TO substitute their agricultural income, almost all the villagers rear buffaloes. Haris and labourers acquire buffaloes financed by the land owners they work for. Salma, for example, has nine buffaloes. She got her first one when the land owner she works for purchased it for Rs9,000.
The agreement is standard: Salma will rear the buffalo, paying for her feed and upkeep. When she grows up and becomes pregnant, Salma can sell the milk and keep the proceeds. Then, the buffalo is sold. If she is a few years old, she will sell for about Rs60,000. At the time of sale, Salma will pay her land owner half the sale proceeds, (i.e. Rs 30,000) plus half the original cost of the buffalo (i.e. Rs 4500).
Typically, buffaloes are bought as income-producing assets since their milk becomes a source of daily income and at the time of weddings or illnesses, when larger sums of cash are required, the buffalo can be sold. It also provides dung which is the primary source of fuel in the absence of gas.
But buffaloes have also given the disillusioned, depressed young men of the village a means to resort to theft. They beg for biris and sit at roadside cafes all day while their parents work the fields. At night, they steal goats and buffaloes from their neighbours’ houses. “Earlier, they used to give them back if the owner woke up but now they say pay us Rs25000 and then we’ll give it back,” says one resident who recently had a buffalo stolen “They have guns now so we have to pay up.”
Some communities see theft as the only means left for survival. In the Bhil Village (deh of Khairo Dero), for example, the Hindus who speak a different dialect, probably originating in Thar, say they live off what they earn from labouring in the agricultural fields. But women from the community are known for their day trips to the town of Rato Dero, a few kilometers away, where they beg in the streets and steal when they can.
Some say they use money begged and stolen to lend out at high rates of interest to others in surrounding villages. Yet the poverty they live in appears stark. Most of them sleep on manjos, beds made by pushing branches of trees into the ground and placing old cloths and hay on top. Inside one hut, despite the stark afternoon heat, an old man wrapped tightly in a rilli, lays dying. Near by, a woman in her thirties is pale from fever. Between the two charpais, two children, no older than three or four sit with an aluminium dish of , watery rice between them eating off their hands. Bhana, about 35, collects her nine children around her. “I would have nineteen kids if the government would give us power here,” she says fanning herself with a hand-held straw fan.
Aasha, a 16-year old girl with gleaming black eyes offers her opinion on the state of the country’s leadership: “We only believe in Quaid-e-Azam,” she asserts. “Does Musharraf give us anything that we should believe in him? He hasn’t given us anything except higher expenses and no jobs.” Aasha is one of the only villagers familiar with the President’s name although she has never been to school. Her husband has been unemployed for four years.
Traditional handicrafts fail to deliver
Women in Khairo Dero also spend several hours a day working on traditional handmade handicrafts the art of which have been passed on from one generation to the next. The two most commonly made are Sindhi topis, hand embroidered with silver and gold thread and mirror work and patchwork bedspreads, or rillis, stitched together piece by piece by groups of four or five women.
Typically, one woman can embroider four topis a month which she sells to middlemen from the city for Rs125 each. After deducting costs, she saves about Rs25 per cap. Rillis take several days to piece together by hand and sell for Rs135 each.
In the small town of Hala, about 55 kilometers north of Hyderabad, the same rillis retail for Rs1,500 each. Efforts to formalize micro-enterprise through the provision of micro-credit have so far failed to have a positive effect in Khairo Dero. A sales representative of Khushali Bank did pass through the village earlier in the year and made a handful of loans, but without the training and regular monitoring that goes hand in hand with micro loans, the attempt failed.
Ghulam Haider, for example, is a primary school teacher earning Rs6,000 a month. He applied for a loan of Rs10,000 from the Khushali Bank which he hoped to spend preparing his small piece of land for the sowing of rice. The loan took six months to be processed. By the time it was approved, it was too late to use for sowing costs but Haider took the money and within days it evaporated on household expenses. No one from the bank ever contacted Haider about follow up meetings, he says.
Education an unnecessary evil
The village of Khairo Dero has 200 girls enrolled in a primary school but even if girls are sent there to study, they rarely go beyond the fifth grade which would require travel to another village or the nearest town.
Boys can study up to the middle school level in Khairo Dero or travel the few kilometers to the neighbouring village of Bungel Dero as well. Even very brief discussions with teachers at the schools in Khairo Dero indicate clearly the abjectly inadequate level of education provided by these government schools. But increasingly, kids are staying away for more complex reasons.
Take Noor Khatoon, a middle-aged mother of four from Misri Khan Goth in the deh of Khairo Dero. She always believed that education was the only way to lift her family out of its endless cycle of poverty. She wanted her children to escape the back-breaking labour in the fields that makes up her daily life. So she put her eldest through school, sacrificing his potential income and even borrowing when she could to provide for him. Today, he’s passed the intermediate exams but has been jobless for the last year.
“When we tried to get him a job, they said give us Rs20,000 as a bribe,” she explains. “If I borrow the money for this bribe and then he doesn’t get the job, what will we eat? The air? So I’ve learned my lesson and won’t let my other kids study. My grandchildren will also work the fields to fill their stomachs.”
Azizah, another mother from the nearby village of Usman Unar agrees wholeheartedly. Her eldest son recently completed matriculation but has been unable to find work. “What’s the point of making them study?” she asks. “They then become arrogant and they don’t work in the fields.”
This seems typical of all the young men who have studied up to matriculation or intermediate. They consider field work demeaning and unable to find jobs, simply while away their time. Azizah’s son Munir takes a different view.
“What’s the point of working in the field for so little?” he questions. So instead, he sells kulfis and makes Rs70 a day, enough only to pay for his own expenses. “In poverty, your heart breaks and when you know you will miss a meal, your enthusiasm for studying dies. So now maybe I will join the army.”
Deedar Ali, 23, knows the feeling. He studied till matriculation but when he couldn’t get a job and didn’t get accepted by the army, he started working for a landowning family’s fruit farm in the village. He gets about Rs5000 for the whole year for tending the mango trees and guava plants but considers the work to be a step above agriculture labour.
The problem, of course, is that even if young students shun agriculture labour, no environment has been created to foster successful trade. When Abdul Sattar, 23, finished intermediate a few years ago, he decided to open a small provisions store in the village. He used a room at the front of his parents’ house, decorating the walls with posters of Indian film stars and stocking up on essentials.
But over the years, Sattar has grown disillusioned. Inside the dark, airless store, Sattar’s vest sticks to his body as he irritably shoos away the kids who linger at his counter eyeing the few jars of sweets and biscuits. “I sell things worth Rs1000 a day but my profit is just Rs50 a day,” he says. “The journey of life is just ongoing. That’s all.”
Health indicators worsening
The dispensary’s supplies are limited to a cardboard box filled with oral rehydration salts and another of Calpol syrup. There are no antibiotics on site and just 100 disposable syringes are allocated to the unit every month compared to the need of 400.
Dispenser Hafiz Siraj says an average of 35 patients visit the health unit every day and the most common complaints are malaria, gastroenteritis and chest infections. “If we have medicines, we give them to the patients but most of the time we tell them to buy their own,” he says.
The five lady health workers who earn Rs1700 per month, distribute contraceptives door-to-door and aim to educate the women about family planning. “The men don’t listen but we try to talk to the women,” says Zamira. So far, their work has shown no results.
Poor hygiene and inadequate sanitation makes health problems worse. And when the local doctor is unable to diagnose or treat a condition, he can do little but advise patients to travel to Larkana for treatment. Most of them can’t afford the bus fare or the working hours lost.
Zareena, for example, rocks her two month old baby restlessly in her arms. He hardly seems to have the strength to cry and she shows me what appears to be several small holes in his scalp. “Our children are dying, we are getting poorer everyday, how will things get better for us?” she sobs into her dupatta.
Most villagers here seem to be losing the strength to continue their struggle. Zahida, the wife of a hari is worried her thatched house will fall. “People pray for rains but we can’t even do that because then we worry about where we will take our kids if the roof falls,” she says. “Where is the prosperity you speak off? The prosperity in Pakistan must be for the leaders themselves.”
Yet many still hold on to their aspirations. Sheherbano, a young mother of seven, shows me the lavatory in her home, with no roof and a frayed cloth as a door. “How can my young daughters live like this?” she says quietly. “I don’t even have walls or money to make walls. So do you think I will be eating fish and mangoes? We eat onions and potatoes on good days. Sometimes we eat one day and then not the next. But I am a mother and like others, I also wish my daughters could wear good clothes and study so they can become teachers.”
But many of the old residents see little hope ahead. One old dweller and a medium sized land owner of Khairo Dero remembers better times. “There used to be picnics in the mango season, boys shouting to one another and playing in the fruit farms,” he recalls sadly. “Now the humour is gone, everyone is desperate and fed up.”
But not jaded enough yet to forget their traditional welcome for visitors. Every visit to every home is met with a generous spreading of the cleanest, newest rilli onto a charpai and enthusiastic fanning with hand-held fans by several young girls to cool you off in the sweltering heat. Maybe it’s the paddy sowing season that has these villagers hoping, yet again, for better times ahead.