Act of kindness: Transgenders help recover missing children

NGO Roshni Helpline gets transgenders on board as they have the best local connections.

KARACHI:

After dragging feet at hospitals, morgues, police stations and government offices for months and listening to false consolations, the only hope for Faiz Buksh to see his six-year-old daughter lies with the eunuchs.

The transgender community in the city, along with NGO Roshni Helpline, has taken the role of recovering missing children, who have been abducted or have gone missing. “I pray that they bring my girl back. They have connections in the area, maybe they can find out who took her,” says the father, showing picture of his daughter, Shumaila, in a black scarf, who went missing from Mobina Town in July after she had gone to a shop. Since her disappearance, the mother has gone in a state of shock and does not talk anymore.



At a main signal in Malir Halt, the eunuchs are secretly carrying pictures in their pockets and purses of a five-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy who have gone missing. They also peek in cars, taxis and rickshaws, and glance at other beggars to see if the child is among them.

Activist and member of the Gender Interactive Alliance, Bindiya Rana, who is overseeing them said that the presence of the transgender in all the towns, and houses (deray) in every locality can help locate children as they would be working as informers.

“We have already helped dozens of children who are lost from their families in public places and united them,” she pointed out. “I remember a boy who was separated from her mother at a shopping centre and, when we took him to his mother, she hugged both of us.”

Another transgender, Riffi Khan, who is also part of the project said that they will help remove misconceptions that eunuchs abduct children and turn them into one of them. “People think that we are the ones who kidnap kids as we can’t have them. But this is wrong. We are not involved in such work.” Group meetings have started among the transgender community while they will also start a door-to-door campaign to raise awareness.

Roshni Helpline president Muhammad Ali said that their collaboration with the transgenders will prove fruitful given the police’s failure to recover hundreds of children who fall into the hands of various mafias, are trafficked and made to work as prostitutes or beggars. “Right now, we have not recovered any child through the transgender but I am sure that we will be successful very soon.”

According to the organisation, this year so far 2,736 children have gone missing with less than 20 per cent recovered. “The idea to involve the transgender came because they have good connections in their areas, are aware of the locals and some of them are beggars at traffic signals. They would be able to help us.” Once they see a missing child, the volunteers will send a text message to Ali and his peers, who will then inform the police.

Vulnerable areas, such as Mobina Town, Gulshan-e-Iqbal, Jamshed Town and others, are being mapped where transgenders would be told to be vigilant.

If the plan works out, it would bring relief to several families, says Ali, as an aggrieved Uzair Rehman sitting next to him looks down on the floor. On his mobile phone, Rehman, a factory worker shows a CCTV video of outside his house in North Nazimabad where his two-year-old son was abducted. He had stepped outside the gate when a burqa-clad woman in a rickshaw stopped and took him away in a matter of minutes. “Sometimes I go to work. Sometimes I don’t.  I keep thinking about my son and my wife keeps crying.”

Published in The Express Tribune, December 24^th, 2013.