Housing and water equals dignity

Photos: Fr Robert McCulloch SSC

To have nothing and now to own. To be without for 3000 years and now to have. To have lived nowhere and now to have a home and an address. To be threatened and now to be secure. This is how it now is for 86 Hindu families from the Parkari Koli semi-nomadic tribal community in Sindh province of south-east Pakistan.

These 86 families live at Jhirruk. Jhirruk is a barren place of nothingness about 45 kilometres from Hyderabad, near nothing except a canal from the Indus River which was four kilometres away. During the major flooding of the Indus in 2011, hundreds of thousands of people in southern Pakistan lost everything. International aid agencies came for several weeks. Then they went. The Catholic Church stayed.

St ElIzabeth Hospital in the Catholic diocese of Hyderabad organized its Mobile Medical Outreach Programme into three teams that provided round-the-clock free medical care for months and more after the floods had receded and the other organizations had gone.

It became obvious that people who had lost everything needed homes as well as medical care. What most had lost was nothing more than a grass and mud shack. But what else can you have if you are treated as despised outcasts with no real civil or legal rights, if you are slave labourers working for wealthy land owners to whom your young sons and daughters and wives are mere objects for easy sexual gratification?

In this crisis situation, St Elizabeth Hospital Hyderabad and the Catholic Church have made a difference. More than 860 homes for desperately poor Hindus, Christians and Muslims have either been built completely or essential building materials been provided. With the help of many donors, including the generosity of Columban donors, we have enabled many marginalized people to assume their national identity with pride.

The story of Jhirruk is a special one in this wide panorama of kindness and compassion and identity-reclaiming.

Photos: Fr Robert McCulloch SSC

In 2012, after the floods, the St Vincent de Paul Society, Victoria donated money to buy four acres of land at Jhirruk to build homes for homeless Parkari Koli people. The people and especially the women chose the land because it was close, just four kilometres away from a canal of the Indus River. It wasn’t too far, the women said, for them to walk twice a day to get water which they with their daughters would carry back on their heads in earthenware pots for bathing and drinking and cooking.

The house-building began. Two- roomed houses firmly constructed of brick with good roofs and raised well above flood level. At a ceremony at Governors House Karachi in 2014, the far-sighted Governor of Sindh, Dr. Isharat ul-Ibad, handed out the deeds of possession to the first thirty families and entertained everyone to afternoon tea in the State Dining Room.
In one afternoon, from the top, the barriers of cultural exclusion and religious and social discrimination were knocked down.

86 families are now happily settled in Jhirruk, each with their own permanent home. After 3000 years of being dispossessed and pushed to the margins by the Aryan people who invaded the Indian sub-continent, some of the original peoples have now something about which they can say for the first time “this is ours”, “this is mine”.

The settlement at Jhirruk is called Bethlehem. The house settlement, really a new village, is legally registered with the Sindh provincial government as Bethlehem Shelter Society. Half the members of the governing body are from Bethlehem. None are literate but all know how to act well for one another. Their leader and the vice-president of the Bethlehem Shelter Society is a woman, Reshma, which may confound those who wish to insist that women in Pakistan have no role in society. The Bethlehem Shelter Society has enabled the people living at Jhirruk to take responsibility for their lives and collective well-being.

The four acres of land at Jhirruk has been divided into four quarters, three for the houses and the fourth for the construction of a clinic, a fenced area for cattle and animals, and intense tree-planting.

The houses are all built. Work is now underway to build connected verandahs in front of all the houses. This will double the living area of each house, provide shelter from the intense summer sun, and give protection from the monsoon rains.

A 20,000 gallon water-tank and five 500 gallon feeder-tanks have been built throughout the village with a secure water supply piped in from the canal from the Indus River. It is not hard to imagine how this immediate accessibility to water has enabled the women and girls to reclaim space for their own lives instead of spending hours walking long distances several times a day to get water.

Bathing areas and toilets with septic systems have been built behind each row of houses. A perimeter wall is being built around the village for security. Trees have been planted and the greening of Jhirruk is a high priority for the Bethlehem Shelter Society Council in developing their community.

Construction of a satellite clinic is underway. The Mobile Medical Outreach team from St Elizabeth Hospital in Hyderabad will come each week for primary healthcare for all people in the area. The provincial government has agreed that it will see to education and schools in the area if the Catholic Church will see to healthcare. It is a good partnership.
Much has been done in just seven years, after 3000 long years.

Columban Fr Robert McCulloch works as the Procurator-General in Rome, Italy. 

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