Australia’s World Cup campaign started poorly, but captain Pat Cummins finds inspiration in a group of schoolchildren and in broadening his horizons in Lucknow.
In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, there are more schoolchildren than there are people in Australia. On Tuesday, one of them, a tall 14-year-old girl, tells Australian cricket captain Pat Cummins about her life. “In our village,” she says, “boys can go out, girls cannot.”
The school is running a program seeded by UNICEF and funded by the government. Called Learning By Doing, it began in 60 schools in Uttar Pradesh, but UNICEF is aiming to extend it to 1800 schools this year and eventually across the country and into the rest of South Asia. Across a dusty forecourt, the focus changes. Here, the girls’ horizons are being lengthened and broadened. Climate change, water conservation and energy conservation are on the syllabus. So too are ways to counter domestic violence, cultivate respect between genders and open doors shut to their parents. Two girls put on an arresting judo display for Cummins.“The gender gap is still so great. But these girls eventually become women,” says Mehrotra. “They carry the legacy to the next generation.
“It makes me grateful for the opportunities I’ve been given my whole life, especially around education,” he says. “But it’s inspiring to see kids here thinking about big problems they’re trying to solve, and armouring with the skills to go out and try to fix them.”Cummins admits to what he calls a “selfish” agenda in his ambassador role. International cricket, he knows, can become an unhealthily enclosed and introspective occupation. “I love coming to these programs.
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