By Duaa Shah
Pop culture teaches us to fear 13. So we run from 13 on a Friday, 13 guests at a table, 13 letters in a name. But even as rationale hits and we wave fear off as superstition, 13 remains merciless; in Pakistan, only 13% of girls are still in school by ninth grade.
Fear renders some of us stagnant. We close our eyes as if that’s enough to evade settling responsibility. Yet beyond the oblivion we quickly wade into, 13 lives on, a number whose smallness reflects millions of girls’ aspirations turning to dust.
Fear inspires others. They choose ache over the dark because the affliction of witnessing is inconsequential against the affliction of experiencing. 13 becomes a number whose implied adversity can then itself turn to dust.
On 26th April, the NUST Community Service Club (NCSC), under Project Orphans kNOw More (OkM), visited Mera Ghar, an orphanage dreaming of doing just that. The “Ghar” encompassed girls from diverse backgrounds, some with families and some without, but all at an intersection of gender, age, and socioeconomics that gives way to harrowing vulnerability. But even in that vulnerability, the children were brimming with innocent prayers like seeing their loved ones for Eid and relentless ambition for careers like medicine, military, engineering, and law. And those prayers and that ambition, which, for many others, are left alone and untethered, find support at Mera Ghar. The administration not only opens its doors for girls across the country’s geographic and ethnic boundaries but also helps pave vibrant and unique lifepaths by sponsoring primary, secondary, and tertiary education; providing facilities like self-defense classes; and keeping multiple caretakers.
As NUST volunteers conversed, played, celebrated, and (finally) broke their fasts with nearly a hundred vivacious, affectionate, and ingenious girls, the seemingly strictly drawn boundary of 13 seemed more faint, more faded, more forgiving.
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