“In the beginning, I was just play acting, teaching my friends,” Babar Ali says, “but then I realized these children will never learn to read and write if they don’t have proper lessons. It’s my duty to educate them, to help our country build a better future.”
These are the words of 16 year-old Babar Ali, who at the age of 9 started teaching some of his friends as a game. A resident of West Bengal in India, Babar lives in a deeply impoverished region, yet he is one of the fortunate ones. His family’s circumstances are comfortable enough that he doesn’t have to work, and they can afford the roughly $40 per year that it takes to send him to school some 12 kilometers away from his home. Each morning, after doing his chores, he heads off by auto-rickshaw and foot. “It’s not easy for me to come to school because I live so far away,” he says, “but the teachers are good and I love learning. And my parents believe I must get the best education possible… that’s why I’m here.”
But what attracted me to this story I came across on the BBC was what Babar does after school. When he arrives home at four o’clock each afternoon, he goes to his family’s yard, rings a bell, and becomes “the youngest headmaster in the world.” Some 800 children pour in from the surrounding village to the very rustic school he has created in his yard and surrounding area, filling every nook and cranny. Babar and nine of his friends conduct lessons for students as young as four and as old as he is. They teach what they have have learned that day or earlier, charging nothing. Babar has even arranged for donations of books and food.
Babar knows that one of the brutal realities of his nation’s poverty is that countless children never get an education, particularly because their families, in order to scrape by, need them to work. The story also profiled 14 year-old Chumki Habra who is one of Babar’s students. Since she was five, she does cleaning work every day so she can earn the $5 a month that her family desperately needs. Come 4:00, though, Chumki heads to Babar’s school, where she stays until 7:00 when she must return to do more cleaning. Her goal is to become a nurse.
Government officials believe that Babar’s school has helped increase literacy in his area, and he has won several awards for his work. “Our area is economically deprived,” he says. “Without this school many kids wouldn’t get an education, they’d never even be literate.” His sense of responsibility, his desire to help others, his long term dedication, and his own hunger for learning are all exemplary and heartwarming. In fact, if you care to learn more about his story or others in the BBC series “Hunger to Learn,” visit www.bbcc.o.uk and search either “Babar Ali” or “Hunger to Learn.”