Can’t imagine what @Hamzakk’s family is going through right now. It’s the same pain shared by thousands of families across Pakistan whose children are disappeared or abducted for one perceived crime or other. Just praying for his safe return home and for justice to prevail.
Our tent was so poor that I became a delicious bait for the rats, until the bite marks turned into keepsakes for my children who have not yet come—perhaps keepsakes for my dreams, the dreams that exhaustion has demolished.
My father always looks at me as though I am a book not yet finished. I want to write its pages in silence, so as not to frighten the rats, for the marks have not dried yet.
And I fear that if I raise my voice, the ceiling might collapse out of fear, that the single lantern preserving our features might go out, and we would become shadows without names.
Rizwana is a normal 14 year old. She loves to dress up, play with dolls, laugh, look pretty.
But she was sent into labour and beaten and tortured. Her limbs were broken, her head was smashed till the bone poked into her brain. She was forced to drink toilet cleaner and has burn marks all over her body from the acid burns and iron burns.
Her teeth were smashed.
She was left to rot in an empty house while the perpetrators went on holiday. When they returned she could barely breathe and her wounds had caught maggots. Especially on her head.
Months and months of surgeries, hair removal, hair still not growing over the raw skin of her head wounds, skin grafting and she is still in hospital.
Why this was done to her is hardly the question we need to ask. It’s evident. We expose poor children to self entitled monsters as a solution to poverty. These children are a source of income for parents who often have nine, ten of them, to make them work. They are trafficked by middle men as the cheapest most vulnerable form of slave labour. Those who speak kindly to these child slaves feel they are good people. Whereas it would be kinder to support the family and send the child to school to grow up, have a future and break the cycle of child trafficking and poverty. It would be kinder to make sure the constitution is followed and they be in full time education by five. In UK if a poor woman put her minor child to slave labour she would be arrested.
It is not the responsibility of children to raise the economic status of their families. It is ours, the states, their parents and the adults of our countries responsibility.
The woman who smashes up and tortured Rizwana is a mother of two and a school teacher. She is free on bail. Her husband a civil judge, reflects the joke of our own systems, as he slapped Rizwana many times and witnessed this brutality. He has been given a promotion recently.
This is the farce of justice and progress in our country.
Please change it. Please be part of the solution. Please raise voice for #JusticeForRizwana and #EndChildTrafficking. Now. Please demand a #ChildProtectionSystemPakistan. Now.
Rizwana is like my daughter. But how many Rizwana’s have no voice?
And how many #FatimaFariros will die raped and abused on cctv infront of a zombie nation and never get justice?
Till when?
Thank you.
Photographs shared with consent of parents, Rizwana & local authorities. Please don’t share photographs of minors without such consent. In the last picture Rizwana is wearing a wig I got her. She still has no hair. She still struggles to walk. She is still on and out of hospitals for surgeries and skin grafts. While her perpetrators are rewarded and scot free.
@NawazSharifMNS@MaryamNSharif@CMShehbaz@fbhutto@BBhuttoZardari@BakhtawarBZ@AseefaBZ@sherryrehman@Dr_YasminRashid@SalmanSufi7@SyedKausarAbbas@kishwarenam@rabrabbit@saynotoweapons@naeem_zafar@AyeshaRaza13@SarahAhmad_CPWB@UNICEF_Pakistan
I don’t know how as a nation, we’ve become this numb. Families are suffering in snow in Tirah, being thrown out of their homes due to military operation, left without shelter. The least we could do is raise our voices but there’s barely any outrage over this.
#TirahValley
Gul Plaza was a disaster waiting to happen. Pushed thru this interactive map: Sixty shopping mall fires in 7 years in Karachi (till 2022)
https://t.co/FsJzyaN6PS
@Micshyy88 Cooperative market burned twice, millennium mall, RJ mall, baldia factory, joria bazar and the list goes on. Nobody batted an eye. Lava hy hi nai.
EXACTLY!!!!People care about each other to the extent of keeping this broken machine working. Esa hy mera Karachi kar kar ky we keep moving in this vicious cycle while it keeps consuming us ALIVE. The camaraderie of Karachiites doesn't translate to taking a stand for its rights!
The tragedy that has unfolded at Gul Plaza with 100s of ppl missing most likely burnt alive & 1200 shops destroyed with goods worth billions would bring a normal city to standstill but Karachi is functioning normally not bcz we’re resilient but we have normalised suffering
Finding stairs on a usual day was a task in gul plaza, can't imagine navigating an exit in fire. Its heartbreaking.Hafeez center,Millennium mall and now Gul plaza. How many more tragedies will it take for the business owners and government to take safety and infrastructure srsly?
Finding stairs on a usual day was a task in gul plaza, can't imagine navigating an exit in fire. Its heartbreaking.Hafeez center,Millennium mall and now Gul plaza. How many more tragedies will it take for the business owners and government to take safety and infrastructure srsly?
i love cute tiny purses but im sad to say i can never be a cute tiny purse girl. i need to haul my hoard of objects everywhere i go. because what if…..