The Model Village

It started with a woman in a kitchen, telling stories nobody was doing anything about. Soha Ali Zaman listened to a household worker describe the life women faced in her village: no clean washrooms, no income of their own, and a loneliness that settled into a home whenever the men left for the cities. She had heard versions of this for years. This time, at fourteen, she decided that listening was not enough. The Model Village is the story of what came next. A team of like-minded teenagers, with no money and no template, set out to build something real in a village near Sahiwal, Punjab, that had never had anyone try. The book follows the vision from its first uncertain steps to a set of changes that outgrew the people who started them. Told in three parts, The Beginning, The Becoming and The Beyond, this is an honest account of the mistakes, the slow wins, and the moment the work stopped depending on the people who started it. Alongside the story are photographs from the village. Inside the book you will read about: Auraton Ki Panchayat, a women's council with no precedent in the village; washrooms built for women working the fields; a female-led tandoor business; the Tappa Preservation Initiative, which keeps traditional Punjabi folk verse alive; a female adult literacy program; banking awareness sessions; streetlights for the paths women use most; and the Murghi Pal poultry-rearing program. Each initiative was built in response to a need the women of the village named themselves, not one assumed on their behalf. This is not a story about grand plans. It is a story about deciding that a problem you can see clearly is no longer someone else's to solve alone. If you take one thing from this book, let it be this: you do not need much to start something big. About the author: Soha Ali Zaman is a writer and social entrepreneur based in Faisalabad, Pakistan. At fourteen she founded the Model Village Project, a set of women-led community initiatives in a village near Sahiwal, Punjab. She is also the author of the poetry collection Notes to No One. The Model Village is her first work of nonfiction. Book details: Title: The Model Village. Author: Soha Ali Zaman. Publisher: Papercraft Publishers Pvt Ltd, Lahore. Edition: First edition. Category: Narrative nonfiction, memoir. ISBN: 978-627-7771-87-4. Available as a paperback and as an ebook you can read online.