At 8 a.m., we leave Islamabad. With the sun hot but still low-hanging, we pass guarded McMansion fortresses, the white table-clothed Pizza Hut, and the teal and khaki Saudi-Pak Tower. Soon the streets, as smooth and straight as Eisenhower's best artery, disintegrate to cracked, jagged roads. The pines, tiger lilies and banana trees shrivel into rocks and roots that pockmark the brown, dusty earth.
We are in a white, Suzuki mini-bus, circa 1970. The two benches in back, facing each other, have been upholstered in a felt camouflage appropriate for duck hunting expeditions. The air from the open windows batters my face and hardens my contact lenses. My shalwar kamiz, wet with sweat, sticks to my back and chest, and I am glad I remembered not to wear white.
Next to me is my translator, Asma. She is 23 and a lanky 6 feet tall. She has just finished an undergraduate degree in business administration, and her father, a retired colonel, has the misguided impression that she might learn something by working as my assistant. In the front are Fiaz, our guide, and our driver, who will not make eye contact with me. I nurse an Evian bottle of coffee, trying not to choke or spill every time the Suzuki lurches after hitting a pothole.
Eventually, we come an intersection with a single-lane road, and here we turn. When the road narrows to a dirt path, we get out and walk through a low-slung maze of attached cement and cinder block houses. Plastic wrappers, bones and corn husks fill the gutters. In flip flops we navigate rocks, mounds of donkey excrement, and rivulets of unknown fluid.
Finally, when we come to one of many nearly identical metal doors, Fiaz knocks. A woman in a shalwar kamiz answers the door, and we enter to find an audience of thirty barefoot kids between the ages of 5 and 12 sitting in rows on the floor. I take off my sunglasses and shake the teacher's hand and say, "Salam alakem! Shukriya for letting me visit your class." She nods nervously. I turn to the kids and flash my best elementary school teacher smile. "Salam alakem!" I say. The kids stare without smiling. I wait. They stare. "Hello? How are you?" Still no answer.
At first, we watch what was already happening in the classroom. Sometimes the students are reciting poetry in Urdu. Sometimes the teacher is correcting homework and the students are doing nothing. Sometimes the teacher is calling the students up to her chair, one by one, for a short lesson, while the rest of them do nothing. Evenutally, Asma, in Urdu, asks the teacher to conduct an English lesson. The teacher nods. Sometimes she calls on a student and says, "Parts of the body." The student stands up and says, with jerky accompanying motions, "This is my head this is my mouth this is my ear this is my neck this is my arm this is my leg this is my foot." Then the teacher calls on another student who does exactly the same thing. And then another. Sometimes the teacher writes five letters on the board, and a student recites them. Sometimes the teacher says, "Fruits," and the students in unison chant, "Apple Mango Peach Banana Grape!" And one time, the teacher opened a book and copied onto the board, "Today we will learn the difference between 'this' and 'that.' 'This' refers to someone or something close by. 'That' refers to someone or something far away." The teacher then moves on to math. Or Islamia.
After thirty minutes, I take the teacher's hand in mine and smile and say, "Shabash," which means very good. And then we leave and drive to the next school. And then the next school. And then the next. They are all in cement rooms with no desks and no electricity and nothing on the walls. Sometimes there are books. Usually there is a blackboard. In my notebook, I distinguish them by the color of the teacher's shalwar kamiz and my impressions of her presence in front of the students.
These are what the Pakistani government calls informal schools -- schools they create in partnership with NGOs for students who do not have access to formal, public schools. (The public schools here, incidentally, are not free.) The teachers are usually 18-year-old women who have finished 10th grade and who hold classes in their families' living rooms. My job, as a consultant to an NGO, is to visit the schools, write up an assessment and then make a list of recommendations.
Usually, after the final school of the day, when we are Islamabad-bound in the Suzuki, Asma asks me if I have yet determined my "methodology" or if I have started writing "my report." "Not yet," I say, "I'm still doing some preliminary work." And then I think guiltily of the colonel, who wanted his daughter, I'm sure, to learn about the social sciences or rubrics or quantitative analysis. But what methodology can I impose on my main observation, which is that teaching, even if you have all the resources and training in the world, is very hard. What rubric explains the inconceivable challenge of teaching if you are young, if you only finished tenth grade, and if all you yourself learned in school was rote memorization. And how do you quantify the bravery of teaching a language you don't know yourself, of standing in front of a class with zero professional training, of attempting to teach colors and vocabulary without visual props, of combating illiteracy when half your students have books and none has paper and pencil.
But we cannot stand still against time, for she will wash over us if we do not swim with her current. There comes danger: toxic chemicals contaminate Love Canal, NY; Jim Jones and his 900 followers perish; Three Mile Island leaks radioactive material; Ronald Reagan takes the helm. We are moderately happy that the human genome project is getting funded, and though we don't see any kids in Peoria tampering with those illegal substances, we figure if that's what the kids are doing elsewhere, for lack of heartland values, what could be wrong with Nancy Reagan's Just Say No campaign? Now that we have a color television we do, however, find her red outfits to be a little showy. But we purse our lips and remember we ought not to resist the hurrying winged chariot. We get the furniture upholstered a nice Nancy red, and then we spend several days sitting in the living room and feeling quite modern, basking in modernity. Under this influence, we allow our children to hang up some pictures, but we feel a little uncomfortable with all the strange symbols and designs -- they may be related to that satan worshipping, and though we stay tight-lipped on that topic, we do send an extra check to the Just Say No campaign. We even get a new light fixture, but we are not sure about the durability of a metal one.
We are not sure if the dining room ought to double as an exercise space (see treadmill and yoga mat), but eating and running seem to be emblematic of these modern times.
