Back to School:

8/19/2026

a reflection on education, partnership, and the persistence of hope

Dear Friends,
Around our house, August means back to school.

The summer schedule disappears. Mornings start earlier. Backpacks are packed again. There are new teachers, new classes, new routines-and, depending on the child, varying levels of enthusiasm about all of it.

It is all pretty ordinary. And maybe that is why I have been thinking about it differently this year.

A few weeks ago, I was reading a report from Community World Service Asia (CWSA), one of Week of Compassion's longtime partners. We have worked alongside CWSA for many years through earthquakes, floods, refugee response, and the slower work of helping communities rebuild their lives.

One story stayed with me.

Her name is Ayaza. She is 11 years old and lives in Kumbhar Bhada, a remote village in Pakistan's Umerkot district.

For years, there was essentially no school for girls in her village. Girls stayed home, helped their families, worked around the house, or worked in the fields. That could easily have been Ayaza's story too.

But the community wanted something different for their daughters.

Working with CWSA, they reopened the village school. There is now a woman teaching there. There are books and school supplies, a place for children to play, and a daily meal.

And Ayaza goes to school.

When she was asked what she wants to be when she grows up, she didn't hesitate.

She wants to become a teacher.

I keep coming back to that.

An 11-year-old girl, in a village that went nearly two decades without a functioning school for girls, is already imagining herself becoming the person who will teach the next generation.

There is something about that kind of hope that gets me.

And I see it elsewhere in CWSA's work.

Week of Compassion has been supporting education for Afghan refugee children through CWSA. Their most recent report told us that 180 students are continuing their education. Of those, 129 are girls.

Those numbers matter. But what caught my attention was what was happening around them.

Nineteen Afghan teachers have received training. Parents are meeting regularly with teachers. And English classes that began with the students have expanded to include some of their mothers.

I don't know that anyone planned for that.

The children were learning, their mothers saw an opportunity, and the circle simply got bigger.

This is the part of humanitarian work that rarely makes the news.

This summer has been a reminder of how quickly life can change.

We watched earthquakes strike Indonesia, Colombia, and Venezuela. Here at home, communities have been hit by flooding and severe storms, including families in Indiana and Texas who are facing the long road of recovery. Every week seems to bring another disaster, another community suddenly finding itself in the headlines.

Our partners know those headlines don't tell the whole story.

Sometimes Week of Compassion is able to respond immediately with emergency support. Other times, we intentionally slow down. We listen. We wait for our partners to tell us what they are seeing and what communities actually need.

I've learned over the years that responding quickly and responding faithfully are not always the same thing.

The work that changes lives often begins after the headlines fade.

A school reopens.

A teacher receives training.

Parents organize.

Children return to a classroom.

A mother decides that she wants to learn too.

None of that is dramatic. But increasingly, this is where I find hope.

Not because everything is okay. It isn’t.

Hope, at least the kind I see through our partners, isn’t pretending that suffering isn’t real. It is people deciding that suffering doesn’t get to make every decision about what happens next.

And that brings me back to Ayaza.

As children in our own communities head back to school, I find myself a little more grateful this year for how ordinary that can feel. We complain about schedules and early mornings. We buy school supplies. We wonder how another summer disappeared so quickly.

And somewhere in Pakistan, an 11-year-old girl is walking into a school that, not very long ago, wasn’t there for her.

She wants to become a teacher.

Maybe someday another little girl will walk into a classroom and find Ayaza waiting for her.

I hope so.

And I am grateful that, through Week of Compassion, we get to walk alongside communities and partners who are making stories like hers possible.

Grace and peace,