God’s anger doesn’t work on me.

By Zeeba T. Hashmi

Said a young child, not more than ten, at the makeshift school for gypsy and slum dwelling children where I signed up as a volunteer. It was my first such exposure of what slum life really is like in comparison to what we fantasize about it in books or movies. This young soul has suffered much, but he lives it through with much resilience, good or bad. To him and many other children like him, life is a manifestation of every day survival . Indeed, some people consider it an unchangeable fate as “God’s tests his loved ones the most”, and nothing can be as convenient a lie as this. Many of us lack this realization, which is quite reflective of the extent to which the society has dehumanized our slum dwellers.

In Pakistan, we have no consolidated data on slums across the country, but we do have an idea that slums are growing at a faster pace than urbanization. In Islamabad city alone, there are about 10 illegal settlements, some of them get frequently evicted by the CDA. In Lahore as well, the development authority remains rigorously engaged in removing encroachments and getting gypsy communities evicted, without working on providing better alternatives for them in return. Many development projects, like Orange Line project at an expense of $ 16 billion per year, have made many homeless and making many more continue to live in fear of becoming homeless. It is not always just the state that alone can be held responsible for it, there are many examples where the religious zealots have evicted entire communities of minorities over fabricated blasphemy allegations in order to occupy their properties. The worst to suffer from it are the tent schools which only a handful of concerned people have set up, where the momentum of their informal schooling gets disrupted frequently.

Muhammad Ayub, a civil defence worker, has seen such disruptions in his dedicated 30 years of providing free education to street children in Islamabad.

“ So many times, my school had been evicted, and I have on many times been harassed by the authorities, but I never gave up. It was only after the presidential award I received in 2015 did such harassment stop.”

He now finally has a small space in F-9 Park where he is able to teach his pupils undeterred.

“ They thought I am working on “foreign agenda” for teaching these children free of cost” He joked while telling me about his extraordinary experience as a teacher. Indeed, he is an Education Edhi among us.

In our urban cities, a major portion of our society lives in slums, yet our society tends to ignore their existence by considering the slum dwellers as “dirt” of the society. In fact, the culture of deliberately neglecting them is deep rooted, where city planning only means disposing off the city’s waste conveniently in their communities. And because they are considered lesser humans in the society, there is majorly no intention shown by the state to improve their lives, nor is there any concrete research on the subject, except for a few independent case studies.

There is a diversity of urban trends in different continents. The poverty stress is mainly laid on the urban populations in Africa, Asia and South America. However, it must be borne in mind that all the slum populations across the globe share similar characteristics in terms of living standards. By using the UN Human Indicators, there are problems of undernourishment, hunger, disease, insufficient living space, overcrowding, and unemployment. UN-HABITAT uses four indicators of slums at household-income level. These indicators are 1) lack of water, 2) lack of sanitation, 3) over-crowding, and 4). Non-durable housing structures. There is also a fifth indicator that emphasizes on security of the tenure, which is arguably not easy to monitor as it mainly has to deal with legality of these dwellings. As a result of which, their issues of dwelling cannot be accurately addressed due to their lack of legal rights there. This case is very evident here, where there are innumerable illegal dwellings that persist despite the government’s efforts to remove them.

For countries following up on policies they agreed upon on poverty reduction to achieve sustainable solutions, it is imperative for them to integrate the poor into the fabric of urban society. It is argued that ultimately, the MDG’s will have to shift more focus on urban development in the face of poverty shifts from slums in cities.

Another demon we have is of depriving people of opportunities through the preferential treatment the society . As per a study in France, the job applicants from poor neighborhoods were less likely to be called for job interviews as compared to those coming from middle or high income neighborhoods. This rings true in Pakistan’s case as well, even if a child has achieved education and is ready to contribute to the society competitively, his acceptance into the society majorly depends on the social background he is coming from. His personal relations too are heavily dependent on his income class. Arguably in every city here, the slums are created for the advantage of the middle and upper middle class for the reason that the equal distribution of wealth will break the class structures.

Maintaining status quo of social class here is more religiously justified. Recently, while referring to over 40% of population living in poverty, Senator Yaqoob Nasser of the ruling party commented that it is the way of the God that we must not interfere in it. Religion is always invoked frequently, because religion cannot be questioned or argued for the fear of losing its sanctity and uprising public resentment for doing so. One may ask, does it also mean that more than 25 million out-of-school children too are a work of God? Is this the reason why less than 3% is annually spent on education here?

This is probably why my pupil said that god’s anger cannot work on him. Yet, despite all the hardships, he looks for an excuse to claim his childhood, and his smile along with his classmates after lesson at school tells us of a tale of hope and makes us realize that they too deserve dignity and humanness.

Zeeba T. Hashmi is an opinion writer and a researcher exploring themes of education that interconnect with issues of indoctrination, hate speech, knowledge barriers and politics on education. She runs her think tank, Ibtidah for Education.