Issue 48

In this issue:

NEHA SHOULD NOT BE WORKING AT THE BRICK KILN. We protest: Give her back her childhood! Imran is also an evangelist with a special concern for Christians working on the brick kilns. It is a pastoral ministry and he has also opened five one room schools.

Pakistan’s brick makers live a hard life with few rewards. Many of them are Christians and among the poorest of the poor. Brick kiln workers labour for up to 12 hours a day, often in the blazing sun.

“I attended a private school, but my parents could not afford the school fees and the cost of books, so I left…” “I studied in a Government school, but the teacher told me that I must sit in a separate place because I was a Christian…”

AN ADVENTURE IN TRAINING TEACHERS
Geraldine Lee directs the work of Starfish Asia in Singapore. As an experienced pre-primary school teacher, her passion has been to improve the standards of teaching practice in Pakistan’s Christian schools. Kashi, wife of Anser Javed and Academic Co-ordinator of Starfish Pakistan, spent two weeks in Singapore in February, followed by a month with Geraldine in Pakistan.

TEACHING INTOLERANCE IN PAKISTAN
A study conducted for USCIRF by the Pakistan-based NGO Peace and Education Foundation (PEF) “Public school textbooks, which reach over 41 million children, portray religious minorities in a negative and stereotypical manner, offering an Islam-centered perspective as the only valid and rational school of thought.” This was the finding of a report published in 2016 on Religious Bias in Public School Textbooks. It found that “textbooks negatively portray religious minorities and teach bias, distrust, and inferiority”.

THE CROSS OVER KARACHI
Last year, following what he believed God had told him to do, a Karachi businessman began building a massive concrete cross 140 feet high — the largest in Asia — to act as an inspiration to Pakistan’s downtrodden Christians