SED Grads Bring Schools to South Asia

The world is shrinking, as everyone knows, and the tragedies and injustices in off-limits neighborhoods and distant countries are not nearly as easy to gloss over, morally, as they once were. The six Boston University alumni we’re profiling this week have chosen work that brings them into contact with the neediest people in our global society. Yet they do not consider themselves extraordinary. They are responding to an urge to engage that feels both necessary and obvious. As one says simply, “There isn’t a choice.”

Arti Pandey remembers the moment she felt sure her work was making an impact. She was in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, at a school established by Barakat, the Cambridge, Mass.–based educational nonprofit she helps run. It was parent-teacher conference day, and for families in the poor community the school serves, it can be a luxury to send even one child to school instead of to work. Pandey wondered how many of the parents, themselves often illiterate, would show up. She was shocked when nearly every parent did.

The school serves a population of Hindus and Muslims, and women of both communities descended on the school with “their broods,” she recalls — younger children, members of their extended families. A woman in full burka arrived, and after seeing there were no men at the school, removed the garment and began questioning the teachers in the universal language of motherhood. “Is this boy behaving? Don’t hesitate — if he isn’t doing his work, scold him! Every day I tell him, do your homework, but he doesn’t listen to me!”

Pandey (SED’03,’07) says the scene reinforced something she had observed elsewhere in South Asia: no matter the poverty, no matter the marginalization of a given population, “there is always such an intense demand for education.”

Pandey is program director for Barakat, a lean, vigorous organization that funds three schools in Pakistan, two in Afghanistan, and two in India, as well as other educational, health, and well-being programs in the region. From a small storefront near Central Square, Pandey and executive director Damon Luloff (SED’07) run — in fact, make up in its entirety — Barakat’s U.S. headquarters. They manage an international staff of 120, recruiting local people who know the South Asian communities they serve and who identify needs and work toward solutions that are both feasible and respectful of customs and attitudes. In that way, they’ve been able to quietly launch programs that would otherwise be controversial: education for girls and women; schools for members of ethnic or social groups traditionally denied opportunities, such as the lowest castes in India; education for forgotten populations of Afghan refugees in Pakistan; health programs in schools.

Luloff and Pandey both did their graduate work at the International Educational Development Program at the School of Education, and Barakat runs on a principle they absorbed there. As Luloff says, “Any place where there needs to be some kind of change, people need to create that change. So education doesn’t just happen in schools. Any place can be a place where learning happens.”

That’s particularly apt when it comes to women’s education. One of Barakat’s successful enterprises is a series of literacy programs in a northern province of Afghanistan, home to populations of ethnic Turkmen and Uzbeks. In conservative communities, many families don’t allow their daughters to attend school, because girls and women are not supposed to be seen by men outside of their families. Barakat’s programs offer an acceptable alternative: they are conducted in the homes of neighboring women and taught by local women who have achieved some level of education themselves. The students are girls and women “of all ages,” says Pandey. “Most are totally illiterate and coming to school for the first time. There is no other way out for these women.”

Barakat, launched in the mid 1990s, is now at a turning point; its founding sponsor is pulling back its support and giving Barakat a couple of years to find the means to stand on its own feet. Luloff and Pandey are preparing for the transition by building a database of donors and starting to raise money on their own. They’re nervous, but confident. “Unlike other young nonprofits looking for support, we have a lot to show for the work we’ve done,” Luloff says. “We can point to a 14-year track record.”

Besides, says Pandey, there isn’t any other option. She’s seen the immense need in these regions and the empowering effects of simple literacy. “Now that I’ve met these women and gotten to know them, we have to keep going,” she says. “There isn’t a choice.”

Bari Walsh can be reached at bawalsh@bu.edu.

Check back tomorrow to read part two of “The Good Life: Six BU Alums at Work in the World.”

"The Good Life" was originally published in the summer 2008 edition of Bostonia.