Just pay me 30,000 rupees...

One of my friends has just been accepted for immigration to Canada. After five years of applications, language tests, waiting and a nerve racking interview, he was invited to become a Canadian citizen just a few weeks ago. The final step to be cleared was the medical exam.

Before going to the Canadian medical labs he decided to get his blood tested in a private lab. One of his close acquaintances works as a clerk in the lab that does the immigration medicals so he went there for a pretest. Upon submitting his sample, he was told that he would be called by 8pm that same evening.
8pm passed. No call. 9pm, my friend tried to call the clerk but there was no answer. 10pm. No answer. 11pm, the clerk shut off his phone. That night my friend didn’t sleep, worried that the news was that he somehow had contracted some deadly disease.

At 7am he called the clerk again and was told that he’d have his results by mid morning. The clerk called back. “Nothing too serious. You just have some symptoms of Hepatitis C. You know, Canadian immigration won’t accept you unless you have perfect health, so if you just pay me 35,000 rupees (~$600) by tomorrow we can clear your record.”

I receive an SMS, “THIS IS THE WORST MOMENT OF MY LIFE.” I write back, “What’s wrong? What is it?” but I receive no answer. I knew he had submitted his test, and since there is no education about health issues here, I think that he may have some form of Hepatitis and not know about it.

My friend is freaking out. Not only does he not know much about different forms of Hepatitis, but he fears that after his five years of waiting he won’t be able to go to Canada after all. He is told by the clerk that many of the young men applying for immigration have Hepatitis B, and that recently one young wife whose husband is waiting for her in the US has tested positive for HIV.
My friend submits his blood sample to two more private labs for a triple check. He waits. He talks to the clerk and bargains the bribe price to 30,000 rupees. The clerk says he needs at least of half of it that very night. My friend calls his brother and makes a plan to arrange the money. Finally in the afternoon he gets the results. They both come back clear and he is declared to be in perfect medical condition.

Something is fishy here. Clerk #1 has a nice big new car which should not be possible on his salary. Turns out nobody will be turned away from entering Canada for symptoms of Hepatitis C anyway, and my friend puts the pieces together. Clerk #1 can afford his flashy new car because he tells people that they have ailments that in fact they do not have. Then he demands that they pay him ludicrous amounts at short notice in order to “clear” their records. Most people don’t question him because they are so afraid that their immigration will be refused on the basis of the final step, the medical. Besides that they are scared because there is no public knowledge of basic things like how HIV or Hepatitis are transmitted and what their symptoms are. Clerk #1 is taking advantage of this dearth of knowledge in a big way.

After my friend has completed his immigration paperwork he plans to report this problem to the Canadian High Commission. Somebody has to know what’s going on, and this man needs to be brought to justice. But here the system is based on corruption and there is no justice. You can’t trust anyone, as this clerk would even lie to a close acquaintance with about a dozen mutual friends between them. He may see justice if he is persistent enough. This situation reminds me of a parable that Jesus told:

“In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared about men. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.
For some time he refused. But finally, he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care about men, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually wear me out with her coming!’
And the Lord said, ‘Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones who cry out to him day and night. Will he keep putting them off? I tell you he will see that they get justice and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” Luke 18:1-8

The Clean Shaven Man

The Lonely Planet Guidebook (LPG) warns against spending a lot of time in Chilas, a town in the Northern Areas about five hours drive south of Gilgit Town. The authors say that most travellers will drive straight from Islamabad to Gilgit in order to avoid stopping in conservative areas along the way. I took their advice, taking the bus straight direct from Pindi to Gilgit Town with short rest stops along the way. We stopped in Chilas for breakfast shortly after the sun came up, but all I can remember is that I was ushered into one of those special "family rooms" while the men sat outside enjoying a view of mountains and waterfalls.

The family I was staying with in Sultanabad shared with me story about Chilas. Shahid, the head of the family, had spent a few years as a branch manager living there. Shahid himself is Ismaili and is quite concerned with the sway of the fanatics in the Northern Areas. He does not have a beard like the mullahs (religious leaders/zealots) do, but only a neatly trimmed moustache.

One day his nephew was driving down from Gilgit town to visit him in Chilas. For whatever reason, high speed, or landslides lessening the integrity of the road, his nephew's car went off the road which resulted in his death. Some men from Chilas saw the accident and went down to investigate. They saw the broken bleeding body in the car. What did they do? Well, they looked at his face and saw that he did not have a beard. His face was clean shaven. They came to the conclusion that he was not a Muslim and had deserved his fate. They left his body there in the car.

The next day the men in the bank were relating the story to Shahid. They shared proudly how they had judged this man to be a Muslim because he didn't have a beard and so they had left him there. He may have been alive. Shahid had found out about the demise of his nephew by this point. He said to the men, "This was my nephew that you saw." The men didn't know how to respond and they left the bank.

Arms Bazaar

Check out this BBC article about the arms market in Pakistan

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/5066860.stm

Room to roll over is not enough

An Australian friend of mine recently attended a funeral here in Lahore for one of our friend's fathers. Only men are allowed to attend, so I can only retell the event through what he's told me since I am denied to witness it firsthand.

Bodies here are not kept in a morgue, but in the home until the day of burial. You can imagine how this is in the heat that I've been endlessly complaining about. And the flies - machia- everywhere. When they finally go to bury the body, they cannot put it in a coffin. Why not? Because it is believed that the body must sit up in its tomb in order to be judged by God. If the body does not have room to sit up, then the person will be judged and will be denied entry into paradise if that's where he was on his way to. You know in English we have the expression, "to roll over in one's grave," but here apparently a little room to roll over is not enough.

The holes are six feet down, but the wooden boxes for entombing the body are four to five feet high. The bodies must be placed down into these boxes by hand, and my friend witnesses one of the pallbearers as we might call them, getting stuck down in the tomb with the dead body and unable to get back out without further assistance. Once all those who helped put the body in have successfully gotten out and away from the body, the box is closed and a small amount of dirt is put on top. The stench of the bodies is everywhere in the cemetary, and there is no regard for stepping on the tombs of others. Actually, there's not anywhere else to stand, so you spend your whole time trodding over graves of people unbeknowst to you. My friend almost panicked when the funeral procession ran off to respond to the call to prayer and left him "in charge" of watching the body, which had not yet been buried.

With all that said, I'm not terribly upset women aren't allowed to go to funerals, although would like to be a fly on the wall sometime just to observe the goings on in those forbidden cemetaries.

In the Absence of Lawnmowers

The gardner, mali, is a tall slender man with an aged face and a timeless smile. He is darkened and wrinkled from long days in the unrelenting sun, but he his face is shadowed by a bright blue hat with a wide brim all around. I don't know his name, but I know his smile and I always make sure to say a "Salaam Alaikum" as I walk by. If he sees me coming from the distance, I can tell that his smile and his words of greeting are just waiting to come out as soon as I get close enough to hear.

This morning I saw the mali in the hostel yard, crouched near to the ground eastern style and holding a short blade. He was dressed in his usual light brown shalwar kameez. We said our customary greetings and I made my way to my morning class. A few hours later I returned to the hostel, seeing him again in the position but about five feet from where he had been. The third time I walked by him, was about four or five hours from when I had first seen him, and by this time he had proceded to the other side of our small garden. This time as I approached him from behind, I was wondering, what has he been doing out here all this time. He's in the middle of the grass and it doesn't seem like he is pulling up weeds or anything.

He was holding the blade and meticulously cutting the longer blades of grass. The grass behind him was neat and even, while the grass in front was in need of a trim. He was doing the entire yard by hand! I then asked myself, "Have i ever seen a lawnmower here?" and I couldn't remember seeing one. So in the absence of lawnmowers, this is how they get it done.