By Satta Ranjan Saha and Nitya Sarker

Youth are energetic! If the wish they can transform a lag behind village and society into the enlightened and advanced village and society. The youth can eradicate illiteracy, exile the superstition and wipe out the darkness of drug addiction in the society. However, in order to do these the youth need to shape themselves with curiosity, energy, potentiality and creativity. Nitya Sarker, one of the youths at Horirampur sub-district of Manikgonj has made these things possible initiating a school for the children of deprived community dubbed as ‘Monirishi’ at Kaloi village of the sub-district.

Nitya Sarker started this school in 2015 taking class under open sky. Children from the Monirishi community attend in his class regularly alongside other poor children from the mainstream community. The initiative of Nitya Sarker soon attracted the attention of the social workers and other prominent persons. Appreciating his initiative they extended helping hands to him by giving financial assistance to build a corrugate house for taking class for the deprived students. Later on, this school got affiliated with ‘Mandir’ based education allowing the students and teachers of the school getting other different facilities and services.

Thus salary of teachers teaching in this school and education materials for the students such as books, pen, pencils, notebooks come from the Religion Ministry of the state. The poor students are happy to learn lessons and their guardians feel at ease and happy to let their kids getting education with free of cost. They do not need to think about the tuition fees and education materials for their kids.

The school does not confine on teaching the lessons from the textbooks but also focuses on other extra curriculum such as poem recite, drawing, debates and music. The Monirishi community seeing their kids going to school and learning lessons feels very happy and is grateful to Nitya Sarker and other youth. They gladness sparks in their face seeing the friendly education environment of their kids. They hope their kids will be able to build their future arming themselves with education and knowledge.

The small initiative of Nitya Sarker has turned to be great blessing for the deprived Monirishi community in Manikgonj. The small but great initiative is now affiliated with government bodies. The Monirishi community thus dares to say, “Our dreams and hopes have come true. We have been able to communicate with people of different stakes and have been successful to build a meaningful relationship with them. This gives us hope that we will be able to improve our livelihood by ourselves.”

Nitya Sarker has proved that if we wish and are determined we can translate our dreams into reality. Seeing his initiative other youth in the area, however, will come forward to work for bringing positive change in the society and state using their innovation, creativity and zeal.

Translated by Silvanus Lamin