This photo is from my favorite place in the city. I graduated from a private college in Karachi. Most of my class-fellows were from well to do families, we had our own cars, wore the latest trends, ate out almost everyday and we were studying in the second most expensive school in the city. Right next to our school though is a squatter settlement. Gulshan-e-Sikanderabad, home to 130,000 residents from all ethnicities of Pakistan, including thousands of Afghan refugees, this is the place of poorest of the poor who moved to the metroplois in hope for a better life. The average number of children per house is 7 and the families earn on average, less than $100 a month. Two sides of the settlement are bordered by huge water bodies of sewage and the houses with electricity face on average 8 hours of power cuts a day. Since it is a squatter settlement it was never planned out and tiny houses after houses just popped up so they have no underground water supply and the residents purchase water from the hydrants every single day.
Yet amidst all this I have found the happiest people I have ever met. This photo is from the Primary Healthcare Center Ziauddin University built for this population. Since 1996 the center has provided medical consultation and medicines for minimal fee. The current clinic fee is 50c and the medicines are provided on 1/3 of the price in the market. The clinic ensures that all children are vaccinated based on the special WHO program for Pakistan called EPI and the center is specially supplied with all free of cost medicines for Hepatitis C, TB and Asthma from the government and other NGOs. Besides health related work the center has also held computer and stitching-sewing courses for the residents to train them to earn for themselves.
As a student I entered the area during my first year when we went there to hold a Dengue awareness camp for about 60 people. They all looked at us as if we were celebrities in our white coats, Most of them were barefooted but they had the biggest smiles on their faces when they greeted us. I had never met anyone this simple and more satisfied with life than these people yet compared to us they had literally nothing good going on in their life. After that every chance I got, I was back there, be it awareness camps for TB, Malaria or hand-washing techniques, Polio vaccination rounds or just visits to their schools. Contrary to popular belief the locals very much want their children to be vaccinated and I've seen them willingly wake up their children from sleep just so they could receive their polio drops when we went door to door for the campaigns. Though uneducated they are well aware of the harsh realities of these preventable diseases and are always keen even for booster follow ups.
During my third year we had our Family medicine rotation at the center and I finally got a chance to interact with the population on a patient-doctor level. The respect I've seen these people give their caregivers is not seen in the private hospitals I have rotated at. When my fourth year started I became the president of this welfare society at my school called KaraHealth Welfare Association and I decided to focus on them once again. All the fundraisers that we conducted were mainly to pay for the medical and surgical bills of these patients for treatments at tertiary care hospitals. I had an amazing group of juniors who helped me do monthly awareness camps at the center. We even called in our friends from dental school for free consultation who came in with a ton of supplies for the patients. Oral health clinics have now become a norm at the center. I realized that having such a short gap between each pregnancy has caused the children to grow up without a childhood as even a 3 year old kid has two siblings after him. For this reason we started weekly hour long sessions for children at the center. Any child could come, we'd give them paper and colours and ask them to go wild while discussing their dreams with our student volunteers. It was all new for the children and they really looked forward to this one hour every week. We provided sewing machines, monthly groceries, school fee, rent money, and money for surgeries and rehab for all those who approached us.
KaraHealth is not functional anymore but the students are still very much involved with the community next to their school. In all my time there I had always wanted just a little more help despite our fundraisers because there was always so much to do and so many more people in need. In the most exciting phone call of my life, back in March, I was told by the head of department of Family Medicine at my school that we were nominated for the MacJannet Prize 2016 for the community work and he wanted me to be interviewed by them. I had never heard of this program before and I was so infinite-ley grateful to have been chosen for this. The amazing Amy Newcomb took my interview and told me it was to last for 15 minutes. Hats off to her patience she listened to me babble for 50 minutes about all this! It was indeed a pleasure to talk to her. It was a huge honour to be even nominated for this, never did I think we would actually win the second prize and get the grant for $5k. Ha that was the second best phone call and I was just so thrilled that someone was helping us to help this community better!
I, with all the doctors and workers at the center are forever grateful for the prize money as it will help us serve this growing community. There is a lot to do but we have started with baby steps and I will try to upload regular posts with photos and videos to show how it is coming along. I plan to do individual profiles of our helpers and the community members so that a two-sided view is uploaded.
A big thank you to the MacJannet Foundation again for considering, choosing and helping us. Here is a link to their announcement: http://talloiresnetwork.tufts.edu/blog/2016/06/06/winners-of-the-2016-macjannet-prize-for-global-citizenship/
By Zainab Faiza
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