INDEPTH: A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE – A school of joy and hope
CBC News Online | February 23, 2004 – Reporter: Peter Mansbridge
All this week, we’ve been talking about the work these soldiers are doing in Kabul, but they’re not the only Canadians making a difference here. Far from it. A Canadian family’s project has brought joy and hope in to dozens of lives. It’s a sound so strange in war-torn Kabul, you can’t help but be drawn to it.
Inside, a place of innocence in this city of so much sadness, the brainchild of Roshan Thomas, an optometrist from B.C. who decided education was the best way to help the people of Afghanistan. At her Sparks Academy, the only school for five- and six-year-olds in the country, she takes Kabul’s best and brightest, many growing up in terrible poverty, and teaches them how to be children.
Thomas says that before enrolling, many of the children had no idea even how to play. Among the students here are the children of Kabul’s war widows. The city is known as the widows’ capital of the world, the result of decades of war.
Ismailimail 