How LFT’s education initiative helps orphaned children fulfill their unmet dreams?

Asma and Aref have been newly enrolled in school first grade as formal students. Both have already passed the school age but were left out of school because of poverty and daily life adversities. Aref and Asma have had no one to help or support them to attend school. They belong to a family which has been hit unexplainably hard by destitution. Their mother –Nikbakht – has been suffering from a chronic illness for years which has caused her immense troubles and plight. She cannot even pay her home rent and cover her treatment costs let alone send her children to school and afford its costs.

Their father died of a sickness five years ago. Since then, Asma and Aref, as orphaned children, have been deprived of the possibility of going to school. They have been only dreaming of sitting on the school chair – a dream which hadn’t come true until recently. But, at the beginning of the year, we learned about their family and dropped by them to find out about Asma and Aref. Very tragically, we learned that Asma – aged 10 – has been left out of school due to her mother’s inability to simply send her to school while Aref has been forced to resort to street work and turn into a shoe polisher on the streets.

None of these children had sat in a school classroom for a day before we admitted them to the school under the LFT’s education programme for orphaned children. Currently, both are first graders who are attending school very happily and with strong enthusiasm and are making progress with the passage of each day. According to Asma’s mother, she often cried and complained that why she cannot go to school. But through this programme, we have put her in the classroom, uplifting her noble dream and giving her the means to start to shape her future. Likewise, Aref is now a school student who was a shoe polisher two months ago. Nikbakht – Asma and Aref’s mother – is especially happy about the chance her children have gained to embark on an educational journey and about the support they are enjoying under the programme.