The world from their eyes

In the major cities of Europe - from Lisbon to Madrid, Paris to Athens, Frankfurt to Warsaw - I have met Pakistanis as Uber drivers, restaurant workers and small shopkeepers. Some came to Europe a couple of years ago, and some have been around for well over a decade. Among the dozens I have spoken to, in Urdu and in my choppy Punjabi, not one dreamed of moving to Europe until the situation at home became unbearable. Not one ever shied to tell me their story. They all missed their families terribly - even if they had harsh things to say about the system that was built on privilege that they did not have. In my conversations with them, sometimes during a short taxi ride and sometimes over a long cup of coffee at a café, I got to see a different Pakistan. A parallel universe of sorts. A Pakistan that someone like me - who is male, Sunni and a Punjabi from a well-to-do urban family - may have read about in some obscure story but never experienced.

I have often wondered about the richness of our individual experiences - and how the tapestry of these experiences creates a whole society. My own experiences are authentic and my own, but they provide me with little insight into the struggles of others. I have never experienced the harrowing choice to either buy groceries or to pay the electricity bill, and deal with that anxiety every month. I have not had to worry about the generational debt to the feudal. I have never had to stop going to school because my parents had to buy medicines for a sick sibling. But others face this economic injustice every day. Someone who has had to sell everything to get on a cramped boat - unsure whether it would make it on the shore or sink in the tumultuous waters of the Mediterranean - is just as smart as I am. The question I ask myself, as I come face to face with someone who looks like me but was born just a few kilometers away in abject poverty, is why their world is so much different than mine? Why is their world harsher, harder and more unforgiving than the world I inhabit?

I do not have deep answers to this question - but I do know that I need to see the world from their eyes to be a more decent human being. I can never experience the world as they do, but I can at least accompany them on their journey. The idea of accompaniment is not new. Individuals from Paul Farmer to Gustavo Guteierrez have talked about the preferential treatment of the poor, and the notion of accompaniment. They have written about poverty not just as a given that we should simply accept as a natural order of things, but as a manifestation of injustice. They have argued about seeing this injustice at the systems level, not in isolation. In his own way, Edhi's approach was rooted in a similar principle - of being there for those who are abandoned by the individuals and the institutions.

The voices of those who live in slums of rich cities all around the world, not because they are unpatriotic or lacking in faith, but because they simply want to survive, rarely reach the high halls of the UN General Assembly in late September, or the corridors of power in our own country. But that does not mean that the world they experience simply does not exist. It is our choice not to ask a refugee child, among our own societies: why is he or she scared? What wrong has he or she done? Or if we don't have the courage to ask the child, maybe we could ask ourselves the same question: why are they scared? What wrong have they done? And why are they less of a human being than us?