“I
was a fisherman once but now all I do is try to take care of my blind family”,
a very exhausted Abdul Rahim exclaimed while rubbing his hands over his face as
if trying to scrape away the truth. Out of eleven family members, Abdul Rahim’s
7 children and wife are completely sightless.
Situated
on the outskirts of Karachi, Juma Goth is this unfortunate family’s home
courtesy of the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum (PFF). Their house, a tiny cottage
well-built to sustain its structure but looked horribly insufficient for a
family of eleven. Rahim owned a boat once which he later sold to pay for his
family’s medical expenses. Now with no means of making a living and 10 mouths
to feed, he lost his previous house and his family was forced to live on the
streets.
“I
got to know about this family when I met Abdul Karim’s older son in an accident
on the street,” says Kamal Shah who works with PFF. “I kept insisting to take
the boy to a hospital but he kept refusing and requested to be dropped home and
that’s when I learned that including him most of his family members are blind,”
he continued. The family literally had not a roof over them and that is when
PFF helped built a house for them to live in.
Abdul
Rahim being the one with sight along with 2 more daughters handles the house
hold from cleaning to cooking also looking after the sightless family members.
He now makes a living by selling the pieces of metal which he finds in the
heaps of trash dumped near his house.
The
oddity in the case of Rahim’s family is that none of his children were born
blind. It is only after they turned 5 or so that they started losing their
sights. Rahim
seems to claim that over consulting many doctors, none have come to a conclusion
and that nobody could really tell how his family went blind.
However,
Kamal Shah talked about a completely different reason saying, “The water here
was so clear before that one could even make out a coin thrown into the water,
now it’s so polluted that even a person would be thrown in it and nobody would
be able to tell.” He talked about how factories
which are situated nearby would dump wastage into the water and how there is
absolutely no authority to stop them.
Families
including Abdul Rahim’s have been consuming this water for years and if they
try to complain about the wastage dumps, they get threatened by mafias or even
beat up for standing up for their basic rights. There
are but numerous cases of such physical disabilities growing within families in
that vicinity for which none seem to care much.
“NGOs
come and go, sometimes they come for research, sometimes for work but none come
back to treat these people. None seem to care.” Exclaims Kamal dismally.
Clean
water one of the basics of human rights is a scarce luxury for the inhabitants
here. If it’s not provided to them then we might as well say farewell to
humanity.
