Dave’s Reise nach Osten

If you go to Pakistan, don’t go as a tourist, go for longer time.

That was the advice a friend got before going to Pakistan and it is true. You cannot understand this country by travelling through it, you have to study it to understand it. Nevertheless, I got some insights that helped me understanding at least a bit. The biggest insight came from understanding that Pakistan has a lot of illiteracy and poverty.

Illiteracy and Poverty

Half of the population of Pakistan can neither read nor write. I don’t know exactly how the school systems works and I heard different things. Some people say there are public schools for everybody that are free, but they are in a bad shape and if you want some good education you pay for a private school. Others told me you have to pay school money for every kid. We talked to one lady in Northern Pakistan and she told us she has to pay 2500 Rupees per month for every boy[1] so he can go to school but she does not have to pay school money for her girl. This lady was living in a small village, she had a garden, a simple house, two cows and seemed to be pretty happy. But I cannot really imagine where she could get the money for the school from. She herself had some education, about 10 years of school, but after that, her parents could not afford more school years for her next to the fact that she would have had to move to a city which is further away and which would take some money too, as there is no higher school nearby.
I realized that the state of Pakistan is not able to provide proper education to all its kids – or simply this government does not care. To be fair, it could also just be because they have problems right now that are more urgent than education. But thinking long term, it would definitely be of high value to invest in education.

Now imagine yourself living in a little village in Pakistan. You are poor, maybe you can’t read yourself, you barely survive and then you have to pay money for your child so it can go to school while it is in an age where it could already earn money. Would you let him or her go to school which cost you money or would you let him or her help in the household/restaurant/on the fields which would make your life a little more bearable?

I started to imagine the lives of the waiters when sitting in small restaurants in villages. I saw small boys washing the dishes and thought that the waiter maybe started his ‘career’ in the same age, under the same conditions. Maybe he is bound to that one restaurant, he survives, but he does not have
perspectives.

That also helped me understand why they sometimes react so helpless on me. Some people just stare at me, others don’t understand my simple order or giggle because of me. But there is no reason to blame someone who always lived in his village, who can’t read and therefore is hardly able to think outside his box.

If you are poor, you can’t afford good education for your kids. If your kids stay illiterate, they will never make a lot of money. They will live simple and so will their kids and so on. A vicious circle.

---

[1]30 CHF/US$. But to get a better picture, imagine 300 CHF/US$ as a lot of things in Pakistan just cost the tenth of what they cost in the west). And that multiplied by three, because she has three boys.