Two years ago, the seventh-grade students at Broad Meadows Middle School in Quincy, Mass., met a famous person who changed their lives. The celebrity was Iqbal Masih, the 12-year-old Pakistani children's rights activist and former bonded laborer.
Iqbal, who was in the U.S. to receive a prestigious human rights award, had an incredible story to tell. When he was four years old, he had been sold to a rug maker for the equivalent of $12. He escaped when he was ten and was now working to free other children who were still enslaved. Iqbal had often been chained to his loom and even beaten, but he had not come halfway around the world just to talk about his own suffering. Iqbal told the Quincy students that his ambition was to be a lawyer and the Abraham Lincoln of his country who would put an end to the practice of bonded child labor. Next to freeing children, Iqbal said, the most important thing was making sure they got an education. One of the Quincy students, Amy Papile, remembered that Iqbal "had a blue pen and a carpet tool in his hands. He held the carpet tool up and said, 'This is not the tool children should have."' He told the seventh graders that he dreamed of founding a school in his home village for children like himself.
Iqbal Masih seems to have made a powerful connection with the students at Broad Meadows. This was partly because of the contrast between their comfortable lives and the unimaginable hardship of his. Amanda Loos, one of the students, put it this way: "He was so tiny. He had a scar on his eyebrow, where he was hit by an overseer .... The whole time I was with him, I kept thinking we grew up with luxuries, as spoiled brats. And they were working for my luxuries." But the students were apparently also struck by the conviction of a boy exactly their age that he could change an unjust system. So they decided to start a letter-writing campaign to let other American students know about child labor.
Iqbal was murdered--shot dead while riding his bicycle--just a few months after he visited the U.S. This moved the students at Broad Meadows to take on a much bigger project. They decided to raise money to build the school Iqbal had dreamed of. To do this, they sent out thousands of letters, fliers, and faxes and set up a web site (called "A Bullet Can't Kill a Dream") in which they told Iqbal's story. They asked people they contacted to contribute $12--a number they chose because Iqbal was 12 years old when he died and because he was sold to the rugmaker for $12. Originally, they hoped to raise $5000 to build a one-room school, but by September 15, 1996, The Kids' Campaign to Build a School for Iqbal had received $123,200 from students and others in 50 states and 20 countries. The campaign will continue until the end of 1996.
The money will go to establish the Iqbal Masih Education Center, a school for 200 poor Pakistani children who have either been bonded laborers or are at risk of being sold. It will also provide money for 50 Pakistani families to buy back their children from bondage, and it will form part of a future endowment for the school. The Kids' Campaign hopes to dedicate the school on April 16, 1997, the second anniversary of Iqbal Masih's death.
To make the campaign a success, Ron Adams, a teacher and the students' advisor, says the kids worked incredibly hard and took all kinds of initiatives that we don't usually expect of 12- and 13-year-olds. They came to school early, stayed late, and worked through vacations. They sent out thousands of letters, including a personal response to every person or organization that wrote them, and, when they found they would be able to build the school, they wrote to 300 organizations in Pakistan, asking them to submit proposals. Their extraordinary success is worthy of the boy who inspired it, but in many respects these kids are average teenagers--and that is important.
We Americans tend to expect very little of our children. We expect them to be spoiled and cynical. We allow them to be precocious in some ways and babies in others. Then we criticize them for being shallow and selfish. The students from Quincy should make us think again. They were not moved by Iqbal because he had the glamor of a rock singer or sports hero or movie star--malnutrition had stunted his growth and his back was crooked from bending over the loom. They recognized his heroism and responded to that. Our young people want to do more; they want us to expect more of them. The Kids' Campaign to Build a School for Iqbal shows what they can do.