Pakistan is set to make its mark in anything but cricket in the years to come. Neither hockey and squash nor snooker! In distant lands, it’s all set to spot Pakistan on the map of international basketball, volleyball and even football. Women’s squad may perform even better!

Descending like intricate crop circles in the British wheat fields, hundreds of international standard playgrounds dot KPK and flood-hit regions of Sindh. Yes, chaotic and adolescent media scene of the country remains oblivious to the healthy change, focusing solely on lousy but popular cricket. Cricket is no more an obsession in 14 districts of the KPK and Sindh.

Over 160,000 children and youth, half of whom are girls, have adopted sports as passion. For instance, a basketball match in Mardan girls’ school start with team members of either sides standing in two circles reminding each other spirit of the game and chalking out a strategy. Watching the two-session sport in itself is a treat to watch as the pashtun youth disprove all stereotypes associated to the ethnic group.

Once the ball is tipped, the atmosphere soars to a higher, deafening level. It’s intimidation at its finest – energetic, passionate onlookers locked for one-plus hour into an intimate environment. As the match finishes, each team forms a big circle to reflect affecting their respective performance.

Unlike the country’s best known elite school networks, this is the way students of over 500 government schools and colleges exercise their ‘right to play’ during recess or play time after the classes. While many of the country’s institutions have succumbed to endemic systemic failure, so has our children’s right to play.

Allegedly well-planned Islamabad has seen nightmarish annexation of play areas and greenbelts by all-powerful land mafia or parking areas of Japanese four-wheelers’. Then how could the pashtun girls of Mardan or the boys of conservative Mansehra perfect the art of playing basketball, volleyball and football. The very same children of northern KPK had no self-esteem after surviving their collapse school building where their best friends and teachers had died right in front.

The 2005 earthquake brought to the world’s attention the under-developed people, 80,000 of whom perished while million became homeless. As a journalist with The News, I had driven to Garhi Habibullah in Mansehra district, around noon on October 8, a few hours after the massive tremors shook the region. My driver had heard of a similar school, under whose caved-in roof over 400 female children lay trapped if not dead. Heart-wrenching is the memory of their cries beneath the rubble. Only a few could survive the injuries and the agony.

Like this wandering journalist, those innocents’ souls could not forget the horrors. Schools symbolized chilling haunted castles out of a Halloween adventure and the course books transformed into photo albums of those lost in the same classroom.

Understanding their ordeal, UNICEF, Save the Children and SOS all came to the rescue. As I recall from my follow-up visits for TV and print stories, the school attendance remained low, depression was high and final results belied the actual performance of students in examinations. Somewhere in Canada, Johann Olav Koss – winner of four 1994 Winter Olympic gold medals – heard the sobbing kids of Pakistan.

Like Imran Khan who opted to establish a state-of-the-art cancer hospital, – Koss founded fundraising vehicle Olympic Aid which later became Right To Play in 2002, with a mission “to use sport and play to educate and empower children and youth to overcome the effects of poverty, conflict, and disease in disadvantaged communities.” While the Olympic Aid had been working for the Afghan refugees in Quetta and Peshawar at a small scale, the Right To Play set up its country office in late 2007.

Based on its experience of working with children in disaster and conflict region of 20 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, today the Right To Play has impacted the lives of 160,185 Pakistani children, 53 percent of whom are girls, in 15 districts such as Bajour, Mardan, Buner, Mansehra, Thatta, Mirpur Khas, Umerkot, Sanghar, Khairpur, Dadu, Qambar-Shahdad Kot, Shikarpur etc. Working predominantly with the public sector schools, the Right To Play has trained over 300 local youth to coach kids applying various techniques inspired from the interlocking rings of the Olympic emblem.

To those who always question the statistics, the real success stories for sure more telling. Enrolled in Mansehra’s SOS Village, Tauba Nayyab (14) lost her family in the earthquake. Now a junior leader under the Right To Play’s programme, the dejected and careless girl of the yesteryears can now moderate a school function with confidence of a seasoned TV anchor. Thankful to her coach Zartasha, Tauba says sports transformed her life and ideas both. She recalls, “I used to beat children and lived in constant depression. Now I am equipped to deal with any challenge and want to become a fighter pilot.” The core purpose of this INGO remains to help children regain the lost confidence, discover their true abilities and channelize them using sports as a natural means of learning, something totally ignored in the country’s private and public sector schools in urban and rural Pakistan.

The concept of junior leaders has been pivotal component in which children below the age of 18 receive ongoing, consistent support from coaches who train and mentor them using various techniques and methods. An assortment of its techniques have resulted in creating and maintaining supportive environment, developing essential life skills such as stress management, resisting peer-pressure, communicating assertively, decisions making, setting up goals and assuming motivational and leadership roles.

Another key outcome for the conflict- and disaster-hit children has been adaptation of healthy attitudes, thus restoring self-esteem and confidence, hope and optimism, empathy and compassion, and motivation helps to shift behaviors. While experiencing equal gender participation in the KPK or interior Sindh, the school associated with Right To Play have been registering increase in enrollment as well as better academic results.

Surveys amongst children involved in sports from Mali, Ghana, Liberia and Benin reveal that 87 per cent of children would not take revenge when faced with a case of peer-initiated conflict. Moreover, 84 per cent children now report how to solve peer-related conflict peacefully, say results of survey Liberia Evaluation 2010. For all practical purposes, Pakistan’s policy-makers must integrate such practices and techniques in the teaching system. School ought not to be the most boring places for a child as the case has been for many decades.

For a physically healthy next generation believing in gender equality, fair play and conflict avoidance, sports offer an easy-to-adapt approach, in the absence of which a retarded, violent and dull nation would emerge. The course of this youthful nation can be set right by resorting to a lazy, elitist and snail-paced game of cricket. Since a healthy mind requires a healthy body, more athletic and inclusive sports require sponsorship of the state and the corporate sector alike.

Given desire of Turkey to support Pakistan in counter-terror and disaster mitigation both, Ankara can send its leading athletes and coaches to inspire and train our youth in basketball as well as other athletic sports.

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