The Bridge of Grace School in Pakistan

In December of 2017 I made my first visit to the nation of Pakistan.  It was during this visit that I witnessed slavery with my own eyes.  On several occasions, I accompanied my hosts to visit Pakistanis working in brick kilns.  I learned during my visit that families who live in these kilns are forced to work 14-16 hours a day, 7 days a week, to make bricks.  Each family is only paid $10 a day for their labor.  It is impossible for families to survive on such a low wage, which forces them to borrow money from the landlord who owns the kiln, placing the family in permanent debt that they can never pay off.  I was even more horrified to learn that children as young as 7 are also forced to work as slaves.  

Visiting Slave Children During My Second Trip

Prior to my trip, I had read Malala's Yousafzai's book and was deeply moved about how this courageous young Pakistani girl It was upon witnessing this that my Pakistani friends and I made the decision to commit ourselves to opening a school for these children, a school run solely on donations so they could attend for free and not have to spend their days doing slave labor.  Shortly after my departure, our staff in Pakistan succeeded in convincing a brick kiln owner near the city of Gujranwala to allow the children in his kiln to attend school instead of doing slave labor once the school was constructed and opened.  

The Bridge of Grace School in Gurjanwala

After two years of planning and fundraising, we succeeded in opening our first school for these slave children. We named our school the Bridge of Grace Elementary School, for it is the Grace of God that bridges us all together, no matter where we are in the world.  

Our main school in the city of Gujranwala has a staff consisting of six teachers, a principal, and three additional staff.  We currently serve 142 students at this school.  Students that would otherwise be doing slave labor if it were not for our school.  Our work soon gained attention and we began receiving requests to take in more children who could not afford schooling.  Unfortunately, we were not able to accommodate many of these requests at our Gujranwala school due to our restrictive budget and limited space.  However, we did succeed in convincing the owner of another brick kiln in the nearby city of Sheikhupura to use the local church building as a second elementary school.  Thus in the Spring of 2021 opened up a second Bridge of Grace Elementary School to serve 77 slave children and hire a teaching staff of five to see to their education.  

Students Learning English In Gujranwala School (Left) and Students in Sheikhubpura School Doing Their Studies (Right)

We have made amazing strides in our cause over the past two years, but we are still facing many obstacles.  The COVID-19 pandemic hit our donations hard, causing us to put our expansion projects in our Gujranwala School on hold.  In addition, our requirements to accommodate our students forced us to use much of our reserves to purchase water filtration systems and other necessities to ensure the safety of our students and staff.  Our expansion efforts has also led an increase in our budget as we need to supply books and school supplies for all of these children.  

In addiction, our school at the time cannot afford a vehicle, but our growing expansion requires us to obtain at least one auto rickshaw, preferably two so that we have one serving each of our schools.  These auto rickshaws will enable us to effective transport supplies to our school in addition to transporting students who have either live too far away to walk or are physically unable to do so.  Unfortunately, each autorickshaw costs $1500 plus there are fuel costs and maintenance fees that would need to be paid.  Our monthly costs just to keep our schools maintain and our staff paid is at least $1500 a month, and right now, our monthly donations barely cover this.  

To keep our schools running and to obtain the auto rickshaws that we desperately need to accommodate our schools, we need your help.  At this present time, our network has a GoFundMe set up to raise funds for our schools which you can visit at this link: https://gofund.me/57cd85b3.  All donations will go a long way to enabling our schools to operate and to obtain the auto rickshaws that we need.  The right for a child to be free of slave labor and to receive an education is a fundamental human right that all children in the world deserve to have.  With your help, we will not only ensure that over 200 children will receive this right, but we can expand our efforts and help educate even more children.  Our schools not only provide education can hope to so many children, it helps promote community and brotherhood, something that our world is in dire need of.