"Please Bring More Toilet Bowls To My School, Uncle" – 9-Year-Old Girl Pleas To PM Anwar
The letter has since gone viral.
By Melissa Alvina — 16 Oct 2023, 12:30 PM
Last night, 15 October, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim shared a handwritten letter from a nine-year-old schoolgirl, highlighting the poor condition of her school's toilets
In the letter written in English, the schoolgirl, Maryam, addressed the Prime Minister as 'Uncle Anwar'.
"Hi Uncle Anwar, My name is Maryam [...] I want to tell you about my school's bathroom. As much as I appreciate your task to make school toilets clean, I don't think my school's toilets are clean," she wrote in the letter.
Maryam mentioned that only two toilets in her school have toilet bowls whereas others are squat toilets.
Apart from highlighting the scarcity of toilet bowls, Maryam also depicted the unsettling condition of having spiders possibly crawling out, underlining the poor maintenance of the facilities in her letter."In the first stall of the toilet is a squat toilet. YES, a squat toilet. Beside it is a hole that looks like a spider can crawl out at any second," read the letter.
In her plea, Maryam also expressed her hope that the toilets in her school could undergo renovations similar to the improvements she's seen in other schools
"I saw so many renovated pictures of [other] school's toilets that look nice, however, my school did not seem to look like that," wrote Maryam.
She also further highlighted that the toilets in her school seem to have missing tiles on the ceiling.
In response to Maryam's letter, Anwar assured that necessary actions would be initiated to address the concerns raised by her
"Thank you, Maryam. I will try my best and expedite resolving this issue for the well-being of the children in school," read the caption of Anwar's Facebook post.
While tabling Budget 2024 last Friday, 13 October, Anwar announced that the government will be carrying out a targeted effort to maintain and repair toilets in 8,354 schools by the end of 2024.
"It is unacceptable that we allow children to go through school years with broken basic facilities and dilapidated toilets," he said.
