By donkey cart to high school
16 March 2016
Back in the mid-1990s, village Sultan Chang near Tando Adam in Sanghar district had only a middle school for boys. Girls too could attend this school, but only until grade five when, by the standards of the Chang Baloch, they were old enough to be married to raise their own families.
Reshma Chang who attended school with her younger brother was made of different mettle, however. Raised by an illiterate mother and a livestock farmer of meagre means, she wanted to be a judge when she grew up. When she was in grade five, her brother, her schoolmate and escort, died after a brief illness. With no other ‘man’ available to accompany her to school, parental pressure bore down on Reshma to give off education.
Read more »
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
,
Back from the brink
14 January 2016
There is something about Mian Said Ali that makes you like him. It is the gentleness in his ready smile, the humility of his demeanour and the matter-of-fact way he talks of his predicament that makes you warm up to him. There is also something that tells you that Said Ali can weather any storm without giving up.
A native of village Janu on the highroad from Khwazakhela (Swat) to Bisham and only a few kilometres outside the former, he suffered like so many others through the years of militant savagery. Yet he kept his smile.
Said Ali and his two brothers own 17 kanals (two and a bit acres) of agricultural land. Living together as a joint family, the brothers worked their holding together. Because it was spread over undulating ground, the land was terraced and unequally divided between fields for seasonal crops and orchards.
Read more »Labels: Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, NGOs
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
,
Internally Displaced Persons
08 July 2015
Church World Service-Pakistan/Afghanistan is a humanitarian organisation that I have been working with for more than a decade and a half. I have written extensively on their relief and rehabilitation project in places like Swat and Thar. Recently I was called to do a short report on their work with Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Kohat.
 |
| Boys who attend the Health Education sessions at a Mobile Health Unit |
I spent two days in Kohat talking to men and women from places as diverse as Orakzai, Tirah and Parachinar and in a word: it was a heart-wrenching experience. These people, whose exact number is unknown, were displaced from their homes over the past ten years or so. Since they left home in small numbers (unlike the deluge following the North Waziristan operation), there were no camps waiting to rehabilitate them.
Labels: Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, NGOs
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
,
Remembers that flood of 2010?
06 June 2015
Most of the writing was for their official use. But many times I used stories that were published in Herald or The News on Sunday [read one of them here]. The work of the NGO is humanitarian and the stories are terribly moving.
Read more »
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
,
Standing ovation for Saba
28 April 2014
“When I ended my speech, everyone clapped.” The lovely doe-eyed Saba Mallah said with such beautiful simplicity. “They stood up to clap for me,” she added. I asked her if she knew that a standing ovation was better than just an ordinary applause. She hadn’t on this past Women’s Day but soon after she learned what a standing ovation meant.
I asked her how she felt for the applause and she said looking at those nearly 400 delegates clapping for her she broke into tears. “I was so happy for myself that I wept.” They were clapping for her in New York where she had spoken for 10 minutes on the rights of the girl child in her native Sindh, 10,000 km east of the venue. As the hall rose and the applause resounded, Saba thought of the time when she will be grown up and will have done what she wants to do.
Read more »
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
,
Reconstructing Lives
05 April 2014
When the Indus River rose in August 2010, Wahid Buksh and his family fled their village Malhar Sheikh near Gambat (Sindh) for their lives. From the high ground of the raised bed of the road leading to the new Khairpur-Larkana bridge across the river, Wahid watched the fertile farmland around his village go under the swirling, brown eddies. But the water would not stop rising and by and by his poor mud brick home too was lost.
When, two months later, he returned from the displaced persons’ camp to what was his village, he found few homes standing and all of his four acres of sugar cane and two of cotton wiped off the face of the earth as if they had never existed. In his twenties, Wahid was no land owner, merely a sharecropper. Even so, his loss was great. As the summer drew to an end, he had little hope of raising enough funds to purchase wheat seed and fertiliser for the December sowing. But a man needs to win bread for the family and so Wahid Buksh resorted to daily wage labour in nearby Gambat.
Read more »
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
,
Ambition: to work under shade
04 July 2013
Darya Khatoon of village Leemon Solangi was born in a poor farmer’s home. That has been her lot all her life as she grew up picking cotton or weeding the wheat fields under a blistering summer sun. In her mid-twenties, she is married to a college graduate who for want of other work continues to be a farm labourer. By her own account, even as she and her husband sweated under the open skies to bring home the daily bread, they dreamed of a better life. But neither knew when or how their big break would come.
Darya Khatoon and her Goats
In 2008, after the birth of her first child, she became a goat-keeper on adhiyari. Now, goats being as prolific as they are, Darya Khatoon did well. In three years, despite having given her goat-owner his share of the kids, she had disposed of a number of kids of her own, put together the proceeds and purchased a milch cow for herself. In the beginning of the year 2011, things looked rosy for Darya Khatoon’s two children who got a regular supply of unadulterated milk from the cow in their yard. She also had four healthy yearling goats to be sold for the sacrifice of Eid al Azha due in November.
Read more »
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
,
Real development stories
27 April 2013
Since 1992, I have been writing NGO 'development stories'. Time was when these were unknown and newspapers and journals were thirsting for them. But now attitudes have changed. Most editors say they are publicity for NGOs and don't want them anymore. However, over these years, I have established close connections with a few NGOs that value my work and ask me to document their initiatives whether they are post-flood rehab or poverty alleviation or health and education.
Until 1992, I saw that NGO annual reports and 'development stories' for papers were more like corporate records. Though the organisations work with human beings, there were no people in the stories. There were only claims of what had been done by the NGO. Though it is in bad form to make this claim, but I suppose it has to be made here: I was the first writer to bring the beneficiaries into the story. It was their story and I used their words.
Most of the time, these ordinary people, the real people of Pakistan, said things that touched your heart; they could bring tears to your eyes. This was the easiest way of writing these stories because you did not have to make an effort to create a story: it was just there in words that needed only to be translated.
I still do that and my stories have been circulated abroad, some have ended up as documentaries and others have brought more funds to my clients.
Labels: NGOs
posted by Salman Rashid @ 10:03,
,
