By Gerry Boyle '78

Osman Haneef '05 with schoolchildren in rural Pakistan. Haneef spent part of his Jan Plan designing school programs for isolated villages in Balochistan.

Someday soon hundreds of children in Pakistan's sprawling Balochistan province may get the chance to go to school, now an impossibility in many of their scattered rural villages. If and when that happens, Osman Haneef '05 will be able to say he played a part.

Assisted by a grant from Colby's Linda K. Cotter Internship Fund, Haneef worked for the month of January with the Pakistan National Rural Support Programme. The NRSP is a nongovernmental organization whose projects range from sex education to loans for purchase of livestock to developing new models for local schools. In a month, Haneef had a hand in all of these, writing a report for the micro-credit program, suggesting that sex-education materials be tailored to each gender and helping to write a proposal for the village schools.

"It was the kind of thing you could never dream of doing at the undergraduate level anywhere within the Western world," he said, after returning to Colby. "No one would ever say, 'Yeah, you don't have your B.A. yet. That's fine, go ahead.' It was definitely like throwing you in the deep end of the ocean and seeing how you do."

The son of a Pakistani foreign service officer now living in Islamabad, Haneef has lived in Germany, Egypt, Australia and Qatar. Last year he did an internship in Islamabad, where he created an industry analysis report on the cement industry for Citibank. For Jan Plan he returned home to look at economic issues of a vastly different scale. Instead of an entire industry, he was considering a program that enables a family to buy a single goat or cow. "It makes a huge difference for the people. It's a source of income, you can milk it, you get cheese and butter," he said. "A very small amount of money can change someone's life there."

And nothing can change a life like education.

In the arid and mountainous regions of Balochistan, the only primary school often is in a distant town, which makes it inaccessible to most rural children. Government schools are often neglected and become "ghost schools," Haneef said. "If the government sets up something, it's, like, 'It's not our school, it's the government's school,'" he said. "I guess the whole point [of the National Rural Support Programme plan] is that you make people contribute in some way to creating the school so they feel it's their own and they are willing to maintain it. It's that whole philosophy of trying to get people to help themselves, thereby empowering them."

Though that might sound theoretical, Haneef's work went beyond development theory. Before helping to write the school proposal, which requests money from the United Nations to start the rural education program in Balochistan, he visited a model school run by the NRSP.

"That was something," he said, smiling. "To actually see five-year-old, six-year-old little kids, pudgy little kids running about enjoying themselves. It doesn't really matter what they might have [for material things]. They were all dressed up in their little uniforms, all getting up as soon as anybody rises, singing, 'Good morning, madame.' Asking them what they wanted to be when they grew up, they'd be, like, 'Doctors, scientists, lawyers.' That was really refreshing. To some extent you feel kind of sad because you wonder how many of those children can really ever achieve those dreams. But to think that they can actually have hope for that, or that [school] has given them something to aspire to . . . "

The experience led Haneef to ponder some of the thorny questions raised by international development projects and policies. Is the money well spent? Are there other ways to help the world's marginalized populations? "How do you measure social change?" he asked. "How do you measure empowerment? How much is giving this person a goat worth? Is it just the value of the goat? Is that all you're going to look at? Or have you helped someone who desperately needs it and couldn't get help anywhere else?"