For three days now, we’ve been running after buses, rickshaws and street children in the city to promote an anti-violence awareness campaign.

I’ve been inviting the general public to stare at me – my T-shirt reads statistics of civilians affected by bomb blasts since 2002 and asks agli baari meri? (Am I next?).

We've spent hours at the bus stop at Tower, where buses disperse to the rest of Karachi and have roped in a team of street kids to help us flood buses with fliers that states that this bus could be the next target in a terrorist attack.

We've spent a whole day at Patel Para and other rickshaw parking joints where we put stickers on rickshaws. We have become very good at this; one person flags down a rickshaw, one person holds up a sticker and briefs the driver on what we're doing, two people unwrap a sticker and slap it on the vehicle as soon as we get approval and one person records the rickshaw driver’s thoughts on the state of violence in the country.

We have followed street kids and chai boys and given them T-shirts. Most of them just wanted a free shirt, but they listened to us tell them about a time when Karachi was not this unsafe.

We roamed through Empress Market, Bolton Market, Khadda Market, Burns Road and Jama Cloth reading out statistics about people who have died in terrorist attacks, as pockets of people gather around us. There's usually a murmur that sounds like "Haan, sahee baat hai," followed by a debate about what we can achieve through all of this.

What, indeed, are we going to achieve by all of this?

After day two – call this naivete, stupidity or habit – I googled "How do you judge the success of an awareness campaign?"

While convincing the general public that what we are doing is essential and is making a difference, a small voice inside me, questions if we really can do anything.

Rickshaw drivers have been asked to put stickers on their rickshaws to pledge that they will take a stand against violence in Pakistan.

When fliers are thrown into buses, people catch them and read them out. Some smirk, some frown, some shake their heads, some say a small prayer. Some people yell out that we need to go back to America. A large number of people look out at us from bus windows and say “There's nothing we can do! Allah raham karay.”

We've had a large number of people question us, and support us. But I fear that only a fraction of the willingness is an actual understanding and a desire to help. A large amount of it is curiosity; a desperation, a desire to be part of something.

What we've done is a visual delight. The T-shirts and stickers look lovely. Today on burns road two bus conductors who had stuck stickers on our buses yesterday passed us by and gave us a thumbs up! We've added to our team on the go – bus drivers willing to have fliers distributed in their buses throughout the day, rickshaw drivers leading us to busy rickshaw joints and encouraging their friends to slap them on, police men have been supportive – glad that instead of blaming the government, civilians are trying to take accountability and do something. We've been applauded for what we've done.

But I question what has been done.

Since 2003, more than 35,000 people have been killed in the violence that has plagued Pakistan. More than 250 suicide bombings have injured over a 100,000 Pakistanis across the country.

It is going to take a lot more then T-shirts, stickers and fliers to tackle the violence that has ripped apart families and communities. It is going to take a lot more than talking to people to make them overcome the trauma that they have been subjected to in these. We are in a mess that is too deep to be sorted out by just an awareness campaign.

But perhaps by initiating dialogue, we can start something.This project will be a small step towards healing and reconciliation.

At the site of the Ashura blasts, one man was actually excited that we were asking him about it. When asked why he was somewhat happy, he answered, "people forget something happened here. How can you forget that something happened here? I'm just glad people remembered and came back".

Remembrance is a powerful thing. When people look back at events that scarred them, sometimes they get scared, and get stuck. More often they put events behind them and move on as soon as they can.

Sometimes such events make people try to do everything in their power to never let them repeat again. Maybe we should look even further back, when Karachi wasn't this unsafe, and aim for a time when it is like that again.

Below are some images from the campaign. -Photo courtesy: Citizen's Archive of Pakistan.

For more information, please visit www.citizensarchive.org/dialoguewithpakistan

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