I never allowed myself to recognize that a few drops of water spilt at the counter ever meant anything. I didn’t see myself so much as batting an eyelid when watching somebody pour a whole glass down the sink either. I rarely ever gave it any notice when entire splashes of water would spill out of pools, and flow into drains, to maybe later create ripples somewhere else.
It wasn’t until I stepped into Mashal Model School four years ago, until I taught my first class, and had my first interactions with the little drops of water that I didn’t know then would go on to create entire oceans in our world, did I realize the significance of a single spill.
After that first day, a different course was set. I don’t mean to suggest that I didn’t value water conservation before, but merely that the metaphor took on another meaning of its own. I have been aware of the gender gap in education, as well as the ideas that the word ‘poverty’ tends to conjure up in our minds, some based on mainstream media, some based on stereotypes, some based on social illustrations contributed to by value consensus, and some from my own perspectives. However, to have known and to have experienced the phenomenon proved to be no more alike than Jung and Freud’s views regarding the derivatives of dreams.
Simply put, to know these children was to love them. To know their company was to know joy – and it shattered me to realize how little the world I knew was doing for them – to know how little I was doing for them. And this wasn’t something I could just mindlessly use capitalist theory and its systemic processes in our contemporary world to defend, this wasn’t something I could dismiss and digress from with ease. To quote Weber, knowing that the inequality in our society was not essentially attributed to capitalism, knowing that the hierarchical societies we are so ingrained within today are characterized by inequality which then arguably leads to poverty – was enough for me to accept that I was as much a part of the society to be blamed as anyone else.
When I started seeing the little drops of water around me as the possible beginnings of rivers, and streams and oceans that could fuel the world – when I started seeing every single drop as no less significant than a much vaster, considerably bigger body of water, I knew what my next steps needed to be.
Gradually, an internship at a non-profit school with very few funds grew into an initiative branching out across the city. Consequently, I was led to collaborate with my friend Mohsin, who like me, saw significance in singularity.
A few months later, born out of a lot of hope, endurance, and hard work was our NGO: Justuju-e-Ilm. This initiative was built in Islamabad solely to proliferate and increase the accessibility to education, information, and educational equipment and facilitation to children of families living below the poverty line, particularly
- Children of religious or social minorities,
- Girls in areas where education has not been made accessible to them due to cultural, religious and economic barriers,
- Children with learning disabilities and mental disorders,
- Children without parental, familial and household support,
- Children who have been victims of substance abuse, sexual abuse, and domestic abuse.
Over the next few months, we targeted all of our energy towards the drops we someday hoped to see create not only ripples but entire waves in the oceans of our world.
Our NGO expanded into a collaborative platform, our registrations opened up to an increasingly large number of members, and 200+ students have been tutored since our establishment in 2019.
That is over 200 single drops that have not gone unnoticed, over 200 spillages that have been prevented, and over 200 beautiful individual voices that we have been able to amplify.
Most recently this year, we collaborated with Mashal Model School for our COVID-19 Summer Relief Program, and because of all the support and donations from not only our volunteers but our community as a whole, we’ve been able to successfully raise over Rs.100,000 for our students and their families.
It is these seemingly effortless acts of humanity that I then turn to; brief interactions between human beings in an effort to amplify something in somebody else that they may have felt in themselves. Something that is crucial to do, when we live in a world where a majority of us spend our time only trying to purify polluted oceans, so recklessly dismissing the minuscule drops of water that created them in the first place.
For more information, visit @Justujueilm or reach out to us at
0300-8541140 – Kamila Aazeen
0317-7733341 – Mohsin Sajjad
By Kamila Azeen
IFFI 