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PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Sep 13 2013 (IPS) - “I miss my mother and cry every night,” eight-year-old Afaq Ali tells IPS. He is a Class 5 student at the University Public School in Peshawar, capital of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the administrative centre for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) to its west.

Ali’s parents shifted him in 2010 from their village Pranghar in FATA’s Mohmand Agency to a school in Peshawar, 157 km away. The Taliban militants have since 2005 systematically destroyed 120 schools in this Pakistan district, one of the seven agencies that make up FATA on Afghanistan’s southeastern border.

“I feel extremely bored and lonely because most of my classmates are from around here and stay at home with their parents,” adds Ali, his frame pencil-thin. “Because of this, I cannot study.”

Like Ali, there are many other homesick children in Peshawar’s schools whose families in FATA’s militancy-afflicted districts have had no alternative but to send them out to study. (via IPS – Hopeful but Homesick in Peshawar Schools | Inter Press Service)