News
KARACHI, Pakistan
Bilquis Edhi has thousands of children.
Some were born with shriveled limbs. Some have misshapen heads. Some will never see, nor speak, nor walk.
Bilquis Edhi loves them all.
For more than 40 years, the Pakistani charity run by Edhi and her husband has taken in children that other people can't afford or don't want. Many a night, someone slips away from an Edhi rescue cradle, knowing that the baby they've abandoned will soon be bathed and clothed and fed.
The Edhi Foundation has hundreds of cradles and more than a dozen orphanages throughout Pakistan, including one on a narrow, crowded street in Karachi where power lines sag to the crumbling pavement. Up two flights of stairs, the squalor of the city gives way to clean, airy rooms with dozens of well-cared-for kids.
There's Yousuf, left in a cradle two years ago. He was so weak they doubted he would live; now he toddles about and dances with his nurses.
There's Irum, maybe 18 months old, maybe 2 years. All they know for sure is that she is "mentally abnormal,'' a nurse says, but heart-wrenchingly adorable.
There are bigger children, too, like 6-year-old Kira and her sister Maryam, 14. Their parents are drug addicts who dropped them off two years ago and never came back.
Pakistan is a poor country, with almost 190 million people and little in the way of government services to help the millions who need it. So the Edhi Foundation tries to fill the void, especially for Pakistan's youngest and most vulnerable.
The foundation was started by Abdul Sattar Edhi, born in India in 1928 to a mother who impressed on him the virtues of altruism. Every day when he left for school, she gave him two coins — one for himself and one to spend on others. He soon learned it was best to come home with no money at all lest his mother accuse him of being greedy and self-centered.
After the chaotic partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, the family moved to Karachi where Edhi was appalled by the poverty. He first worked with other welfare groups, then started his own clinic for the poor. He bought an old van, a "poor man's ambulance," he called it, and drove around the city, helping the sick and burying the dead.
In 1965, during one of Pakistan's wars with India, Edhi met a young nurse who was tending to victims of enemy shelling. "Her skin glowed with an inner light,'' he would later write of Bilquis Bano, the woman who would become his partner in a life of philanthropy.
Today, the nonprofit Edhi Foundation is Pakistan's premier welfare organization. Supported solely by grants and donations, it operates the country's largest fleet of ambulances, provides maternity care for thousands of women and is usually the first on the scene of disasters.
The foundation has also sheltered more than 20,000 abandoned children, some with mental disabilities or severe deformities.
One is Shazed. He was left in a cradle outside the foundation's Karachi headquarter's 24 years ago, likely by a woman who didn't want to raise a boy with flippers for arms. Shazed went to an Edhi school and now works in the ambulance maintenance shop logging vehicles in and out. He plays cricket with other orphans on Sunday, his day off.
Shazed is among the luckier ones. Last year, the Edhi Foundation buried 1,200 babies who had been thrown in the garbage or left on the street. This year it expects to bury even more. The tiny bodies are taken to the Edhi Morgue in Karachi — Pakistan's only cold-storage morgue — where workers gently bathe them and wrap them in white cloth tied at the ends like bonbons. In this patriarchal society, where females are valued less than males, many victims of infanticide are girls. But no one will ever know the true numbers of babies killed at birth.
There are happy stories, too.
More than 14,000 orphans have been adopted, many by families in other countries. Thousands of applications are pending.
For older girls who remain in the foundation's care, Bilquis Edhi arranges marriages and dowries. Many orphans return to show off their own children and thank the Edhis. Some want to know who their "real'' mother is, like the woman who recently came from Florida.
" 'I am your mother,' '' Bilquis told her. "Then I took her into the nursery and showed her some of the babies and she started crying. She realized what I meant.''
At 83, Abdul Edhi has largely bowed out of his foundation's day-to-day operations. Most of the work is done by more than 3,000 volunteers and younger members of the Edhi clan like 30-year-old grandson Muhammed. He has lived in the United States but now handles the foundation's public relations.
"It's a family business,'' he says.
On this July day, he is visiting his grandmother, who just had cataract surgery and is slowing down a bit too. But Bilquis Edhi keeps one job for herself: Naming the orphans.
The night before, someone left a newborn girl in the cradle outside the Edhi headquarters. The baby's forehead was unusually narrow, and she had the features of a Down syndrome child.
Bilquis chose an especially impressive name — Noor Jehan, after one of history's most powerful empresses.
Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com.
Loading...
