Ballooning crisis: Living in inescapable penury

Sitting in the corner of a dark Islamabad alley, waiting for the weekend crowd to emerge from their dwellings and fill the empty street markets, is 60 year old Mibar Khan— a hawker who’s spent the better part of his life selling children balloons to make ends meet. His grizzled hair and bronzed skin are testimony to a lifetime spent under the baking sun, while the wrinkles on his forehead speak of the trials and tribulations which facing years of penury have afforded him. “I was born into poverty and escaping it has been an uphill battle for me, as it was for my parents and will be for my children too. The world around us may have grown by leaps and bounds but for the six decades of my existence, I have failed to build a better life for myself or my brood,” lamented the father of five.

Khan, who is indigenous to the vales of Kohistan, migrated to Islamabad some thirty years ago in hopes of making a better livelihood and improving his standard of living. It took him the investment of valuable household items to secure a gas machine and a wheel barrow worth Rs 50,000, which he expected his income would soon payoff. However, it has been a slow, grueling process with endless labour and little fruit.

“I have been lugging this cart for over thirty years now but body’s fast retiring and business is only getting worse. I would get Chinese balloons from Rawalpindi and sell them here in Islamabad’s street markets to children, but the lack of business during the lockdown period was backbreaking and everything’s gotten expensive ever since.”

Where the capital’s upscale parties are the most generous to Khan’s otherwise meagre income, his constant financial crisis has kept him from ever being able to celebrating his own children’s birthday. “It’s always been about surviving anotheday for us. We have seldom had enough to spend on any kind of celebrations of our own,” said the balloon seller. “Two of my elder sons work in Naran, selling custom engraved rice grains to tourists. While the youngest one sells second-hand clothes in Islamabad’s flea market. I also have two daughters but they work at home.

Although I have tried to give my children the best of what I could manage with my finite resources, it was never enough pull them out of poverty,” he added. Mibar Khan, is among the 53 million people in Pakistan, who live below the poverty line, for whom escaping the poverty trap has been a pipe dream. The absence of effective economic and political governance has allowed them to feed into a self- reinforcing mechanism which has caused penury to persist over generations, affecting them in various ways. Some of them being lack of access to education, healthcare, utilities, drinking water and sanitation— all of which are classed as fundamental human rights.