Hanna Lockman
It started with a struggle for a man named Mohammad Ayub. When poverty hit his home after his father passed away, he struggled to get a proper education for himself and his siblings. He was responsible to raise and provide for his family. By going through hard times, he learned how important education is. That’s why he promised himself he would never let any child miss the opportunity to get a proper education.
In 1986 he left his village in Mandi Bahauddin and looked for a job in Islamabad. That’s where he took a job as a firefighter. Then 1988 was the year an ammunition depot in Rawalpindi exploded and killed more than 1,300 people. After the tragedy, he saw small children collecting garbage and begging which made him gather a few of these children that he saw in his area and he decided to teach them how to read and write He uses his own salary which he divided in three parts: one part is money that goes into his school project, the other third goes to his family and the money that remains goes to himself. At first people were quite skeptical about his motives, but after seeing progress with the children, other families started approaching him to teach their children too.
“My family was staying in the village and I was here in the city alone, so I wanted to do something in my spare time that would be of some use,” Ayub told Al Jazeera.
Today 58 years old Master Ayub has taught over 200 students a year for over 30 years with the help of two of his old students who decided to teach the children in this school without any payment, at a public park in Islamabad’s F-6 sector, a couple of kilometers from Pakistan’s parliament building. Thousands have passed through in the last three decades, taking government accredited exams to allow them to go on to higher education, or secure decent jobs. They achieve success with an education he provided for free.
Now, together with the children they collect stones to build the school. With some funds received by donations and money that he has been saving. It will be used to build their school. He is a jewel among us. Someone so selfless, he proved to the world that humility is more important and a single person can do any good for society, even at large scale level.
