KARACHI, Oct 10: I could not believe that Amna, a thalassaemia patient, had drawn the pictures collected in a bunch of loose papers. The 10-year-old has not been to school even for a day as her mother says they cannot afford her education. A neighbour has just started giving her tuitions for class I and charges a nominal fee of Rs100 per month.
Amna Ismail has been getting blood transfusions since she was only three months old.
“Keeping her health stable is itself a challenging task,” says her mother, whose husband is a security guard at a private business college. A charity hospital, far away from their one-room rented home in a Korangi locality, provides free blood transfusions. But money is needed for her regular treatment necessitated by the ailment.
When I insisted that she might have traced the well-known cartoon characters and other figures from the book she was clutching, she opened her bag, took out her pencil and eraser and began drawing Mickey Mouse. She measured the lines with her index finger and drew similar lines on the blank paper. She was fairly successful in her effort.
If anything, Amna is a born artist, but too poor to hone her talents.
The last 10 years have been a real ordeal for her mother. It was not an easy task to make the hospital register the child as a regular patient. Her preference is a hospital that purifies blood before transfusing it. But the desired charity hospital is out of her reach as though its administration is kind enough to give an occasional transfusion, it is not willing to register Amna as a regular visitor.
“Whenever she undergoes a transfusion, she suffers from bouts of allergy and has to be given a particular medicine. And her complexion is becoming increasingly dark, which I believe is because of the untreated blood,” says the mother, who has grown frail but tirelessly fights poverty and disease. Her son is a class IX student at a private school while her husband Ismail, who earns a meagre monthly income, suffers from hepatitis C.
Ismail was in the army, posted at Mian Channu, when the newborn Amna was first diagnosed with thalassaemia. The army hospital provided almost all kinds of treatment to the family but there was no arrangement for blood transfusion there. So he quit the job prematurely and shifted to Karachi.
With no regular job in hand or shelter, he began life here as a construction worker before getting the security guard’s job. He, however, is happy to compare his present condition to that of the beginning of the trial more than 10 years ago. As he works 12 hours a day, it’s his wife who solely takes care of the ailing Amna. Almost every fortnight she has to be taken to hospital for transfusion. The hospital is almost 25 kilometres away and a two-hour journey changing different buses. The process takes almost the whole day.
So there is very dim light even at the end of the tunnel.—Naseer Ahmad
