Teachers become Caregivers
The government teachers involved in the RCC program are quite experienced, most of them working in these schools for 7 years now. Not very different from their own teachers who had taught them in schools, they still took the children through grueling and boring routines of rote learning the alphabets from the Primer, numbers off the blackboard and sessions of screaming multiplication tables in unison right before school was let off. Every now and then, a misbehaving child also got the perfunctory slap on the hand or a mild beating for not being able to recite his alphabets/numbers properly or misbehavior of any sort. They had all attended numerous training sessions and workshops organized by the government.

Zamarud Suleiman, a government teacher for katchi class in Tando Saindad claims that there have been great changes after the RCC interventions in the school environment and the way children respond to the idea of schooling. “Previously, children were very scared of their teachers, were always crying and fearful of the concept of school. It is not like that anymore and now there is a marked change in the lives of our children.” She is now engaging the children in learning through play techniques, and has also softened her attitude towards them as a teacher. She repeatedly emphasizes that it was her lack of knowledge that led her to behave in a harsh manner towards children and that now she knows that children will learn and respond better in an environment where they are given love and affection coupled with the security that they can trust their teachers. She quotes the example of a girl called Zaib-un-Nisa who used to come to school with her mother and cried continuously, but now that she’s receiving the teachers’ attention and is surrounded by a friendly atmosphere, she has started to come to school herself with newfound interest. The parents are also very happy with this change and she now meets little boys who insist that they want to study in her school too!

Paving Way for Girl's Education
It is a well known fact that in smaller villages, education is not considered a necessity and hence not promoted either. If anything, it has a very bad reputation and is perceived as an element which leads to the breakdown of well established societal norms and therefore discouraged.

Gul Bano, an Assistant Teacher for the katchi class in Yar Mohammad Kandra, a small village in Tando Mohammad Khan belongs to such a community. An educated girl from the village had taken off to get married to someone she liked without the consent of her family and this scandalous behavior had further cemented the belief that girls should not receive any education at all as it would “spoil them.” Gul Bano’s family, however, had a different outlook on education and she was the first girl in her village who had completed her education till the Intermediate level.

She was a volunteer teacher in the village school after she completed her education and helped out teachers in all the classes whenever and wherever needed. Employed by the AKES,P in the RCC program a few months ago, she is now a regular part of the government school’s Katchi class. She was not very different from the other government school teachers when she came to the first training session, as everyone was employing age old methods of teaching the children through rote learning techniques. On her return from the training, she would apply the new teaching methods to her nieces and nephews at home and observed that they were very happy and willing to learn, which encouraged and excited her about being a teacher as well as the program.