‘Please buy my three children... and give them a better future’

Woman tries to sell her children outside a hospital in Sialkot while her husband is treated for drug addiction.

SIALKOT:

Of the many things for sale outside Government Allama Iqbal Hospital, perhaps the most intriguing are Waqas, 9, his six-year-old brother Waqar and their three-year-old sister Amna. Their mother Khatoon Bibi, 33, has put them up for sale in the hope that they will be bought by somebody benevolent who will give them a better life than the grinding, poverty-stricken existence she can provide them through her work as a house-maid.

The children’s father is inside the hospital, receiving treatment for his drug addiction, which Khatoon says often leads him to beat her and renders him perennially unemployed.

Khatoon and her children are from Dulchike, a village in Sialkot district. She said that she married her husband Bilal about ten years ago. At first she was able to tolerate life with his drug addiction, but he soon became increasingly violent, making Khatoon’s life unbearable.

Bilal’s addiction seems to have gotten the better of him: Khatoon says that her husband is “in the last stages” of his drug problem, implying that he may not survive much longer. Meanwhile, her in-laws decided to kick her out of the house, leaving her with no home and no support from anyone but her own meagre earnings.

Khatoon’s parents are dead, and her brothers are barely able to feed their own families, let alone take on the burden of another four people. Her three children are all she has and she has nothing to give them. And so she decided to sell them, not for the money, she says, but in the hope that her desperate act would provoke someone compassionate to take them in and provide them a better life than she has been able to thus far.

Her act of desperation seems to have caught the attention of the media and local politicians. Nasim Nasir Khwaja, a PML-N member of the Punjab Assembly, has directed officials from the Child Protection and Welfare Bureau (CPWB) to provide shelter to Khatoon and her children. Khwaja also asked Khatoon not to give away her children.

CPWB superviser Zafar Iqbal said that Khatoon and her children had been taken into protective custody and would be provided food, shelter and other facilities. Khatoon herself will be provided vocational training and a Rs3,500 monthly stipend at Darul Falah, according to the organisation’s superintendent.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 4^th, 2011.