The classroom under the second roof

One · What happened

A classroom under two roofs

“Around 10 to 15 children trapped beneath the rubble,” Sohail, a resident, told the agency of what he saw before he helped pull them out. Bilal Ahmad Faizi, the spokesman for the emergency service Rescue 1122, said that one roof had collapsed onto another and crushed the classroom under it. The school stood in Dir Colony, a crowded neighborhood in Peshawar. The Express Tribune described it as a private school of three storeys with a hundred and ten children enrolled, thirty of them in classrooms on the upper floors when the roof came down. Narrow streets slowed the rescuers, the paper said, and the Pakistan Army joined the work.

Health officials first said that a teacher and at least thirty-two students were dead, mostly under fourteen. By that evening Asim Khan of Lady Reading Hospital gave the toll as thirty-three, with most of the victims aged between four and fourteen. The agency counted at least twenty people hurt, three of them admitted with head injuries. By evening most of the injured children had been sent home to their families. Counts differed by outlet through the day. The Tribune reported that Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar had cited seventeen deaths in an early post, and that thirty-three bodies had reached Lady Reading Hospital.

The provincial Education Department formed a fact-finding committee chaired by Javed Iqbal, managing director of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Private Schools Regulatory Authority. A senior Peshawar official told the agency that early reports suggested weak infrastructure. The school’s owner was taken into custody the same day. According to the Tribune, Capital City Police Officer Dr Mian Saeed said the roof was poorly built and the building appeared overloaded, with a slab made of choka, thin flat clay tiles. Governor Faisal Karim Kundi ordered a structural audit of every government and private school in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa within a week. He also said an earlier audit had gone undone through the negligence of the previous government. He said it while rescuers were still at work. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said, “No parent should have to endure such pain.”

Two · What it is doing

The relief of having a name

Sher Ahmed, a resident who spoke to the agency, blamed substandard construction materials and called for a thorough investigation. The owner was in custody the same day. A reader takes in that line with something close to relief, and the relief is for himself. If one man’s cheap tiles brought the slab down, then roofs fall where men are careless and only there. The school his child enters each morning was built by careful men. The question of whose negligence left the Peshawar roof unchecked belongs to the investigators there, who have the building and the documents. A reader in another country holds no evidence of his own.

Roof and building collapses are common in Pakistan, the agency reported. More than a dozen children died in June when a roof fell at a tutoring centre in Lahore. A second reader hears the first sentence as the whole explanation. He has found a place where such things happen. The shrug costs him a second and keeps his own street out of the story. Under the shrug sits a small contempt for the parents of Dir Colony, as though sending a child to a three-storey school in the next street had been foolishness. Nothing in the agency’s coverage calls those parents anything but bereaved.

The third reader has a child in a classroom at this moment, and the story hands him nothing to do. Nothing in his own child’s school has been reported wrong. The dread has no object to attach to and settles on the ceiling anyway. Ten to fifteen children, Sohail said. The urge to phone the school office comes with an urge to keep the child home from now on. Both are attempts to buy a guarantee that no inspector can sell. The fear is an ordinary one that comes with having a child at all, and a signed inspection report does not remove it from anybody.

Three · Where the ground is

The house that fell on Job’s children

A messenger told Job that a great wind had come across the wilderness and “struck the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young people, and they are dead” (Job 1:19). They were Job’s seven sons and three daughters, who had been eating and drinking at their eldest brother’s house. Job got up and “tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped.” The narrator closes the scene with the line “In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong” (Job 1:20–22). The chapter gives Job no reason for the wind. When the LORD finally speaks to him from the whirlwind, he gives no reason for the house.

“Who that was innocent ever perished?” is the question Eliphaz put to Job in Job 4:7. He was asking what Job’s children had done. The friends had sat with Job in silence for a week before they began supplying reasons. At the end of the book the LORD told Eliphaz, “you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7). God held against the friends the cause they had named for a collapse he had named no cause for.

A wall around the roof

Moses gave Israel a plain law for the man who builds a house. “When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof, that you may not bring the guilt of blood upon your house, if anyone should fall from it” (Deuteronomy 22:8). The roof in that verse was a flat one where a family sat in the evening, and the law put the guilt for a fall on the builder who left the edge open. A builder answers for a death from neglect, to the neighbors who climb his stairs. The inspectors and prosecutors in Peshawar are doing work the verse itself would recognize as a builder’s reckoning. A reader far away can leave it to them.

A father on the road

Mark reports that people were bringing children to Jesus to be touched and that the disciples rebuked them. Jesus was indignant and said, “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:14). Then he “took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them” (Mark 10:16). The men who thought children a distraction from the day’s real business watched him do it. Mark stops at the welcome. Anyone comforting a parent at a grave in Peshawar or at one in his own county does well to stop where Mark does.

Jairus, a ruler of the synagogue, had a daughter of about twelve who was dying. A messenger from his house met him on the road and said, “Your daughter is dead; do not trouble the Teacher any more.” Jesus answered the father, “Do not fear; only believe, and she will be well” (Luke 8:49–50). At the girl’s side he took her by the hand and called, “Child, arise,” and “her spirit returned, and she got up at once” (Luke 8:54–55). Luke records that for one house on one day. He does not turn it into a promise for every parent. Jesus died on a Roman cross in the place of sinners and rose bodily on the third day, and everyone who trusts him is kept by him to the end. Scripture offers no reason for Peshawar and no promise of a safe roof for any child. A congregation carries a bereaved parent through the weeks after a funeral, and a pastor can read the words Jesus spoke to Jairus across a table.

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

One of these five is for strangers in Peshawar and the other four sit within a few miles of your own door.

1. 01

   Pray for the three children with head injuries.

   The agency reported that three of the injured children were admitted with head injuries. Pray for them and their parents each morning this week. Pray also for the staff at Lady Reading Hospital who have been receiving the dead and the hurt since Thursday. Psalm 147:3 says of the LORD, “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” Ask him to do that for the parents in Dir Colony.

2. 02

   Ask the school office two questions.

   Call the office at your child’s school or at the nursery in your church. Ask where the children go when the alarm sounds and when an inspector last walked the roof and the stairs. Write the answers on a card and keep it in your wallet. Moses told Israel to build a parapet around the roof of a new house (Deuteronomy 22:8), and a phone call is the cheapest way to find out if the parapet is there. Nobody is accused by a question. An office that cannot answer has told you something plain.

3. 03

   Find the two nearest exits at your church.

   Before the service this Sunday, count the doors between your seat and the street and walk to the two closest. If the congregation meets on an upper floor, find the stairs also. Luke writes in Acts 20:8–9 that the church at Troas met in an upper room. A young man named Eutychus, sitting in the window and sunk into a deep sleep as Paul talked on, fell from the third story and was taken up dead. Paul went down, and the church took the young man away alive (Acts 20:12). Tell an usher or an elder what you found, then ask when anyone last walked the building.

4. 04

   Write to a parent whose child has died.

   Think of someone in your church or your family who lost a child, in any year. Write the note by hand and mail it before the weekend, with the child’s name in it and a line saying you still remember. Romans 12:15 says, “weep with those who weep.” The note does not need anything wise in it, only the name and the sentence that you remember him.

5. 05

   Bless a child of yours by name.

   Put a hand on the head of a child in your house, or call a grown one. Pray for him by name where he can hear it. Mark 10:16 says Jesus “took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them.” You cannot promise your child a safe roof. You can give him a blessing in your own voice with your own hand today.