Educator, Master Trainer and now a Parent
Parwaaz is a community initiative of parental education for the parents bearing children of ages zero to three years. This programme aims to enable parents to understand the philosophy of Early Childhood Development (ECD) in order to ensure holistic development of their child.
I heard about this initiative when I was in teens. One of the mentors forced-fully sent me for the Parwaaz training. It was an eye-opening training for me and added the fuel to my passion for ECD practices. What would you expect a teacher to respond, if a child is not listening to a story. An older me would would keep forcing the child to listen but, me as a Parwaaz educator would keep narrating the story with all the love so that if a child even don’t listen today, the love of stories and story telling still flourishes.
I would take lead in planning and conduct of parwaaz sessions, interacting with parents, listening to the ground-level challenges and helping community as a whole to look at child’s upbringing with a different, positive perspective. I still remember the focus on healthy eating and thus, would request my mother to prepare interesting healthy combos for parwaaz children to be distributed after every session, that too in a budget!
The days passed on, the learnings grew exponentially. We grew with our mentors’ feedback and parwaaz grew too. The parwaaz was now ‘parwaaz plus’ which would begin from the times of conception (pregnancy). I would now think of expanding my horizon in the field and applied for Master Trainer Parwaaz. A very small group of 35 educators were selected for thos programme all over Karachi. This team was led by the team of doctors and educators from Aga Khan University (AKU) that came up with a course related to a beautiful blend of child health and child learning. We were blessed to have another eye-opening, full of knowledge and wisdom sessions that made us reflect to our past practices and enlightened us with new practices and researches in the field. Any thing that is more huge than a galaxy?…true that, A human brain! thats what we Master trainers were learning to deal with.
Right after this training, we were on ground to begin with pilot phase of this parwaaz plus programme. I was not alone this time, I had a little womb plant with me. Fortunately, I was designated pre-natal classes to conduct. What an amazing blessing it was! Me as a facilitator and my husband as a parwaaz parent, me as a pregnant mother, helping other pregnant families to understand child development practices. Got a ball? Bounce it and observe it coming back to you. Thats what the hype of ‘serve and return’ is all about, one of the ways of healthy brain development. I could never forget those little kicks while conducting sessions!
Now my womb plant is five months old. I joined Parwaaz as a parent. I thought what could be new for me in this, but never wanted to miss being part of Parwaaz. I attended my first class and not a single thing was uninteresting to me. I now understand the reason about parents loving parwaaz so much. It gave me the feeling of ‘we’ as a community and that ‘I am not alone’, All while doing activities, it made me fall in love with my baby all over and over, over and over. It was definitly worth every second and an unforgettable family time activity.
I remember one of our leaders sharing about how the name ‘parwaaz’ for this prograame was inspired by the airport announcement (parwaaz xyz rawangi ke lye tayar ha) while they were on a official video call during travel. I simply cannot believe a programme that was a dream once is now fully fledged workable model with hundreds of volunteers giving their time and knowledge for the cause. Many well-settled bussinesses tried to replicate this prograame but could not meet its quality and make an impact, what this voluntary programme has paved the legacy!
Dear guriya, I hope together we return back to our community in many folds what we have now blessed from it. I hope that the Womb plant become a forum to help develop a learning community.
