Fated for Darkness - Humanity goes Sightless

“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.