By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn
THE much-touted Prime Minister`s Housing Scheme (PMHS) is heading for doom. The housing minister disclosed recently that the government had signed 36 MoUs with a number of foreign construction companies but none had so far begun work on the project aiming for one million `low-cost` housing units completed at a cost of Rs40bn.
Continue reading A city with two souls
A boy — seemingly healthy — is born to a young couple and there is much rejoicing in the family. But little do the parents know at the time that tragic news awaits them. The infant has urethral valve obstruction at birth and if he is not treated in time he will head for kidney failure.Today there is hope for the infant, thanks to the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation (SIUT), Karachi, which is the only medical facility in Pakistan that has a unit for paediatric urology. Dr Philip Ransley, a paediatric urologist from the UK, who helped in the establishment of a paediatric urology unit in SIUT, finds it ‘crazy’ that there is no other unit of its kind in a country of 180 million where 45 per cent of the population is under 15.
The parents of the children — 20,000 of them who visit SIUT’s biweekly paediatric clinic every year — have much to be thankful for. They are provided the best state-of-the-art treatment free of charge by specialists trained by world renowned urologists in an environment that is child friendly. Bladder extrophy, spina bifida, and traumas caused by accidents that could become the cause of much anguish to children and their parents no longer lead to despair. There is hope.
The silver lining in Pakistan’s dark cloud of the public health sector is the SIUT which is the creation of the iconic Dr Adibul Hasan Rizvi who recently received a standing ovation in the National Assembly where every political party head lauded his efforts.
It was his vision — he always speaks of having a dream and then goes after it like a driven man — that saw the birth of the paediatric urology unit in 2002. The significance of this was driven home to me by Mr Philip Ransley who was in Karachi last week to conduct the Second International Paediatric Urology workshop. Mr Ransley retired a few years ago from London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital where he had trained under Sir David Innis, the legendary father of paediatric urology in Britain. He has made it his life mission to help the children of Pakistan and says, “Like many other areas of medicine, urology is a discipline that requires specialists trained for children. A urologist who operates on adults cannot really treat children’s urological problems with the expertise needed for it.”
“When I first started coming to Pakistan (he has been here dozens of times) my idea was to do surgery to rescue children from problems which no one could do here. Then following the dictum ‘give a man a fish and he feeds himself for a day but give him a fishing rod and he feeds himself for life’ I decided to pass on my expertise to the surgeons in Pakistan. The essence of our success is that SIUT’s paediatric urologists now take care of the vast majority of cases themselves — they have been quick on the uptake. They are even doing bladder reconstruction surgery which they had never done before,” Philip Ransley comments.
That explains the importance of the four day workshop held at the SIUT last week. The idea was to transfer knowledge of the new techniques that are continuously emerging in the world of medicine. Along with Philip Ransley and his colleague from London, Jeeta Dhillon, a perinatal urologist, the workshop was conducted by a guest faculty of four from France, the US, Germany and Italy.
Run with “amazing organisation of a military nature” (in Ransley’s words), the workshop was found “mind-blowing” by Jeeta Dhillon. There were three operation theatres running simultaneously throughout the workshop — unheard of in any surgical workshop anywhere in the world — ensuring continuity and intensive interaction. It also allowed the faculty to introduce the participants (about 150 of them from all over Pakistan) to different techniques. Laproscopic surgery, the latest entry in the field of paediatric urology and practised the world over, topped the agenda. Another area of interest was reconstruction of the bladder — a complex and time-consuming procedure.
What made the workshop so successful was not just the minute-to-minute scheduling done by Jeeta, the wonder woman of the exercise, but also the care and time taken in the selection of the 17 children operated upon — a nine-month process undertaken by Dr Sajid Sultan and the paediatric unit of the SIUT he heads. Jeeta pointed out that urologists don’t get to see so many cases in any workshop — and all free.
It was therefore a pity that the delegates from abroad — excepting the Turks — didn’t turn up. It is the image of Pakistan being an unsafe place that put them off. But the faculty who came were so pleased with their experience in Karachi that, as Philip Ransley hopes, they will talk about it and more people will visit.
Not surprisingly, WHO has decided to select SIUT as its collaborating centre for organ transplantation in the eastern Mediterranean.
Source: Dawn
By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn
WHAT keeps Pakistan afloat? Despite its seemingly precarious political existence and the gloom and doom spread by the highly politicised media, as well as the horrendous bomb blasts, the country manages to survive? For the answer switch off your television and step out to see for yourself how people cope in a country that does not provide its citizens even their basic needs. The immense reserves of resilience the people have is striking.
Continue reading How Pakistan survives?
By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn
IT wasn’t such a long time ago when a simple, soft-spoken man dressed in khaddar wearing dark-rimmed glasses used to be a familiar figure in Dawn’s office.
He would drop by for a chat to tell us about his social engineering experiments he was undertaking in Orangi, once described as Asia’s largest slum. Whether it was the drainage scheme, the school programme or the health plan he was dilating on excitedly, his zeal was always infectious. It compelled you to visit his projects to learn about them.
Continue reading Fading dream of social justice
by Steve Inskeep
On a narrow, unpaved Karachi street that has never had water service, a handful of men were digging a trench recently. They were digging it for their own water line, at their own expense.
For this part of Karachi, that’s normal. But surprisingly, for this part of the world, a woman was supervising the men.
Sabra Khadun has a cold, steady gaze and a stud in her nose. She explains that everybody on the street is donating money for the water line.
She lives in a tiny house, in a settlement that you could call a slum. The living room is painted pastel blue. And there’s a cushioned wood couch, big enough to hold a few of her 11 children — four sons and seven daughters. Every child’s name begins with the letter “S,” just like hers.
It’s not unusual to find women in leading roles in Karachi’s development. At the city’s public universities, female students vastly outnumber the men in key fields like architecture.
People aren’t sure why, but it’s happening.
One of Karachi’s former architectural students is Parveen Rehman. She started her career dismayed by the work she was doing.
“When I graduated, I was very confused,” she says.
Rehman worked for a famous architect, designing a hotel, when she decided to walk out and change course. She ended up going to work instead for an organization called the Orangi Pilot Project. It gives poor people the help they need to dig their own sewers, or water lines, when the government does not.
Rehman vividly recalls something that she heard from the project’s male founder, who spoke of the power of women. He compared himself to a grandmother — “not your grandfather, because your grandmother gives love … and through love she’s able to encourage and make people grow.”
Women are active in the development of Karachi, but Rehman says “they do not like to publicize” their roles.
‘Gentle but Persuasive’
A woman “is in charge of the entire house, [the] entire budget,” Rehman says. “And if she’s not convinced, no money can be let out for the development. No house can be improved, no child can go and get educated. It’s a woman who [makes] the decision.
“But when you go into some house, a man will come and talk and be very upfront and high profile, because by nature the women have been very gentle but persuasive. They know how to persuade their men … to do the things that they want to get done.”
Dealing with government officials initially was difficult for women, Rehman says. If women told an official, ” ‘You do this, you do that’ … he would start avoiding us. There’s a lot of things he can’t do. The system is such. But now we go and we say, ‘We want your advice. Please tell us what to do,’ and they feel very happy.
“I feel sometimes — not with men and women — with any group, if you come just upfront and try to be … the person taking credit for everything, that’s where things start going wrong,” she says. Once you rise up horizontally, you take everybody with you. But if you want to rise vertically, you will rise, but then nobody will be there for you.”
Rehman heads a research center in Orangi, a section of Karachi. She also teaches a college class in architecture. The list of students right now includes 11 women — no men.
It’s not unusual to find women in leading roles in Karachi’s development. At the city’s public universities, female students vastly outnumber the men in key fields like architecture.
People aren’t sure why, but it’s happening.
One of Karachi’s former architectural students is Parveen Rehman. She started her career dismayed by the work she was doing.
“When I graduated, I was very confused,” she says.
Rehman worked for a famous architect, designing a hotel, when she decided to walk out and change course. She ended up going to work instead for an organization called the Orangi Pilot Project. It gives poor people the help they need to dig their own sewers, or water lines, when the government does not.
Source: NPR