Pakistan: Hearts and Minds
As new leaders in Washington and Islamabad struggle against a surge of Islamic militancy and growing political instability in Pakistan, their greatest challenge will be winning the hearts and minds of 170 million citizens in one of the world’s poorest and most densely populated Muslim countries. Sponsored by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
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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Lessons from God Poverty and Faith Fill Pakistan's Madrassas
Peshawar, PAKISTAN--Rows of adolescent boys kneel in an open marble courtyard, dwarfed by the oversized, yellowing Arabic texts opened before them. Murmuring under white knit prayer caps, their small bodies sway in rhythm with their hafiz (memorization of the verses of the Koran by rote). The entryway is adorned by a faded poster of Mulana Sami al-Haq, the owner of the sprawling grounds of the Dar al-Haqqania Madrassa and Principle Administrator to its 3000 students. Shrouded in green, he holds a Koran in one uplifted arm and a Kalashnikov in the other.
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Up All Night Telemarketing in Lahore, Pakistan
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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Categories: Pakistan, Listen, Labor and Immigration, Poverty and Development
Pakistani immigrants in Seattle confront a huge challenge at home As highly skilled people pour out of the troubled country, the local Pakistani community is working to stop the brain drain and help educate those back 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.
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Categories: Pakistan, USA, Read, Education, Labor and Immigration, Poverty and Development
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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Categories: Pakistan, Read, Listen, Education, Gender, Poverty and Development
The Ghost Schools of Pakistan Frightening realities from inside an education system on the brink.
September 20, 2009: Story updated with radio feature and photo slideshow. 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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Categories: Pakistan, Watch, Read, Listen, Education, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
CLP Journalists Alex Stonehill and Sarah Stuteville on Frontline/WORLD 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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Categories: Pakistan, Watch, Blogs, Education, Human Rights, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
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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Categories: Pakistan, Watch, Read, Listen, Labor and Immigration, Poverty and Development
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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Categories: Pakistan, Read, Listen, Education, Human Rights, Poverty and Development
Karachi Nights
No matter how frenzied the exhaust-coated sun-saturated day is in Karachi—this city really lives at night.
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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.
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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Categories: Pakistan, Read, Listen, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
Behind the Scenes Update from Karachi Pakistan Video blog from the CLP's multimedia team
The CLP team takes a break to reflect on the first half of the Pakistan: Hearts and Minds reporting project.
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Categories: Pakistan, Watch, Blogs, The Media, Politics and Conflict
Caught in Pakistan's crossfire Taliban militants, Pakistani military units, and US drone attacks spark an uneasy exodus.
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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Categories: Pakistan, Read, Human Rights, Labor and Immigration, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
Letting the Terrorists Win
Pale columns of smoke are rising from a sea of blue tents stretching into the distance of the flat khaki plain that is Jellozai, a refugee camp eight miles outside of Peshawar, home to an estimated 43,000 people fleeing violence in the tribal regions not far from here.
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Categories: Pakistan, Blogs, The Media, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
Pakistan's Viral Video
The release of a grainy video showing a girl being flogged for adultery by the Taliban in the Swat valley has created an uproar in Pakistan. In this video-blog journalist Alex Stonehill discusses why, amidst all the violence in Pakistan, this particular video has evoked such a reaction.
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Categories: Pakistan, Watch, Blogs, Human Rights, Gender, The Media
Hanging with the Ladies
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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Categories: Pakistan, Read, Blogs, Education, Human Rights, Gender, Politics and Conflict
Fear Factor: Pakistan
I’ve become terrified of my email. I’ve always been a little skittish of the inbox, never knowing what that first login might bring to my day - an outraged critique of a recent article, a facebook request from a long lost ex-boyfriend - but in the weeks leading up to our departure my crowded inbox has set my stomach lurching in newly anxious ways as I sift through daily accounts of the chaos that has touched down in Pakistan.
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Categories: Pacific Northwest, Pakistan, USA, Read, Blogs, Education, The Media, Politics and Conflict
Reflections from Pakistan
I was in Pakistan for a little over a month last year reporting on the issue of bonded labor and debt slavery in the country. Though Pakistan was only one of the ten countries I visited in an eight-month tour, it looms the largest in my memory. I was fascinated by this country so at odds with itself: as feudal as it is modern, as isolated from as it is harassed by the international community, as hospitable as it is hostile. But the real reason Pakistan is still on my mind is because America won’t let me forget it.
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Twenty-First Century Slavery Pakistan's Brutal Bonded Labor System Lingers On
Lahore, PAKISTAN—On the night of October 1, 2005 in the tiny town of Jannat, one hour outside of Lahore, Shoukat Masih, 35, was fast asleep. He and his extended family had pulled their rusted charpoys out into the courtyard of their one room home in order to enjoy the cool air and a night’s rest before returning at dawn to another twelve hours of hard labor in the neighboring brick kilns. Around 11:00 pm a group of men armed with pistols and sticks entered the courtyard and yanked Masih to the ground, shouting, “Are you the one making statements on the television?!” His wife was in a neighboring village visiting family, but his father, children, nieces, and nephews, all looked on in terror as he was beaten to death on the packed clay earth.
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Categories: Pakistan, Read, Labor and Immigration
Faces of Pakistan
Our reporting took us to three of Pakistan's four provinces, from northern mountain regions to lawless tribal areas and the agricultural fields of Sindh, as well as Pakistan's four major cities - Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar and Islamabad. Despite mainstream news coverage that depicts a one-dimensional Pakistan seen through the lens of The Global War on Terror, our travels revealed a country of incredible diversity and remarkable complexity.
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The Power of Propaganda Dissolving Prejudice in Pakistan
The late afternoon sun beats down on the high-rocky landscape. Sweat runs down my face and the back of my neck–tickles my scalp underneath a long grey burka swaddled tightly around my head and shoulders, and hanging to just below my knees. My feet slip on loose pebbles as I scramble up a steep slope in the rugged foothills of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province.
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The Best Friends Aid Can Buy
Surprisingly, the strongest indicators of international aid presence are the words of this man, Dantali Shah, the village head here in Kakray. “We are so happy for the help of America-- please don’t be afraid of us. We welcome any more aid the Americans can offer.”
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Categories: Pakistan, Blogs, Politics and Conflict
Backpacks not Bombs International aid brings more than relief to earthquake victims, humanitarian challenge remains
Ayubia, PAKISTAN—Ten year old Fazia Reza was in English class when she felt the ground starting to move. She watched in terror as the walls of the school began to tremble and crack, obeying her teacher’s shouts to run outside and start praying just in time to see the roof collapse and the walls cave in. Her father, one of 40 people injured in this tiny village of just 145 families, lost his leg, and two others died in the October 8, 2005 earthquake. Almost all of the town’s buildings were destroyed.
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Categories: Pakistan, Read, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
Poverty and Faith Fill Pakistan's Madrassas
For years, Pakistan's religious schools have been identified as breeding grounds for terrorists. But they're also the only opportunity millions of poor Pakistani children have to get an education. In this video, reporter Alex Stonehill goes inside madrassas to find out whats really being taught.
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Categories: Pakistan, Watch, Education, Poverty and Development, Politics and Conflict
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.
[more]
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