Aamir, Mehvish and Maha

In September, three students from Pakistan, Aamir, Maha and I visited Hellstern Middle School to present about our country. At first, when I learned about the opportunity to visit the middle school and we would be speaking in front of 450 students, I couldn’t believe it! I had never done a presentation for 450 people and I was not sure how we would prepare the presentation, let alone be able to speak in front of this massive audience.

During our presentation, we showed many pictures of our country to introduce different landscapes and attracting places which would be interesting to American middle school students. We presented various aspects of our culture, such as; sports, dances, music, clothing and things that would be fun for young students to learn. The audience was so attentive that I gained confidence second by second while presenting. The most challenging part was to think how we should present materials to make it more interesting while considering what 6th grade students would know.

Great Q & A session

In fact, those sixth graders had been reading a book, “Iqbal” by Franceso D Adam, which was a part of the reasons why we were invited. In this book, the main character, Iqbal, was described as someone who was working to abolish child laboring in Pakistan. We also included the information from this book while keeping the end of the story hidden from the children so they themselves would find out that Iqbal died because of his mission as they read the book.

It was my first time to visit a local school and it turned out to be a great experience. Schools here in the U.S. are entirely different from Pakistan. This middle school had a big hall to have lunch all together, whereas in Pakistan, we normally have lunch in small cafeteria, corridors or play grounds- depending on the school. Besides that, the building was very nice and neat whereas most of the school buildings in Pakistan would be houses which had been turned into schools. I found teachers here to be really interesting, caring and friendly. The relationship between teachers and students was very interactive. The students at the school we visited were really respectful, listened to our presentation attentively and asked a lot of questions which were relevant and sensible.

After the presentation, students gathered to ask more questions.

I learned different things from this experience. It was a little tough to work as a group to coordinate our differing schedules, but we managed to take out some time and communicate through emails to develop a good presentation. It made us learn how to manage time with our full schedules.

For me, presenting about my own country in Fayetteville through this ICT activity focused to reduce stereotypes people might have about Pakistan. This was a great opportunity to show that what media portrays about Pakistan may not be 100% truth. We desired to show the beautiful and fun cultures we have in our daily lives. It was a great experience to talk in front of those 450 students and to share Pakistani culture with them.