PAKISTAN: DECADES OF HOPE

Nimmi Gowrinathan
Director, South Asia Programs

Arif has six children. His youngest is a four-year-old daughter who never left her father’s side; a child he doted upon, perhaps sensing the impact of the void left behind by the death of her mother just a few months earlier. Arif was among several key members of the Maldera Village who welcomed Operation USA with a fresh-cooked meal of roast-chicken and biriani rice, a school play, and warm smiles. His wife was one of four women who passed away in the last month from an entirely preventable cause -- childbirth.

From May 6 -13, Operation USA conducted a monitoring trip to Pakistan, visiting the sites of two completed clinics constructed through our partners, OMEED and CHAL. With the generous support of Honeywell Hometown Solutions and Kaiser Permanente, our partners have constructed a primary health clinic in Garhi Dupatta that now sees 80-100 patients a day, creating local access to quality health care; and, an amputee rehabilitation center in Bagh that has provided individualized prosthetic limb fitting and physical therapy to over 200 adults and children since it opened last fall.

On one eventful day of our trip we met Arif just after driving up a damaged road and hiking the last few kilometers to reach the village of Maldera. The South Asia Network, based in Artesia, California, will collaborate with Operation USA and local partners to create the Maldera Village Trust, institutionalizing the request of the residents to be involved in any development projects. The projects initiated in this village will be completed through community organizing, allowing every member of the village to feel some ownership of the final product -- a new clinic, which the village elders have been requesting from local government for over 30 years. Operation USA will also assist in the construction of a 10-room schoolhouse to educate children who come from six surrounding villages, and walk an average of one hour each way to attend class.

While international attention and the media spotlight has long-since faded from the October 2005 earthquake that claimed 80,000 lives in Pakistan and India, Operation USA remains committed to meeting the long-term needs of marginalized communities in the region impacted generally by endemic poverty, and specifically by a 7.6 magnitude earthquake.

05/2007