Belgian nurse in limbo over visa extension

Seventy-six-year-old nurse and charity worker fears she won’t be allowed to return to Pakistan

KARACHI: When Sister Jeannine Geuns left her native Belgium in 1962 to live and serve ‘untouchables’ in a suburban locality of Karachi, she was just 21 years old.

Fifty-four years on, the passion of this Belgian woman to serve has only grown stronger as she tends to patients at the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Centre in Mangophir even at the age of 76 and fights to get an extension in her visa to stay among her patients.

Talking to The Express Tribune, Sister Jeannine said she had been living in Pakistan for all these decades and had visited Belgium only briefly to her family. She said it had been almost ten years that she last travelled to her country.



Candidly narrating her story, Guen said she was not a good scholar and never wanted to become a teacher. “However, I had a passion to nurse the sick. That passion groomed over the years and when I was 21 years old I decided I’d become a full-fledged nurse,” she said.

Reminiscing over her parents, she said her mother was a very strong and generous lady but it was her father, who gave her the permission to follow her passion. “Later, this passion led me to Pakistan and to nurse the sick people here along with Dr Ruth Pfau at the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Centre.”

However, the sister admitted her vocation was a challenging one. “Initially, the heat was very difficult to bear and I used to perspire a lot. Also, we were away from the main city area. But I was treating lepers here and other patients,” she says.

The nurse said the very word ‘leprosy’ frightened people away. “But I was never afraid of it and I tried to work for the suffering ones,” she said, while rejecting myths surrounding the disease.

She said people even avoid the nurses who tend to these patients. “But there were others who were friendly people and who invited me over to their homes,” she added.

Issue of non-extension in visa

Sister Jeanine said she had faced a delay in extension of her visa in the past and sometimes she would get an extension after six months. “However, the problem used to get resolved and I never had renewal issues but now it is too much of a hindrance,” she added.



Talking to The Express Tribune about Sister Jeanine’s issue, the newly-appointed Belgian Ambassador to Pakistan Frederic Verheyden said: “Sister Jeannine Geuns is here in Pakistan since 1962, she applied for her visa extension, the last time in April 2015 but hasn’t heard from the officials, as yet.”

Verheyden said the main reason why she was so concerned about the extension was that she planned to travel to Belgium but feared she might not be allowed to return back. The newly-appointed diplomat said he came to know about her problem about a month back.

According to Verheyden, Sr Jeanine is a distinguished award winner from the government of Pakistan and deserved an extension in visa. In 1991, the government awarded her the Sitara-e-Quaid-i-Azam for her services to humanity, he said.

“We know, that we cannot pressurise the Pakistani authorities but she should be given a visa solely on humanitarian grounds. We can only request the Pakistani authorities to consider her case, so that she may continue to help the suffering souls here,” he added.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 11^th, 2016.