A small miracle at the top of a mountain

In its native Pushtu, Laram means "scorpion".

Once a month a battered UN truck labours up a narrow, forbidding valley along stream beds and swithback roads to this tough mountain village in Pakistan’s North west Frontier Province. It is loaded with vegetable oil to be delivered among the parents of Aram who have agreed to send their little girls to school.

The oil-for-schoolgirl project administered by the United Nations is a new weapon in a worldwide battle against not just female illiteracy but hunger. The people here are so desperately poor that a girls’ education is often the last thing on a parent’s mind. In 1994, the World Food Programme of the United Nations launched its oil-for-schoolgirl programme. The strategy was to give an 11-pound can of cooking oil – often the most expensive item in the people’s diet here – to each girl who attended classes at least 20 days a month. The same incentive was given to teachers to reduce absenteeism.

The programme immediately raised a girl’s status in her family. "The little girl who picks up her can of oil has something visible to present," said a UN staff member. "She is bringing it to the household."

Immediately after the programme was introduced, school enrolment among girls in the village skyrocketed. One school saw its student population increase tenfold, from 20 to 220.

Some of the girls are very bright. According to Hussna Ara, their teacher, if they could stay, they would one day become teachers and help the poor. "If the oil stops, I am afraid, they will stop coming," she said.

Adapted from the Los Angeles Times (22 December 1997)