Pakistan: Hearts and Minds Story Placements
Ali Jaffri (Up All Night)
Like India, Pakistan has its share of call centers, offering everything from customer service and tech support to health insurance and home security systems. Jessica Partnow takes us through a night in the life of Ali Jaffri, a professional telemarketer in Lahore.
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Ali Jaffri (Up All Night)
Like India, Pakistan has its share of call centers, offering everything from customer service and tech support to health insurance and home security systems. Jessica Partnow takes us through a night in the life of Ali Jaffri, a professional telemarketer in Lahore.
[more]
Ghost Schools
Primary education is compulsory in Pakistan, and the country has a large public school system. But many of these schools are just marginally functional. Corruption is rampant, teachers play hooky, and some schools exist only on paper. The problems are so widespread that the term "ghost school" has become a household phrase.
[more]
Ghost Schools
Primary education is compulsory in Pakistan, and the country has a large public school system. But many of these schools are just marginally functional. Corruption is rampant, teachers play hooky, and some schools exist only on paper. The problems are so widespread that the term "ghost school" has become a household phrase.
[more]
Ghost Schools
Primary education is compulsory in Pakistan, and the country has a large public school system. But many of these schools are just marginally functional. Corruption is rampant, teachers play hooky, and some schools exist only on paper. The problems are so widespread that the term "ghost school" has become a household phrase.
[more]
Shehzad Roy
Pakistani singer Shehzad Roy spent much of his childhood in the U.S., and was troubled by the poor quality of public education he saw when he got back to Pakistan. So he founded an advocacy group called the Zindagi Trust, designed to reform failing public schools.
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Pakistani Sleepaway Camp for Girls
Specialized sleep-away camps are a dime a dozen in the United States. But not so in Pakistan. This summer, for the first time ever, boys and girls in Pakistan went to camp together to study science and math. Host Peggy Wehmeyer talks with CLP interpreter Faris Kasim, who works for the Indus Resource Center in Karachi.
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Pakistani immigrants in Seattle confront a huge challenge at home
As the first notes of the Quran, sung by a diminutive imam in an embroidered prayer cap, fill the Westin Bellevue's ornate Grand Ballroom, a sea of hands moves to cover heads. At the hotel, 450 people from Seattle's growing Pakistani community have gathered to help the troubled country they left behind. It's been a tough year for Pakistan.
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'Ghost schools' in Pakistan plagued by government neglect
KARACHI - Amid ankle-deep garbage, charcoal-scribbled graffiti images of machine guns and the scorched remains of squatters' fires, the dusty green chalkboard still reads "December 2, 2006." That's the last day classes were held in the primary-school wing of Mirza Adam Khan, a government-run compound of schools in the poor and violence-plagued neighborhood of Lyari.
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Educating Humiera
Pakistanis in Seattle give a Pakistan community the gift of girls' school
BUGNA, Pakistan - Thirteen-year-old Humiera Kausar's oversized sneakers hurry over piles of granite boulders and through scrubby pines bristling with last night's rain. A headscarf and pink shawl are wound tightly around her small frame to protect against the thick mist that has settled over her high mountain village.
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The ghost schools of Pakistan
Significant funding goes toward non-existent education provided by non-existent schools.
KARACHI - Despite ankle deep garbage, charcoal-scribbled graffiti of machine guns and the scorched remains of squatters' fires, the dusty green chalkboard still reads "December 2, 2006," the last day that classes were held in the primary school wing of Mirza Adam Khan, a government-run compound of schools in the poor and violence plagued Karachi neighborhood of Lyari.
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School for Working Children
UNICEF estimates that 250 million children work for a living in developing countries, and calls the practice of child labor a violation of basic human rights. Many advocates work to eliminate child labor completely, in particular because work can keep children out of school. But in one neighborhood in Karachi, Pakistan, a group of young people are both working and going to school. Reporter Jessica Partnow has the story.
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Alex Stonehill Interview
Pulitzer Center sponsored reporter discusses the education system and challenges in Pakistan.
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Galleries on the Go
Pulitzer Center sponsored reporter Alex Stonehill reports on the tradition of painting cargo trucks and the brief respite it offers Pakistanis from the violence.
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Pretty Trucks
Shipping is a big business in Pakistan. With new paved highways offering a fast track to Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, trucking is an important part of the country's economic engine. Goods arriving at the port of Karachi travel as far as US troops based in Afghanistan or newly rich central Asian republics farther north. The cargo shipping trucks here are decorated with bright colors, lines from Urdu poetry, and life sized paintings of politicians. From Karachi, at the heart of Pakistan's truck decorating business, Jessica Partnow filed this story.
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Pakistan: Education's Fault Lines
Journalists Sarah Stuteville and Alex Stonehill spent six weeks crisscrossing Pakistan to report on the country's growing education crisis. Both are funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and spoke recently with iWitness from Karachi about their experience. Watch the interview and find out why they believe Pakistan's religious schools get an unfair rap from the West, and how so-called "ghost schools" are at the heart of the state's failings. The two also talk with a Swat resident in Karachi who has just fled the fighting, and why his presence in the city is causing new tensions.
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Big, bright and, to many, beautiful
The truck artists of Karachi apply a splash of color to an otherwise bleak canvas.
KARACHI, Pakistan - At first glance this is not a colorful city. An aerial view of Karachi reveals a sprawl of squat markets and utilitarian high-rises set among sparse vegetation and dull industrial public art, a landscape of stucco corroded by salty sea air and looming cement structures coated in urban grime.
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School for Working Children
UNICEF estimates that 250 million children work for a living in developing countries, and calls the practice of child labor a violation of basic human rights. Many advocates work to eliminate child labor completely, in particular because work can keep children out of school. But in one neighborhood in Karachi, Pakistan, a group of young people are both working and going to school. Reporter Jessica Partnow has the story.
[more]
Hope for Pakistan's child workers
A Karachi-based group bent on eradicating child labor is offering school lessons outside working hours.
KARACHI, Pakistan - Sher Shah is a hard-working neighborhood - a confusing knot of cramped lanes offering up a riot of rattling power looms, puttering motors and booming furnaces. This rough suburb, with its garment factories, machine shops and scrap metal smelters far from the imposing cement skyscrapers of the city center, forms the industrial gut of Karachi.
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Swat Refugees
Hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis were already fleeing the Swat Valley before the latest fighting broke out. Sher Ali Khan, 55, is one of them. He fled his home in a village in the Swat Valley nine months ago. Sher Ali Khan now lives in a rented house in Landhi, a largely Pashtun settlement on the outskirts of Karachi. Khan, his wife, and 13 children have been crowded into a three-room house, anxiously awaiting the day they feel it's safe enough to return home. Khan discusses his situation with reporter Jessica Partnow.
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Bad times return to Karachi
Renewed violence in this Pakistani port city is threatening its status as a safe haven from troubles further north.
KARACHI, Pakistan - Despite Karachi's decades-old reputation as Pakistan's most violent city, over the last year this urban economic hub has remained a haven from the bombings and violence reverberating through the rest of the country. But a flaring of ethnic clashes in recent weeks, exacerbated by a the arrival of thousands of refugees from the violence in northern Pakistan, has many worried that instability has returned to the streets of this massive port city on the shores of the Arabian Sea.
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Caught in Pakistan's crossfire
Taliban militants, Pakistani military units, and US drone attacks spark an uneasy exodus.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan - The day is closing in Jellozai and children run along the narrow dusty rows of UNICEF-stamped tents trying to squeeze a little more play time out of the dying evening. Some 43,000 people live in this refugee camp just outside of Peshawar, after fleeing violence in the tribal regions not far from here.
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Pakistani Politics: Why Women's Voices Matter
Violence in Pakistan dominates the headlines. But rarely do we hear reports on the perspective of women. Sarah Stuteville finds their voices.
In the gray light of my first morning in Pakistan, the thick salty smell of sulfur introducing me to the seaside city of Karachi, the streets were full of men. With few exceptions it was men congregating in front of the still dark airport, men piled onto buses carnival decorated with Technicolor and chrome and men weaving through the thickening traffic on motor bikes and rickshaws.
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Pakistan: Education at a Crossroads
Pakistan gets plenty of press for bomb attacks and international terrorist threats. After two months traveling the country last year, CLP journalists found that the ongoing crisis here has its roots in a corrupt and collapsing education system that is feeding poverty, discontent and violence.
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