Homeschooling Dad of 6 goes to Pakistan
with Alpha-Phonics
Garth Wiebe of Massachusetts tells his story of assisting a
Christian ministry in Pakistan designed to rescue young children from their
difficult, hopeless life as laborers in a brick factory.
Wiebe, a widower, whose wife and he used Alpha-Phonics to teach
most of their children to read until she passed away, made an investment to
assist a new primary school that CSF had started, initially by demonstrating
to the local Pakistani school teachers how to use Alpha-Phonics, while instructing
them in the fine points of English pronunciation.
We who publish Alpha-Phonics in hopes of helping to assure all people learn
to read find this possibly the most moving story we have learned of in nearly
30 years of this work.
This is the story in words, videos and photos.
(Mr. Wiebe contacted The Paradigm Co., publishers
of Alpha-Phonics, early in 2014 indicating what he planned to do. The Paradigm
Co. was pleased to be able to supply him with a digital file of Alpha-Phonics
which he needed to carry out the work)
My name is Garth D. Wiebe (no relation to the "Marlene Wiebe" of
the Alpha-Phonics Nigeria story). My wife and I used Alpha-Phonics
to teach five of our six boys to read (because of his personality
and learning style, we used Marie LeDoux's Play 'N Talk program with
one of our boys). When my wife passed away in May of 2011, I retired
early from my career as a computer engineer and became a full-time
homemaker and home-school "mom" and dad at the same time. I also
got much more heavily involved in practical ministry; as of this
writing, I am serving as the Massachusetts State Director for
John G. Lake Ministries (http://www.jglm.org).
So why on earth would I go to Pakistan, of all places?
After I befriended an 18 year-old contact in Pakistan through JGLM
via Skype, he explained what they were doing there, and asked me
to help them financially and come there to visit.
His father was the head of CSF ("Christian Soul Foundation") in
Lahore, Pakistan, an outreach to children, many orphans, and their
parents, of a brick kiln factory labor camp. These families,
including children and orphans, would work maybe 14 hours a day
or more making bricks by hand. They lived at the factory in
makeshift living quarters with no running water or toilet
facilities, making the bricks themselves, from gathering mud,
water, and sand, all the way to carrying the sun-dried bricks
to the oven; they would deliver finished bricks to the factory
owners, earning the equivalent of about USD $2.00 for 1000 bricks,
a hard day's work for a family.
The CSF ministry website is
http://csfpakistan.webs.com. A video walk-through documentary
of a working brick kiln factory is on their home page.
In December, 2013, the brick kiln factory they were ministering
to was closed and the site demolished, because the owner's contract
ran out. CSF started a primary school for children at the site in
a rented facility, to teach these children to read and write in
Urdu and English, giving them hope for the future. In Pakistan
there are no free schools, public or private. Schooling is too
expensive for many people, and the illiteracy rates are high
among both children and adults.
18 year-old Jamshaid Akhtar and his 54 year-old father, Javied,
also a recent widower, asked me to come visit them. I had given
them some money already, but to actually go there?? This I argued
with God about for about 2 months. But as we know, God wins all
arguments.
I had never even been outside of the U.S. before. I got myself
and my two youngest boys, ages 7 and 11, passports, then worked
through the red tape of obtaining visas to gain entrance into
the country for a visit.
Knowing that they would need help with English language instruction,
beginning with phonics, I cooked up a plan: I would purchase and
hand-carry into Pakistan a portable projector, an
Optoma ML550
in this case, which is powered by an 20,000-30,000 hour LED lamp, instead
of an incandescent bulb (which they would have no means to replace in
Pakistan), and can display documents, photos, and videos directly from
a USB flash drive or microSD card, in addition to the usual HDMI or VGA
connection. Then I negotiated with the Alpha-Phonics folks for a PDF
version of their manual, which they eagerly provided me, given the
circumstances of my mission. This would provide CSF with a paperless
presentation method, eliminating the cost of hard-copy materials, which
would have been a practical and financial burden to them.
We left for Pakistan on April 20, 2014, and stayed for a month.
Here is the material and level that they were learning/teaching around the
time I arrived: (click on any photographs to enlarge) /
Well, every project has to start somewhere, and so did mine. I
gathered the primary school teachers together and taught them
Alpha-Phonics! There were two planned outcomes of this: First,
they had no native English speaking person to impart to them proper
English pronunciation, so I would need to do that. Second, by
going through the Alpha-Phonics program with the teachers, they
would learn how to go through it with their students.
Here is a video documenting what I did:
I worked with them roughly an hour a day, maybe four times a week
(only when they were all available), and in four weeks we went
through all 128 lessons.
So this was just a beginning, helping to equip them for the long term
work that they put their hands to. Hope for the future of these former
brick kiln factory workers.
There was much more to the trip and mission, of course, but this was
the Alpha-Phonics piece of it.
