Leaving your dream job for the benefit of your country is easier said than done, especially when the job gives you six-figure salary and immense career growth. It becomes even harder when the cause requires you to leave a comfortable place and move to a beautiful small town without any connection to life outside it; but Marvi made it possible.
Marvi Soomro actually quit her job as a software engineer to teach school children in the Misgar, a valley in Hunza.
Things changed in the summer of 2016, when she got an opportunity to visit Misgar on a week long art residency. She mentions how Misgar may have a primitive lifestyle but its people are warm and open.
“I have never felt like an outsider and I never had to conform in any way. I continued wearing jeans and sweaters and felt as much at home and comfortable as I did in Islamabad,” she shares.
When she returned from the trip, she devised a programme called ‘Innovate. Educate. Inspire Pakistan’ (IEI Pakistan), built a curriculum and plan around the ideology of innovation, education and inspiration and recruited volunteers. Her program had two divisions – the art programme and the academic teacher programme, and she recruited volunteers for both of them.
Since then, Marvi is living in Hunza and has opened a world of opportunities. She has taught them more than any book or curriculum ever could; she has shown them how to imagine and think; she has informed them about the world beyond Misgar. And by doing so, she has broadened their perspectives.
Marvi may leave Misgar one day, but her gift will live through the children she has touched.
