Monthly Archives: February 2011

World Vision UK Chief Executive, Justin Byworth, is in Pakistan, six months after flooding devastated the country.

My time in Pakistan is drawing to a close. Before preparing to head back to the UK, and looking forward to being reunited with my own family, I had the opportunity to see the devastating effects of urban poverty on children in Rawalpindi, Islamabad’s twin city. I visited World Vision’s drop-in centre for children, where we’re working hand-in-hand with a local partner to provide education, care and advocacy for vulnerable children working as rubbish pickers, beggars or worse on the streets of Rawalpindi. As I arrived, one of the children was leading about 70 others in a sung Muslim prayer, followed by the Pakistani national anthem, before they went off to their classes and activities while I got to hear about the work from the excellent local staff.

Child labour is a huge issue in Pakistan. Although the government has passed laws against it, at least 10 million children are thought to be working, often for long hours and in hazardous conditions, rarely able to get the education they are entitled to. In this poor part of Rawalpindi they estimate as many as 80 per cent of children work from the age of three or four, which I found so difficult to imagine and accept – recalling what my children were like at that age, it seems incomprehensible that we live in a world where this is allowed to happen. But, as always with poverty, the causes are a complex mix of social and economic factors.

Children play at the drop-in centre.

For the past few years, the centre has provided non-formal education for more than 700 children under-11 and skills training for 120 young teenagers.  The results are impressive: 62 children have “graduated” from the centre and moved into the formal education system where they had previously been excluded. 82 have graduated from the skills training that is provided for teenagers too old to move into formal education. Many have gained the formal birth registration critical for their future.  What’s even more impressive as you talk to these children is to hear the change this has brought in their lives.

I was privileged to be able to speak for a while with children to hear about their lives and the difference the drop-in centre has made.

One of these children, Jaffir, is eight years old and loves the chance at education the drop-in centre gives him. Jaffir’s friends, who beg and scavenge for rubbish, tried to persuade him to drop out, but he wants to become a doctor and knows he needs to study hard. It’s clear from Jaffir’s story, how dangerous it is on the streets. He has to climb into the dirty canal to collect rubbish to sell for about 50p a day.

Jaffir, eight, at the drop-in centre.

“I’m afraid I might drown, I can’t swim,” he tells me, and today his hand is bandaged from an accident with a bicycle. Jaffir experienced real trauma when his friend was kidnapped by armed criminals right in front of him and he only escaped kidnapping because his older cousin arrived to rescue him.   As I looked at Jaffir, even younger than my nine-year-old, Luke, I thought no wonder you look older than your years.

The help that Sana, World Vision’s psychologist, has been to Jaffir is palpable as they talk about this incident together. Sana’s doing an incredible job dealing single-handedly through play, art and counselling with a range of issues, not the least being domestic violence, which seems very prevalent in the stories here. Children on the streets here experience things that no child should.

It’s a long way from our vision of life in all its fullness for every child, and reminds me of World Vision’s founder Bob Pierce’s reflection: “Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God”, back in the 1950s.

Sitting later in the day with a group of mainly Muslim colleagues, knowing that they’ll be here tomorrow, next week, next month, whatever this year brings to this complicated country with resilient people, a prayer I heard at the local Church in Islamabad on Sunday came to mind and is one I know I will continue to say for them as I return to the safety and comfort of England:

“O God, who knows us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright; Grant to us such strength and protection, as may support us in all dangers, and carry on through all temptations.”

World Vision UK Chief Executive, Justin Byworth, is in Pakistan, six months after flooding devastated the country.

My final days in Pakistan have given me a taste of the international aid and diplomatic community in Islamabad. As I prepare to fly home I feel a mixture of sadness at saying goodbye to new friends here, anticipation at getting home to my family, fatigue from a very busy week and energy at gearing up for a shift of focus on my return to World Vision UK.

I met with officials in both the UK government’s Department for International Development (DFID) and the European Commission, to discuss the floods, the wider situation in Pakistan, and current and potential future joint projects. Everyone I met was impressive in their insights and commitment to the people of Pakistan, and to doing their best to ensure that aid and development funds are used as effectively as possible.

It was a good reminder of why we as British and European citizens should be proud of what our country and continent are doing with our taxes to help millions who are born into far more poor and fragile places than we are.

We discussed the challenges facing Pakistan in 2011; food security and malnutrition in Sindh, recovery from the floods and preparation in case of more. We talked about how the international community can respond better to major humanitarian emergencies and support development in fragile contexts like Pakistan. This is part of the influencing role World Vision plays with our own and other governments across the world to help bring real change for the world’s poorest children.

Children displaced from their homes by flooding in Sindh.

If security and access in some parts of Pakistan is tough for aid agencies like World Vision, it’s far tougher for international government staff. Most live and work within a high security diplomatic enclave on the virtual island that is Islamabad, it’s a far cry from being with our team in Sukkur last week. I don’t envy them, the lengthy security and relative seclusion they have to deal with here. The need for it though was once again brought home when I was at an Islamabad cafe that still bears the scars of the assassination of  Punjab’s governor just a month ago.

The day ended with thoughts about my plans for tomorrow – my last day here. I’ll be visiting a World Vision drop-in centre for vulnerable children who work on the streets of Rawalpindi, Islamabad’s twin city.

World Vision UK Chief Executive, Justin Byworth, is in Pakistan, six months after flooding devastated the country.

I was woken yesterday just after 6am by the call to prayer from a nearby mosque and, to everyone’s surprise, a cold, grey and rainy day. It was the first rain to fall since the floods came last August, and after a simple, tasty breakfast of egg and chapatti we were off to some food distributions.

First stop was the commodity warehouse on the edge of Sukkur town, Sindh. Ernest, our experienced commodity and food aid manager is from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, where I was exactly a year ago and where I saw one of the largest food programmes I’ve ever seen. (This is one of the strengths of World Vision; being able to mobilise skills and experience from across the world quickly, often from one developing country to another.  Bernard, who’s with us and manages our relief programmes in Pakistan, is from Lebanon.)  The warehouses were typically well organised, with the wheat, oil, peas, sugar, salt, high-energy biscuits and Plumpy’nut neatly stacked and catalogued.  As Ernest said to me: “The key to good food distribution programmes is in the planning and organisation.” This is absolutely essential if you’re to reach 200,000 people as World Vision has done in Sindh.  Accountability is also vital and something we take very seriously, right from the complaints officer at each distribution so that anyone who feels unfairly treated had a formal way to express this, through to strong people management when things don’t go as they should.

Shoes can become more of a hazard than a help in this sort of mud!

I confess I wasn’t prepared for what I saw as we headed to the distribution point. Vast areas of fields still under water, more than 20kms from the Indus river and six months since the floods hit. The pile of shoes near the food distribution illustrated perfectly the sinking mud we were surrounded by, as their owners squelched through the mud to receive their food rations. There’s nothing quite like a food distribution; the sight and sound of so many people, the mixture of emotions – need, gratitude, anxiety that everyone is reached fairly.  I’ve seen these things get ugly when they go wrong, but this one went off without a hitch, save for the weather as we all got wetter and wetter in the steady beating rain.

In the midst of the crowd were 686 individual human stories, all of hardship and resilience. I met one man, Ali Ahmed, who told how with his wife and two young children (aged only 1 and 3) came close to death as they fled the floods by boat and foot many miles to Sukkur and have only been able to return home two weeks ago. I met a 7-year-old girl, Kulsas, who came to collect the food in place of her mother who gave birth just a few days earlier to her new little sister.

Kulsas, collecting food on behalf of her family.

Not far from the distribution site, tents and makeshift shelters line the road, where 280 families (about 1900 people) are living because their village is still under water. You could see it half a mile or so across the flooded fields in front of us, which stretched on as far as the eye could see. To still be displaced after all this time, living in conditions that I’d barely cope with for a few days, is truly shocking. One family we met had 20 people living in the same shelter, and their cow was virtually on top of their tiny makeshift kitchen space. Hygiene is near impossible in such conditions and their kids getting sick almost inevitable. “We just want to get home,” they said.

As my colleague Tennille wrote when she was in Pakistan a couple of months ago, it’s easy at times like this to either be angry, looking for someone to blame, or to despair. The huge scale of these floods means that even combined, all organisations, the government and international community haven’t been able to do enough to meet the needs of all 20 million people affected. I voiced my fear that it’s so easy to feel whatever we do, it’s never enough. Bernard, our relief manager, had the perfect reply: “Whatever we do, it’s making a real difference.” He’s absolutely right, and it’s this that sustains so many committed friends and colleagues across World Vision, and many other organisations.

No matter how bleak or challenging the situation, there is hope. Hope in the resilience of the people. Hope in the people who work tirelessly to bring change. Hope in the fact that time after time this week I’ve seen that the aid response to the floods has opened up hearts and minds for a bigger change to come in Pakistan so that communities can become places where children thrive and flourish.

These will be the images I take back to Islamabad with me as I prepare to meet with British and European government representatives and talk further with my colleagues in World Vision Pakistan about plans for recovery in the next 18 months, and longer-term development beyond that. I’m also looking forward to meeting up with Elisa, my World Vision UK colleague, who’s responsible for support to our programmes and colleagues in Pakistan; she’s been in country a week longer than me but we’ve not yet seen each other here and have so much to talk about.  First I must get all the mud off my boots and trousers otherwise they’ll never let me on the plane, or into smart Islamabad!