Jennifer McAndrew serves at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan.
Jawaid is a four-year-old trash picker. He wants to be a tree when he grows up.
At least, that's what he tells his teacher during an art class sponsored by the LettuceBee Kids project in Islamabad, Pakistan.
"But you are not a tree," the teacher tells him. "If you don't like where you are, you can move."
That's the idea behind the LettuceBee initiative, which helps street kids like Jawaid move beyond a life of begging and trash picking, and re-integrate back into society through art, music, and mentorship.
The brainchild of Sarah Adeel, a Fulbright alumna and graduate of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), the idea for LettuceBee Kids came about when she was in Pakistan in 2008 conducting research for her master's thesis on child welfare in South Asia.
"I was doing a comparative analysis between orphanages and foster-care homes, and these were some of the most abysmal places you could imagine," Adeel explains. "I spent hours getting to know the children. One day, I asked them to write letters to whomever they missed the most, and most of the letters were addressed to God. When I saw them having nobody but God to write to, I knew I wanted to help these kids who, by the luck of the draw, were born on the roadsides."
After graduating from RISD in 2009, Adeel returned to her native Pakistan to launch the LettuceBee Kids non-profit organization with fellow alums Jabbar Bangash, a Global UGRAD alum who earned his degree from Carleton University, Mohsin Ali Afzal, a Fulbright alum and graduate of UC Berkeley, and Zainab Feroz Kapadia, a Fulbright alum and graduate of Columbia University. The United States invests more in the Fulbright Program in Pakistan than in any other country in the world and supports numerous other exchange programs that together have resulted in a Pakistan-U.S. Alumni Network of more than 12,000 registered members.
An estimated 1.2 million children are on the streets of Pakistan's
