Bright side of Black Monday: Sophia Swire gave up a high-flying career in the City of London for the sake of illiterate children in Asia

For A Change, Dec-Jan, 1998 by Michael Smith

Sophia Swire is never likely to forget that Friday in October 1987 when stock markets began to go into free fall. It was just before Black Monday. At the time she was a merchant banker with Kleinwort Benson in London, fresh out of university and a high-flyer, fully expecting to break through the proverbial glass ceiling of female promotion.

But that day all hell broke loose. `There was a cut-throat atmosphere,' she recalls. `Quite a number of my friends were fired over lunchtime. They weren't allowed back in the dealing room. We found ourselves fighting over our clients and I had a stand-up argument in front of 500 people on the dealing room floor, mainly men, about a major client of mine--the Vatican--whom my boss was trying to steal from me. We almost came to blows.'

In the midst of the mayhem, Swire realized she was `fighting tooth and nail for something I didn't believe in'. There and then, she decided to get out and do what she had secretly wanted to all along: development and journalism. `I had always been a big traveller and adventurer. I was keen to write and wanted to make a difference. None of this was satisfied by my city job.'

She took off for a three-week holiday in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, landing in Peshawar, close to the Khyber Pass and south-east of the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan. She was drawn there, she says, by `the romance' of the Hindu Kush as well as the Soviet-Afghan war in Afghanistan, where a number of her contemporaries had gone as correspondents and cameramen. Her brother, Hugo Swire, had set up a TV satellite facility in Peshawar `and was full of stories of the Mujaheddin'.

She visited Chitral in northern Peshawar, in the foothills of the Hindu Kush, a place of breathtaking beauty. On her first day there she experienced what she calls her coup de foudre--her lightening flash of revelation. It was her 25th birthday in September 1988. She was watching local tribesmen play `a wild polo match against the backdrop of the incredible granite mountains which shoot 25,000 feet into the sky. I had never seen anything so beautiful, so dramatic. I thought, "This is it. This is my spiritual home."'

After the match, the Deputy District Commissioner for Chitral, a Punjabi army major called Javed Majid, came up to her and said, `You are the kind of woman I have been looking for to help me set up a school here.' `Why me?' she asked. `Well, did you go to university?' he replied. `Yes.' `In that case you have 15 years more education than most of the local women here.' He had tried to recruit teachers from down country in Pakistan but it was considered a hardship posting and no one would come. He explained that he was desperate for English teachers because the language would enable local Chitrali-speaking girls, who did not even speak Urdu, to go eventually to university. `Within one generation the standard of living of this whole valley will rise.'

Recognizing her kismet, Swire agreed. Majid asked her to find other English women to join her and bring library books and school equipment. `OK, consider it done,' Swire replied.

Back at Kleinwort Benson she handed in her notice. Her friends were shocked `because I was being groomed for the top'. Kleinwort Benson's chairman offered to keep her job open for a year, telling her that what she was doing was completely wonderful and totally mad. Swire says, `The second I handed in my notice I didn't look back. Very few things I have done in life have been like religious experiences. Leaving my job was one.' She used her Christmas bonus money from Kleinwort, before her final departure from the bank, to buy schoolbooks and equipment. Flying back to Pakistan in January 1989, she and four English friends assisted Major Majid and his wife to recruit local teachers. Within months Sayurj Public School opened with 40 children, aged four to 12. Today there are 500.

She left Chitral a year later to set up a non-governmental organization fighting heroin abuse under the auspices of the Pakistan Narcotics Control Board. But some `rather unpleasant' politicians took fright and a senior government minister advised her to leave the country. She returned to report for the BBC's World Service radio and television, `because I had a fairly unique access and understanding'. Few Westerners, she says, have any real understanding of or compassion for Pakistan.

Then, in 1993, Afghan refugees in Peshawar asked Swire if she would help sponsor their six schools for 3,000 girls in the Northwest Frontier Province. She realized that to raise the funds needed she would have to form a registered educational charity in Britain. Five years ago this November she and her friend Charlotte Bannister Parker--daughter of the athlete Sir Roger Bannister who first broke the four-minute mile--launched Learning For Life. Bannister Parker had worked in India, researching the role of women, as well as with ActionAid in Nepal, and she suggested the name for the charity.

Today LFL supports over 160 schools in Pakistan, two in India and others in Nepal, benefiting over 10,000 children--mostly girls. These `grassroots village community schools' are initiated by local people, to whom LFL donates basic school equipment, seed money and teacher training. LFL is the only European aid organization targeting girls' education in Asia `as the most effective route to long-term development', says Swire. It has received funds from Britain's Department for International Development --[pounds sterling] 200,000 so far--and from the National Lottery's Charity Board, as well as through sponsored fund-raising events. Swire and Bannister Parker persuaded the film distributor Buena Vista to dedicate its glittering London charity premiere of Little Buddha to LFL, raising [pounds sterling] 35,000. This year, the London premiere of a documentary film about Jinnah, Pakistan's founding father, which Swire had produced for television, raised over [pounds sterling] 18,000.