Shahab Husain, is a businessman who believes that education is a basic human right. Together, they understood that in communities like these, education cannot be delivered from a distance; it must be grown from within. That means teachers who live nearby, curricula that meet children where they are and relationships with families built on consistency and respect.

The model proved effective, so they replicated it. There are now five schools across nearby villages, including Darya Khan Goth, Alam Sher Goth and Mangi Ladho Goth.

They stopped at five - not because the need stopped; it never does out here - but because this kind of work cannot be handed off. It demands presence: real, sustained, unglamorous presence. Training teachers. Sitting with parents. Earning trust slowly in communities where trust has rarely been rewarded.

To understand what the Sindh Singhar Initiative is doing, one must first understand the landscape in which it is working.

Every child enrolled in these schools is a first-generation learner. In the nineteen villages served by these five schools, there is no baseline of literacy. Whether a child begins their education at the age of ten or fifteen, they are starting from absolute zero. There are virtually no educated adults in these communities. One of the teachers, Shahida, who is also a parent at the school, attended classes only until the second or third grade. She is now helping shape the futures of children who will go far beyond what she herself was able to achieve.

This is worth pausing on because the consequences of first-generation literacy extend well beyond the child who acquires it. In households where no one can read, a child who learns becomes the family’s bridge to the written world. They are the one who reads the prescription, deciphers the government notice and navigates the form that determines whether a family receives support or is turned away. Literacy, in these communities, does not stay in the classroom. It walks home with the child and changes the texture of daily life for everyone under that roof.

In Somanro Goth and Darya Khan Goth, which are fishing communities, there was once a saying passed down as casually as a fishing net: a fisherman’s child will never study. It was not cruelty, exactly. It was the calcified weight of generations of exclusion, dressed up as common sense.

Today, scores of children from these communities are proving it wrong.

Azra, the daughter of a fisherman, speaks and reads with a confidence that would put most urban school children to shame. She is not exceptional in spite of where she comes from. She is exceptional, full stop. For most of her life, the circumstances were simply arranged to prevent anyone from noticing.

Inside the classrooms, the Sindh Singhar model is thoughtful in ways that go beyond goodwill.

Each school runs a daily one-hour self-learning session, designed with deliberate intentionality. Children rotate through three distinct activities. One group works on Khan Academy exercises using Android tablets, with each child receiving twenty focused minutes as the groups rotate. A second group uses self-correcting laminated worksheets to practise core subjects. A third group reads books.

On one visit, a child was reading a short story by Ismat Chughtai. On the same shelf, another girl was absorbed in a book by educationist Basarat Kazim. Each classroom has its own small library stocked with titles in Urdu, English and Sindhi. The tablets are few, intentionally so. The children take turns. Nobody complains. They simply wait for their turn.

Then there is the girl who loves art. She once presented a visitor with a handmade book, written entirely by her and structured like a children’s illustrated storybook. Each page carried a few lines of her story paired with one of her own illustrations, with words and pictures breathing together across every page. She had built a complete world out of paper and whatever pens she could find. It was the kind of work that, had she been born in an affluent urban neighbourhood, people would have framed, photographed and shared. She was asked what she wanted to be. She looked up and answered without a flicker of hesitation, “An artist.”

Attendance across every class: one hundred percent.

Alam Sher Goth functions as the secondary school and it offers something extra: computers. Children who have never had reason to imagine themselves in a professional setting navigate keyboards and screens with a focus that would put many adults to shame. Some attend classes on Zoom, taught by teachers based in Karachi. A child sits in a village on the edge of Sindh, connected in real time to a city that has largely proceeded without her.

Sindh Singhar is not preparing these children for a world that once existed. It is preparing them for the one that does.

Outside each school is a small covered platform with a cupboard of books: the library. Modest in size, enormous in what it represents. These are children who had never owned a book, who had never been in a space where reading was considered their right. Now they have books. They have choices.

Malnutrition runs deep in communities like these. Many children arrive at school having eaten little or nothing. A donor has made it possible for Sindh Singhar to provide a nutritious meal each day, alternating between milk with paratha and milk with eggs. The children eat. Then they play outdoors, loud and unhurried, entirely themselves.

Ask them what they want to be when they grow up and they answer without hesitation: doctors, lawyers, engineers, soldiers, artists. Not one of them hedges. Not one of them looks uncertain. They have been taught, somehow, in these small buildings at the edge of a city that barely notices them that their futures are worth imagining.

What that shift in aspiration does to a community is difficult to overstate. When children in a goth begin to imagine professional futures, it changes the calculus around them. Parents who once saw little reason to keep a daughter in school begin to see one. Boys who assumed they would inherit their fathers’ labour begin to ask different questions. The dream does not stay inside the child. It seeps into conversations at home, into what families expect and into what a community begins to believe is within reach. A single generation of educated children can permanently alter the direction of a community. Sindh Singhar is betting on exactly that and the early evidence suggests that the bet is being won.

When the Husains visit the schools, they do not do so in the manner of patrons dropping in for a tour. They arrive and they stay. Not for a walkthrough or a check-in, but for actual time with the children, the teachers and the community. A single visit can easily stretch to fourteen or fifteen hours. That is devotion with its sleeves rolled up. And they do not speak of it as a sacrifice. That, perhaps more than anything else, is the detail that stays with you.

The initiative extends beyond the classroom walls. Sindh Singhar works with the women of these communities, commissioning handcrafted and hand-embroidered goods that are sold at bazaars, festivals and at Tali in Karachi. The women are paid fairly. That fairness matters more than it might appear. When a woman earns and is paid what her work is worth, her standing within her own household shifts. She is consulted. She is heard. And her daughter, sitting in the classroom a few metres away, is watching. The lesson being absorbed there is not found in any textbook, but it may be among the most important ones on offer.

When a recent storm tore through Darya Khan Goth and damaged several homes, the Husains committed to rebuilding thirty-five of them. It is far beyond any school’s mandate. But the children sleep in those homes and the Husains have never been able to draw that line. They do all of this with what one might describe, as tawakkul: a deep and unshaken faith. And then they simply show up again.

There is a question that this initiative forces upon anyone who encounters it: What does it mean to give? Not to donate, but to give. To give your time, your knowledge, your years, your presence to people the world has structurally decided to forget.

Shirin and Shahab Husain did not simply write a cheque and feel better about themselves. They went. They stayed. They built. And then they kept going back, until the children in these goths started believing that someone would always come back for them. That continuity, that reliability of return, may be the most profound thing they have created. Not the schools themselves, though those are remarkable, but the feeling - now lived and understood by these children - that they are worth returning to. That is the most radical thing one human being can do for another.

Somewhere on the outskirts of Karachi, there is a girl with a handmade book full of stories and drawings. She has never had much by any conventional measure, but she has a dream so clear and so untroubled by doubt that it reorders your sense of what is ordinary and what is extraordinary. She is already living as though the future belongs to her.

And the astonishing truth - the one that the Sindh Singhar Initiative has spent five years and five schools proving - is that it does.

The writer is a non-profit executive and former CEO of NAPA. He can be reached at [email protected]