A Place to Play

How a shade structure in Faisalabad gave hundreds of students back their courtyard. This is the story of how one community gave another the space to be young.

Picture the school you went to. Maybe you remember the sports fields, the basketball courts, and the gymnasium where assemblies were held. The music rooms where students practised instruments. The covered areas where you sat with friends during lunch. The places where you learned, yes, but also the spaces where you simply got to be yourself.

Now picture a school where none of that exists.

La Salle High School Campus 2 in Faisalabad, Pakistan, educates 476 students from Christian families who make up less than one per cent of the country's population. These families face real discrimination. Most earn very little. Sending children to school at all is an achievement. The school has no gymnasium. No sports hall. No music rooms. No covered play areas except for one narrow strip of shade running alongside the building. Under that shade sat a concrete table tennis table. For years, it was the only recreational facility the school could offer.

Eventually, the space became a makeshift parking area for students' motorcycles, and the last place students could play was gone.

When Lasallians Look After Lasallians

Twelve thousand kilometres away in Middle Swan, Western Australia, sits another school with the same name. La Salle College Middle Swan is a modern secondary school with 1,400 students. They have sports fields, music programmes, outdoor education facilities, a career hub, and a new boarding complex opening this year. The facilities are what you would expect from a well-resourced Australian secondary school.

The students at Middle Swan are Lasallians. So are the students in Faisalabad. They belong to the same global family, founded over 300 years ago by De La Salle who looked at children with nothing and decided they deserved an education. Both schools carry his name. Both follow his mission. But the difference between them is staggering.

When the request came through from Principal Brother Samuel Tabish in Faisalabad, the community at La Salle College Middle Swan decided to act. They backed a grant from the Lasallian Foundation to build an extended shade structure so that motorcycles could be relocated to a proper parking section, freeing the existing area for students. The total cost was AUD $7,709.

The work started in mid-November 2025. For nearly a month, students watched as contractors dug foundations, sank steel poles into concrete, and stretched panels of fibre shade across a frame that grew longer each day. By early December, it was done. The motorcycles had a proper home. The table tennis table had its space back. And for the first time in years, students could actually use it.

What It Feels Like To Be Seen

Edwin is in Grade 8 at Campus 2. When the project was complete, he stood up to speak on behalf of his school. He thanked the Lasallian Foundation and the students at La Salle College Middle Swan. He talked about what it means to have a safe space for recreation, for physical health, for mental well-being. For the chance to be a student who gets to play.

His teacher, Mr. Farooq, the school's table tennis coach, wrote a letter to the Foundation afterwards. He described what the project had done:

"Your kindness has gone far beyond providing a physical structure. You have given our students a safe and welcoming space where they can play, grow, and simply be children. The table tennis area now echoes with laughter, friendship, and youthful energy. “

He closed his letter with: Gratefully yours in De La Salle.

That phrase is everything. Students in Faisalabad and students in Middle Swan may live far away from each other, but when one community looks across twelve thousand kilometres and says, 'Your students deserve what our students have,' something shifts. This was not charity handed down from people who have to people who do not. This was family.

What The Mission Looks Like In Practice

The Lasallian mission has always been about the whole person. Saint John Baptist de La Salle founded his order after meeting children who had no access to education and no one willing to help them. His life's work became providing them with what he called a human and Christian education. The word 'human' sits alongside 'Christian' deliberately. It means caring about the child as a full person, body and spirit. A student who has nowhere to run, nowhere to play, nowhere to simply be young is a student whose formation is incomplete.

A shade structure in Faisalabad might not look like much. It might never make national news. But to Edwin and his 475 classmates, it is the difference between having a place to be a child and not having one. It is the difference between belonging and not belonging.

The Lasallian Foundation connects communities across Australia and New Zealand with schools in Pakistan and Papua New Guinea that share the same mission. Every project is carefully selected. Every grant is documented. Donors can see exactly where their money went, what it built, and what it means to the people who received it. This project cost $7,709. It was finished in twenty-six days. It gave 476 students back the courtyard they had lost.

When students at La Salle College Middle Swan supported this project, they were living out what it means to be Lasallian. They understood that being part of this family means looking after one another, wherever you are.

What You Can Do

There are numerous schools like Campus 2 across Pakistan and Papua New Guinea. They are doing extraordinary work with almost nothing. The needs are real: classrooms that need repair, clean water, safe toilet facilities, teacher salaries, educational resources. And yes, places for students to play.

Supporting the Foundation is supporting the Lasallian family. It is students helping students. Schools helping schools. Communities reaching across impossible distances to say: you matter, your students matter, and they deserve what ours have.

SUPPORT THE LASALLIAN FOUNDATION

All donations are tax-deductible in Australia. Give online, through workplace giving, or by bequest.

Visit: lasallianfoundation.org.au/donate