Giraffes have been sighted in MA |
Someone was coming to visit the sixth-graders at the Broad Meadows Middle School in Quincy, Massachusetts. It was 1994, and the visitor was a boy named Iqbal Masih. He was their age and he had come all the way from Pakistan to talk to people in America about his life in his country. The Broad Meadows students were excited. They’d never had a guest from Pakistan before. When Iqbal arrived, they were very surprised. He was so small, his feet didn’t reach the floor when he sat in their chairs. His small hands were as rough as an old man’s. When he told them about his life, they understood why. His family was very poor, he told them. They once borrowed money to pay a bill. Then they couldn’t pay the man who had loaned them the money. He threatened to hurt them all. To pay him, the family sold Iqbal! A man who made carpets paid them $12 for Iqbal, who was then four years old. The carpet maker chained Iqbal to a loom where he made carpets for 12 hours every day. His small hands tied thousands of knots every day, making the carpets. If he stopped, the carpet maker hit him. Iqbal got so little food, he didn’t grow like other children. When the Broad Meadows students heard this story, they understood why Iqbal was so much smaller than they were, and why his hands were so rough. When Iqbal was 10, he found out that it was against the law to make someone work for no money. Pakistan has a law against slavery, and Iqbal was a slave. He ran away and he began to tell people about being a slave. He found out that 7 million children in his country are slaves and that there millions more in other countries. Many good people in Pakistan want to stop slavery there. They helped Iqbal travel and tell people his story. But, Iqbal told the kids, many bad people in Pakistan wanted him to keep quiet about child slavery. |
Iqbal told the Broad Meadows kids that they were very lucky because they
could go to school. He dreamed that all children in his country could go
to school one day.
The American kids were upset by this terrible story. They promised Iqbal they would help in some way.
Very soon after Iqbal got back to Pakistan, someone shot and killed him! The Broad Meadows students felt terrible when they heard. Remembering Iqbal’s dream of Pakistani kids going to school, they decided to raise the money to build a school in his village. Some people thought that was an awfully big job, but the kids were sure they could do it and their teacher said he would help them.
They wrote letters and e-mail messages to schools all over the world, telling them they could help build “Iqbal’s School.” They asked each person or class who got the message to send $12 to help build the school. They chose the number 12 because Iqbal was sold for $12, and he was 12 years old when he died. Everytime they got a donation, they wrote a thank you letter to the giver.
At the same time that they were asking thousands of people for money, the Broad Meadows kids were making sure that people knew about child slavery. They told the story to reporters for newspapers and television stations. And they asked people who sell carpets in this country to be sure they had not been made by child slaves. Many store owners just laughed at them or told them to mind their own business.
There was so much work to do that for a whole year, everyone in the class came to school early and stayed very late. They worked on weekends and over holidays. At the end of the school year, they had raised over a hundred thousand dollars! They bought a building in Iqbal’s village and they hired teachers and a principal. They even found 50 families whose children were slaves and they bought the children back from the people who “owned” them!
When the new school opened, 200 Pakistani children came to learn. They were getting a chance at a better life, all because some children in faraway Massachusetts cared and worked very, very hard to make Iqbal’s dream come true.
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