delay
By Jamila Achakzai
ISLAMABAD: After a painful seven-month wait, around 65 more youth on
Sunday left for Cuba to study general medicine on scholarship.
Fifty-five youth, including four girls, boarded various flights for the
Caribbean island from Islamabad and around 10 from Karachi. They will
have a stopover at Dubai on the way to their destination, a Higher
Education Commission (HEC) official told Daily Times.
These students are part of the last batch whose departure hit snags
almost seven months ago after Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC)
raised certain objections to the programme for which they had been
enrolled in Cuba. A doctor or a dentist requires his/her degree's
recognition by the PMDC for practice in Pakistan.
There followed deliberations among the HEC, the PMDC and Cuban embassy
representatives on the subject and a PMDC team's visit to the North
American republic to examine medical teaching and laboratory facilities.
The distraught youth, totalled around 640, heaved a sigh of relief last
month when the PMDC gave much-desired green light to their programme.
Under the plan, the students will be sent to Cuba in phases till August
3, Muhammad Sadiq of the HEC said.
He said that the HEC was bearing travel and other expenses of the
students. He said that students would be paid 50 Euros each as daily
allowance and would be bound to return to Pakistan for service for at
least five years.
He said that in all, the HEC had selected 1,000 youth for the programme
offered by the Cuban government following the October 2005 earthquake in
the NWFP and Azad Jammu and Kashmir.
Sadiq said that many of the students belong to quake-hit areas. Of them,
356 including 60 girls have already been studying in Cuba for over one
year, he said.
He said that the Cuban authorities had to fulfil certain formalities,
which caused delay in the students' departure.
At the airport, students told Daily Times that they were delighted at
their departure.
A student said that the time that the PMDC took in approving the
programme after raising objections to it was quite painful for him.
"We had a testing time during the last seven months but are on cloud
nine, now. We owe a debt of gratitude to the HEC, the PMDC and Cuban
authorities whose efforts brought us this momentous occasion," she said.
Ayesha Salman and Asma Salman, two sisters from Mansehra, said that they
expected a wonderful time in Cuba during their first international tour.
"We've collected so much information about Cuban history, terrain,
people, lifestyle, basic laws, political and educational systems, health
care etc from various sources that we strongly feel that we'll manage to
adjust ourselves to the new environment quite comfortably. Yet, we'll
miss Pakistan a lot. Anyway, we're really looking forward to a good time
there," he said.
Another student, Sirajuddin, praised the Cuban government for offering
Pakistani youth free medical education. He said that Cuba was known for
quality health care and medical education throughout the globe and it
was good for Pakistanis to benefit from Cuban experience, which focused
on primary health care and preventive medicine.
He said that Cuba offered good educational environment to foreign
students. He said currently, around 30,000 students from across the
world were enrolled in Cuba for various programmes and two thirds of
them studied general medicine.
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008\07\14\story_14-7-2008_pg11_2
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