Page 285 - James Caan - The Real Deal

28 · Back to School

‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’, and I couldn’t help but wonder what
speaking English would do for them, and for the country. If you
can speak English, you can get double the salary and you can build
a future. I love that nursery rhyme now.
I took my mother to see the school a couple of months after it
opened, and when she saw my dad’s name, she burst into tears.
‘Imagine if he was here, if he could see this!’ It was a wonderful
moment. There’s something so powerful about watching children
learn, especially in an environment like that, and knowing that
because of you they’re getting a life they otherwise might never
have had.
I’ve now been into several state-run schools in Pakistan, so I
know how much better the facilities are at my school, and so do
the people who live nearby, which means there are always kids
outside hoping to be let in one day. Our only entry criterion is that
you must not be able to afford education anywhere else, and that
means we teach the very poorest kids. When I was there recently,
I was in the playground messing around with the kids and I
noticed one boy wasn’t wearing shoes. He was quite young so I
picked him up and I asked where his shoes were.
‘It’s not my turn today,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
His brother also attended the school and they took it in turns to
wear the one pair of shoes that the family could afford.
‘Where do you live?’
It was a village forty-five minutes away that the minibuses didn’t
go to. He was walking for forty-five minutes with no shoes.
Sometimes it gets so hot in Lahore that you can burn the soles of
your feet. My heart sank because it wasn’t just him: the teacher
told me lots of the kids had no shoes.
My first instinct was to say, ‘Let’s buy him some shoes.’ I could
have included shoes in the uniform I paid for but that meant an
extra 400 pairs of shoes, and, as kids grow out of shoes really

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