"My cousin used to drive a cab and one day he was called by a customer who needed to be picked up. That night he went missing and his family started searching for him.

The police found a body and we were called to identify it. Later on, with a local Jirga, we got to know that five people who wanted to snatch his cab, called him and then killed him. This incident left me speechless.

With the help of the Jirga members and Union Councils, we have made committees in neighbouring villages. Every village presents its problems to this organisation and the organisation helps them out. After this, I made a committee of local youth who collect funds and help out poor people and we also help the police. We still have not gotten any help from the government. We work on the basis of a ‘help yourself’ ideology.”

— Unemployed man, age 25, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

One story provides a dramatic example of a powerless family being saved by police action. A farm worker says that he and 17 other family members worked without wages as bonded labourers for their landlord. The landlord kept them in appalling conditions. “Often we had to face hunger and forced fasts,” he says. “They would chain us and they had allotted numbers to us like prisoners. We were compelled to urinate and fulfill our natural needs in front of each other in plastic bags.” They were eventually freed in a police raid.

"As I am a non-Muslim, my Muslim brothers used to look at me with disgust in their eyes. But one incident broke the roots of this hatred. The village sardar’s mother was very ill. His mother’s blood group was O negative and no one was a match. I was shaking and scared but stepped forward and stated that I was ready to donate blood.

The doctor told me to come and get tested but the sardar interrupted the doctor and told him that he will never give a non-Muslim’s blood to his mother. I got my blood group checked and by fate, it was also

O negative. The doctor saw a ray of light to save the old woman but he was helpless in front of the sardar’s stubbornness.

Suddenly, his elder sister came forward and burst out crying, saying ‘please give blood to my mother to save her.’ I did and after some time, the sardar’s mother started recovering. My happiness knew no bounds when the sardar, a person who never liked to even talk to me, hugged me with tears in his eyes. From that day onwards we eat, drink and sit together.

— Agricultural worker (male), age 24, Punjab

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, October 19th, 2014