Voice of Children (VOC) School is located on the eastern edge of Lahore in a village called Janjate. The area is very poor. The main street is a river of mud in the rainy season and baked hard in the sun at other times. At the edges, the smell from the open sewers that occasionally spill over into the street is pungent. The dilapidated houses that are home to large families and their livestock are tiny with one or two rooms and a courtyard. They are mostly dark and damp with no flooring except soil pounded by feet to become hard, at least in the dry season. Children are everywhere, many wearing scruffy dirty shirts, open sandals and some barefoot. Young children make cow pats by moulding warm buffalo manure with their bare hands and then sticking them to the side of the wall of the house and courtyard to dry in the sun to be used as fuel for a fire to cook on.
The school started in around 2010 by a family living in the city of Lahore. The vision was to provide an education to the children in the Principal’s ancestral village. The maturity, drive and knowledge of the lady Principal, who has a master’s in education, has resulted in an encouraging level of progress. Her father, who is a self-employed tradesman, also helps by using his vehicle to bring some of the teachers and children to the school from the surrounding area. This school began with virtually no facilities with classes sitting in the local church compound outside on the ground. Over the years, the church has built six classrooms to accommodate the children and the conditions have generally improved significantly. The school now has 160 children from preschool to class eight (and beyond) with nine teachers.