This summer I had the absolute privilege to work in collaboration with TCF Pakistan in their head office in Karachi as part of my LiA. This experience formed the bulk of my LiA with the remaining portion being attributed to dedicated time to prepare and organise TCF Ireland's Annual Event, scheduled for October 3rd.

The Citizens Foundation is a Pakistani charity founded 30 years ago this year with the simple goal of educating Pakistan's youth. Education, or lack thereof, is an enormous issue within Pakistan and TCF is one of the global leaders in aiming to improve and reverse the rampant inequality that riddles Pakistan. It is almost impossible to fathom the burden that an uneducated society carries without seeing it with your own eyes. I will do my best to explain how drastic the situation is however with the following statistics.

1. 22.5 million children out of school (Pakistan Education Statistics 2020)
2. 44% of children aged 5-16 not attending school (UNICEF)
3. 70% of girls not completing primary education (World Bank)

These statistics make for fraught reading and it clearly illustrates the necessity for TCF's work. TCF build, maintain and sustain schools in all areas of Pakistan now educating close to 300,000 students. They train the teachers and develop the syllabus and textbooks themselves in order to quality control the material in their schools. Not only this, but they train the teachers in such a way that they can communicate with the students in their own native dialect while teaching them in Urdu and English. They do all this while being a non profit charity based in Pakistan and are have countless incredible alumnus stories, once recent example being a TCF alumnus now studying in Harvard University. 

The gravity of the work TCF does is the primary reason that I chose to organise this LiA and aimed to contribute to this charity in a way that would allow my work to continue effecting positive change long after my departure. Once it became clear that we would be able to work together in line with both their requirements and the LiA principles, I had a feeling I was onto a winner. My instinct's were proven correct but the road to 'winning' was far different than what I had planned.

My initial proposal that I presented to TCF was based around my interest in teaching in their schools and bringing my skillset and expertise to aid in any way possible in the development or refining of their curriculum but this proved logistically impossible due to how short my summer was between fourth and final year of medical school.  We then decided my LiA would be based around building and redesigning internal resources used in TCF's Baghbaan program, a program designed to involve fundraisers from all backgrounds across Karachi to fundraise for TCF. These resources included developing a master manual for all Baghbaan volunteers, a shortened version of the same manual and developing a leadership guide for Chapter Leads within the Baghbaan program. That ultimately is the outline of the Karachi portion of my LiA.

When I began my work in the office I was struck by how different life was in Karachi compared to Dublin. There is virtually no public transport so either you drive or get driven. There are more motorcycles on the road than you can barely begin to count such is their ubiquity and this is because many people can't afford cars. Even basics like rear view mirrors or helmets are surplus to requirement over there. This is only what I noticed on the drive from the airport to my accommodation but in truth I could pick any basic aspect of life and it would pale in comparison to what is normal in Ireland. The most salient aspect of this however was the role language played and that reinforced a concept I've seen but never truly internalised: never judge a book by it's cover.

Most people in Karachi speak Urdu and most educated people speak both English and Urdu and so the vernacular in Karachi is somewhere halfway between the two where people speak English and Urdu interchangeably, as if it is one language. This took some adjusting to as I can speak Urdu as we speak it at home but speaking english in an Urdu accent was something I had to pick up on the job. Not only that but I realised how humbling it can be to be surrounded by people more fluent in the language than you and how quickly that can shrink your confidence and personality. My Urdu is okay for Irish standards but certainly below par for Pakistan standards and this 'language barrier' was quite challenging to deal with. It is one thing to be completely unaware how to speak a language but it is an entirely separate thing to be just fluent enough to understand and be confronted by your deficiencies in that language. Gradually my Urdu improved and between that and watering down my Irish accent, I didn't have any major communication issues but certainly for the first 10 days it was a challenge that was undoubtably daunting.

This whole experience gave me an entirely new appreciation for all the people who come to Ireland and are faced with their own version of this language barrier. This has shone a new light entirely on the patients and staff I meet in hospital on placement whose English may not be as perfect as they'd like because, when I see in a patients eyes they have more to say but don't have the English to say it, it is as though I am seeing myself. Having sympathy for people is great but empathy is truly a game-changer and even in the 2 weeks I have spent in the hospital on placement since I have been back in Ireland, I have already noticed a difference within myself and my attitude to these patients

The nature of the work I was doing meant collaborating with my supervisors to amend and adjust previously produced manuals to better reflect the realities of fundraising in 2026. This task required me to work in a team and take feedback on board after presenting my work while also needing to be comfortable getting the head down and working away on tasks on my own to keep up with our deadlines. I had never worked in a office like TCF before and I really enjoyed the environment and cultured they have cultivated. Being surrounded by a team full of kind, considerate and competent people meant that my experience went as well as it possibly could have. Of course it wasn't seamless and there were days more frustrating than others but ultimately my experience was remarkably enriching. Being given the opportunity to be a part of something much bigger than me and being given the trust and responsibility to critically evaluate the existing materials and then deliver and execute my new vision was a role I appreciated being thrust into.

This taught me a valuable lesson on leadership where sometimes supporting people means letting them face and deal with problems themselves instead of pre-emptively solving them. Knowing I had the support and confidence of my supervisor while it was made clear these projects were my responsibility and I had to take ownership of delivering them was a really unique practical way for me to experience leadership. 

This is a microcosm for the things I learned working with TCF. It is one thing to hear and read that leadership takes many forms and has many effects but seeing it and living it is completely different. Hearing that a leader should be accessible to the people they are leading is all well and good but there's something poignant about seeing the VP of Development going around the office floor, chatting to everyone he meets with equal warmth. This includes the LiA student here for a few weeks and he met me as if I'd be there for years. What we small talked about I can't remember but I do remember how our interactions made me feel important and gave me the jolt of motivation I may have needed to keep going with my work. I may never be in a workplace in TCF Karachi again but these positive examples of leadership I witnessed will be principles that I will aim to carry with me wherever I go in my career. It's easy to lead people who are all the same as you but the beauty of the TCF model, both in its schools and its corporate family, is that it doesn't matter who you are, where you are from or what language you speak, you will be treated with the same love respect and dignity as the next person. If that's not a brilliant model of leadership we could all learn from, I don't know what else is.

I have aimed to explain some of the benefits this LiA had on me in terms of what I learned in the office but the prevailing and long term benefit of this entire experience will likely be what I learned outside the office. It has always been difficult to conceptualise how different my life would have been had my parents not moved from Pakistan to Ireland after graduating college and this LiA gave me a flavour of what life in Pakistan may have been like. It gave me a sense of what living in Pakistan could be like, what living in a muslin country is like and also what living in a country surrounded by family can offer you. Through all this I learned many things, one of them how being how incredibly different life can be based solely off of where you are born.

There is an entire encyclopaedia of problems that come with having only a Pakistani passport for example that I have never known because I was born in Ireland. When I organise holidays it can take minutes to book flights and then me and my disorganised friends can figure the rest out later. If I had a Pakistani airport, I would need a visa for almost everywhere I would want to go and would have to wait months before even getting approval for the hypothetical holidays I would want to go on. Something so simple that I take for granted is the main issue in other people's lives, like my TCF friend who married a Canadian Pakistani girl but has been waiting 18 months to have his visa approved to move to Canada with her. With an Irish passport, this problem is like a speed-bump but for him it's a sinkhole....all because of where he is from. All because of the passport he holds because of the country he was born in. All things he never chose but fate chose for him.

For all the infrastructural issues in Pakistan, it is a truly beautiful place. The people there are remarkably hospitable in ways you won't find anywhere else and it truly is infectious. It is one thing to give when you have more than enough but it is another to be generous when you barely have enough for yourself. This attitude of kindness and goodness is so important to have and to learn from. Many Pakistani people have only ever known poverty and poor living conditions yet their attitudes are still positive, their mood still upbeat. They don't quite know what they may be missing so they thrive as they can in the world they see. Of course from our perspective this is unfortunate that their horizons are narrow and their behaviours may seem odd from a distance but when you see it up close you can't help but be inspired. I know I personally can be better at being present and enjoying life as it is, not as it could be. When you see people for whom their entire live revolves around doing the best they can with the hand they've been dealt you begin to feel ashamed of ever being so arrogant as to not be entirely filled with gratitude for the wealth, security and privilege you have come to accept as normal.

My entire LiA showed me how remarkably fortunate I am to be able to live the life I am able to live, to pursue the education and goals I can with the support and advice of so many amazing people along the way. My experience working with TCF Pakistan and immersing myself in Karachi taught me far more than I could ever have imagined about my personal and professional goals, my leadership style and everything in between.

LiA's are a difficult thing to explain and even harder thing to plan but I am truly grateful to have been given the chance to have struggled with both because I am a far better, more rounded person and hopefully will become a more effective, empathetic and confident leader for it. I wasn't exactly sure what I had gotten myself into when I landed in Karachi airport at 4am but now I know that the feeling in the pit of my stomach was excitement masquerading as nervousness. That's a pretty good analogy for what a self-directed LiA is : it only really makes sense looking back and you're not entirely sure what exactly happened and how but you know it was good and that it was worth doing. And more important than that, you have to, like all good leaders, improvise and deal with problems as they come up. It is only at the end that you realise that your LiA ended up being different to what your proposal said it would be and you can only laugh at how misguided your younger self was that everything would go to plan.

But we know that the journey matters more than the destination and my goodness was this LiA a journey of a lifetime and one I am grateful I went on. And so I would say to any Laidlaw Scholar considering whether or not they should do a self directed LiA or not my answer would be an unequivocal 'yes!' because it just might change your life as mine did for me.

Hammad