On Peshawar’s greenbelts: Sleep even comes to those who have no home

Exposed to the elements, streetlight people of provincial capital demand shelters.

PESHAWAR: Teen Jameel Khan* pats down a tuft of grass on the greenbelt near the Haji Camp Bus Station in Peshawar. He is about to settle in for the night after yet another long day.

Suddenly, a burst of light from the LED of a nearby mobile phone fills the otherwise dim scene.

The intense light wakes a sleeping dog and forces 17-year-old Jameel to raise his hands to his eyes to block it out. The dog swiftly receives a kick from his caregiver trying to sleep on his little patch of grass.

“I have a family and we share the same bed,” Jameel tells The Express Tribune. “We sleep and eat together.”



The teenager is among thousands of children and adults dotting Peshawar who have no place but the streets to call home.



According to a 2014 report from the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC) as many as 10,000 children live on the streets of the provincial capital, while over 1.5 million children call it home across the country.

Life on the streets is also fraught with risks with around 475 cases of assault and sexual harassment of street children registered in 2014.

Like many of his friends, Jameel is an Afghan who picks through the piles of rubbish the city generates every day for scraps to eke out a subsistence living for himself and his family.

While talking to The Express Tribune, Jameel says he has been picking through the city’s trash, collecting plastic ever since he was five-years-old.

He adds that he works alongside 20 other homeless children who collect plastic bags, papers and iron from the garbage bins making around Rs300 a day to feed his family, which lives in the Shamshato Camp.



“We garbage pickers are mostly Afghan nationals, but we also have some children who were displaced from areas like Mohmand, Bajaur and North Waziristan,” Jameel says, explaining that demographic of the rag pickers has changed in recent years.



“Once the business was dominated by minors fleeing the war in Afghanistan,” the garbage picker says, adding, “But now, we have children from areas such as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata), and even from the settled districts who have migrated to the provincial capital to support their families in their villages.”

But it is not just the children who occupy Peshawar roadsides.

Bano Bibi, who hails from Upper Dir, says she is not alone in sleeping on the greenbelts and that there are over 30 women like her who are homeless.

“Each night passers-by tease us, trying to touch us,” says the elderly Bano.

“Some even offer us money [for services], but we run away for fear of social disgrace, the reaction of our near and dear ones, and ostracisation.”

Of promises and stillborn projects

The federal government had announced plans for building low-cost housing schemes for the shelter-less and homeless in 11 districts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) in 1999.

Around 294 and 214 kanals of land were acquired in Abbottabad and Haripur respectively for this project.

But the project, work on which is yet to begin, cannot come soon enough for those having to sleep on the greenbelt.

Due to political instability in the country, work on the project has yet to begin, an official in the provincial housing ministry told The Express Tribune while requesting anonymity since he was not authorised to speak to the media.

The official added that land for the project has been acquired and money has also been transferred, but the government has yet to start work on a feasibility report to get the project off the ground.

“We have but one demand, that the government build makeshift shelters for the homeless to lessen their suffering and also protect them from the natural elements,” cried Bano.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 16^th, 2017.