Saved by a whisker!

What a week it has been! From student council meetings, to getting proposals for my school's carnival event, to getting in late submissions of the Youth Talk articles to the editor and getting nearly crushed and run over by a school bus recently.

Yes, you can read the last sentence again; I was nearly crushed by a school bus last week while I was crossing over the road that leads to my school.

This bus, out of nowhere, was speeding down the road and looked set to crush me into pieces only to stop and hit the brakes at the last second.

If that doesn't scare parents and students, I don't know what will.

During the past weeks, newspaper headlines across the kingdom reported the news of the death of schoolboy Mohammed Soheel, a seven-year-old pupil at the New Horizon School, in a school bus related incident.

His death is a tragedy and the hearts of GulfWeekly readers go out to both his family and school friends. Could this accident have been avoided? Investigations by the police and relevant authorities will no doubt be able to answer that in the fullness of time.

In the meantime, we have to start working as a team to solve the bus driving problems that many schools, whether private or government based, are facing.

The Ministry of Education needs to open its eyes wide enough to realise that this is a deeply disturbing issue that many parents and pupils are worried about.

It would appear that in the past the ministry and schools across Bahrain have left the "problem solving" to the private bus companies rather than taking the initiative.

Certainly, if the bus driver had not hit the brakes at the last moment, it could have easily been me splattered across the road and the newspaper front pages further outlining the incompetence of some of the systems that are in place which are supposed to protect us.