The sign above the crib in a dusty Karachi street is less a commandment than a plea. “Do not kill,” it says, in English and Urdu. “Leave the baby to live in the cradle.” Almost every day a desperate woman obliges, abandoning her illegitimate, disabled or simply unwanted child in one of 300 similar cribs, or jhoolas, throughout Pakistan. In a country racked by natural disasters, war and drug-trafficking, where 39% of the population live below the poverty line, these children are relatively lucky. They are taken in by Bilquis Edhi, a redoubtable 58-year-old with hennaed hair and bright eyes. Her nickname, “Mother of Pakistan”, is well earned. The charity she and her husband, Abdul Sattah Edhi, run has rescued more than 16,700 unwanted babies since 1952, and today takes in an average of 450 a year.
Many are adopted by Pakistani families who cannot have children. The rest are brought up in the Edhi Foundation’s network of 17 orphanages. “They’re basic by western standards,” says Fatima, a British Muslim from Luton who adopted her two children, Shehla and Mohammed, now 10 and 6, from the Edhi Foundation while she was working as a nurse in Pakistan. “The cots are metal and the floors stone. But you can tell the children are loved. My little boy was three when I adopted him, and Bilquis and everyone who works at the orphanages had really cared for him. You can see that the children are happy.”
Children who are not adopted are educated within the orphanages and grow up calling Bilquis and Abdul Sattah “Ammi” and “Abbu” (“Mummy” and “Daddy”). Boys are taught trades, and girls learn to be homemakers. Many choose to stay on to work within the foundation. For others, Bilquis arranges marriages as a Pakistani mother would, and the foundation raises the girls’ dowries.
It only takes a walk through Karachi to see the fate of unwanted babies not lucky enough to end up in Bilquis’s care. In the teeming port city of some 12m, armies of ragged children carry out backbreaking labour, or beg in organised gangs. In the sprawling heaps of rubbish and in drains, the tiny bodies of newborns are often found, garrotted, burnt or asphyxiated. Their births are not registered, so neither are their deaths. “We come across more important cases than these every day,” says a Pakistani police officer. “That leaves us with no time to probe these cases. It is not that we don’t consider infants important, but usually such cases are impossible to follow up on.” Instead, they call the Edhi Foundation, which collects and buries the little bodies. They are the only people who keep account of how many are found. It is sometimes as many as 50 a month, though the number has decreased as they have left out more cradles.
Anwer Kazmi, a spokesman for the foundation, says that almost all the abandoned and murdered babies are girls. About 3% are disabled; only 1 to 2% are healthy boys. “Female babies are a liability all over the subcontinent. Males can work for the family when they grow up. A girl can’t work, but still has to be fed and clothed, and her dowry has to be raised.” Typically, a dowry is three times the father’s annual salary. For many Pakistani families, especially those with daughters already, a female or a disabled baby is unaffordable, says Kazmi, yet they cannot afford not to try for a son. The country is governed by Sharia law, which forbids abortion and adultery. Kazmi speculates that many of the abandoned, healthy boys are illegitimate, their mothers driven to abandon them by the fear of public execution by stoning, or a private honour killing.
The first jhoola appeared in 1952, outside a charitable dispensary run by Abdul Sattah Edhi. He had been horrified by widespread infanticide, and wanted to offer despairing mothers an alternative. He met and married Bilquis while she was working as a nurse within his dispensary, and she took charge of the jhoolas project. Today it is only a small part of the foundation they run, which has become the closest thing Pakistan has to a social-security system. Funded entirely by donations, it employs 3,500 staff and tens of thousands of volunteers across the country. It provides ambulances and hospitals, shelters for the destitute, and rehabilitation for drug addicts. Its aid lorries were first to the scene of the earthquake in Kashmir last October, arriving before the military. It was to one of the foundation’s mortuaries that Daniel Pearl, the murdered American journalist, was taken in 2002. Their phone number, 115, is as well known in Pakistan as 999 is in the UK, and all across the country, it is their ambulances that will be found at the scene of emergencies. “The government knows it should be doing what the Edhi Foundation is doing,” says Kazmi, “so they stay out of our way.”
The foundation has faced attacks from hardline mullahs, some of whom have declared that the jhoolas are as sinful as abortion. “Leaving unwanted babies to die in rubbish dumps is the biggest sin,” counters Bilquis Edhi. The foundation’s volunteers have been kidnapped, and its property burnt by fundamentalists. “I am a Muslim,” says Abdul Sattah Edhi, “but essentially I believe in humanity above creed or class.” The children in the orphanages are raised as Muslims, but the Edhis will consider prospective parents of any religion, trying to match children to adults they resemble. They reject aid from the Pakistani government and from international organisations. “We’ve got to stay independent,” he says, “and the Pakistani people need to help themselves.” Potential adoptive parents are not allowed to donate money to the foundation. As Bilquis Edhi says, “We do not sell babies here.”
The Edhis themselves live modestly in a two-room flat within one of the orphanages. Their day starts at 5am for morning prayers, followed by breakfast of dry bread and a cup of tea. Simply dressed, both often work 14-hour days. They hope their own children, two daughters and two sons, will carry on the work of the foundation. The Pakistani people hope so too. As an Edhi Foundation volunteer puts it, “Above is Allah, and below are the Edhis.”
Right: Bilquis Edhi comforts a baby girl brought to the Edhi Foundation the night before. The day after this picture was taken, the baby, in good health, was given to her adoptive parents
Photographs: Nicola Kurtz
