Pakistani three-year-old Afshan’s trip to school is a high-wire balancing act, as she teeters across a metal girder spanning a trench of putrid floodwater, eyes fixed ahead.
After record monsoon rain flooded her classroom in the southeastern town of Chandan Mori, this is the route Afshan and her siblings traverse to a tent where her lessons take place.
“It’s a risky business to send children to school crossing that bridge,” Afshan’s father, Abdul Qadir, 23, said. “But we are compelled ... to secure their future, and our own.”
Photo: AFP
In Pakistan, where one-third of the country lives in hardship on less than US$4 a day, education is a rare ticket out of grinding poverty.
This summer, floods destroyed or damaged 27,000 schools and spurred a humanitarian disaster which saw 7,000 more commandeered as aid centers, the UN Children’s Fund said.
The education of 3.5 million children has been disrupted as a result, the charity said.
Photo: AFP
“Everything has gone away, we lost our studies,” said 10-year-old Kamran Babbar, who lives in a nearby tent city since his home and school were submerged.
Before the rains, which have been linked to climate change, Afshan followed her sisters to a lime green schoolhouse.
About two-and-a-half months after they finally abated, her school remains swamped by standing water.
Photo: AFP
More than 300 boys and girls have decamped to three tents where they sit on floors lined with plastic sheeting, answering teachers’ questions in chorus.
As midday approaches the tents are baked by the sun, and students fan themselves with notebooks — quenching their thirst with mouthfuls of cloudy, polluted floodwater.
Many cannot summon the strength to stand when called to answer questions by teacher Noor Ahmed.
“When they fall sick, and the majority of them do, it drastically affects attendance,” he said.
In this conservative corner of Pakistan, many girls are already held back from school, groomed for lives of domestic labor.
Those students that were enrolled had their prospects dampened by hunger and malnutrition even before the monsoon washed away vast tracts of crops.
Over the past two years, the COVID-19 pandemic saw schools shut for 16 months.
The floods — which put one-third of Pakistan underwater and displaced 8 million — are yet one more hurdle many would not overcome.
“We are nurturing an ailing generation,” Ahmed said.
In the nearby town of Mounder, the monsoon storms tore the roof off the government school.
The walls are cracked and crumbling, and students now congregate outside, fearful of a collapse.
The boys learn under the shade of a tree in the courtyard, while the girls gather nearby in a donated tent.
“Such events will leave an everlasting traumatic impact on the girls,” teacher Rabia Iqbal said.
“If we want to make them mentally healthy, we will have to immediately move them from tents to proper classrooms,” she added.
The return to school is unlikely to be swift.
Analysis suggests the bill for the reconstruction of schools and recovery of the education system would be nearly US$1 billion — the total repair bill is close to US$40 billion — in a nation already mired in economic turmoil.
Undaunted by the difficulties ahead, the girls of Chandan Mori’s high school trudge every day to a temporary classroom 3km away.
“We will not be defeated by such circumstances,” 13-year-old Shaista Panwar said.
Apps and Web sites that use artificial intelligence (AI) to undress women in photos are soaring in popularity, researchers said. In September alone, 24 million people visited undressing Web sites, the social network analysis company Graphika said. Many of these undressing, or “nudify,” services use popular social networks for marketing, Graphika said. For instance, since the beginning of this year, the number of links advertising undressing apps increased more than 2,400 percent on social media, including on X and Reddit, the researchers said. The services use AI to recreate an image so that the person is nude. Many of the services only
IN ABSOLUTE CONTROL: About 80 percent of Russians approve of Putin, a survey shows, but that might be misleading due to his intolerance to criticism Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday moved to prolong his repressive and unyielding grip on Russia for at least another six years, announcing his candidacy in the presidential election in March that he is all but certain to win. Putin still commands wide support after nearly a quarter-century in power, despite starting an immensely costly war in Ukraine that has taken thousands of his people’s lives, provoked repeated attacks inside Russia — including one on the Kremlin itself — and corroded its aura of invincibility. A short-lived rebellion in June by mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin raised widespread speculation that Putin could be
JUMPING BAIL: The democracy advocate said made the decision after ‘considering the situation in Hong Kong, my personal safety, my physical and mental health’ Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Agnes Chow (周庭), who was jailed over her role in massive 2019 protests, on Sunday said she had moved to Canada and would not return to meet her bail conditions. Chow was one of the best-known young faces of the 2012, 2014 and 2019 protest movements against Beijing’s increasingly authoritarian rule in Hong Kong. She spent about seven months behind bars for her role in a protest outside Hong Kong police headquarters in 2019, when huge crowds rallied week after week in the most serious challenge to China’s rule since Hong Kong’s 1997 handover. On Sunday
TAKING STOCK: It was not yet clear how damaging the espionage, dating to 1981, has been, as authorities are still assessing the situation, the State Department said A former US ambassador to Bolivia has been arrested and charged with spying for Cuba over a 40-year span, the US Department of Justice announced on Monday, detailing a shock betrayal by a suspect who called the US “the enemy.” US Attorney General Merrick Garland laid out the allegations against Victor Manuel Rocha, a onetime member of the White House’s National Security Council now accused of using his positions within the government to support Cuba’s “clandestine intelligence-gathering mission” against the US. The charges against Rocha, 73, expose “one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign
RSS