Today was day one of a course for new activists. Twenty five, mainly young women textile workers, working 16 hour days, made to work seven days, not paid the minimum wage. They are extremely nervous at the start and then got going.
This evening we have the IS branch meeting, seven comrades plus me. Sartaj does a short talk about Wikileaks, which is followed by trying to work out how to increase sales. Selling papers at the bigger universities risks getting beaten up by one of the Islamist student groups, there are no places where people meet regularly for meetings or musical events. Asgar comes with a box of Indian sweets to celebrate a successful interview making him permanent in his job in the Federal Urdu Uni.
After the meeting, Riaz and Sartaj and I go out to eat. The large but less than totally salubrious restaurant we eat at is packed with lots of young male professionals. We get a table surprisingly quickly; Riaz reckons the 'gora' (me, the white person) gets special treatment. We discuss being careful about what we eat. The main hazards come from water, not food and Sartaj gives me the old Pashto proverb ‘Don’t be afraid of what you eat; be afraid of what eats you.’ After the meal, we have a paan. Two inches across, carefully wrapped, it’s a folded leaf filled with aniseed, bits of nuts and much else, to be taken whole and slowly chewed. A kind of ‘digestif’ to be taken at the end of the meal. They used to smuggle the leaves in from India, now it’s legal. As Riaz goes to the paan stall, I watch a policeman stagger past. ‘He’s drunk’, Sartaj points out. In Karachi, all policemen are drunk after six o’clock.
Monday 13 December
The course finishes well. Shuja, back from a prison in Karachi where he’s assisted with the release of a dozen Indian fishermen, puts pictures up on the web:
1st day: http://picasaweb.google.com/piler.pakistan/Geoff_KHIWS_Day1?feat=directlink
2nd day: http://picasaweb.google.com/piler.pakistan/Geoff_KHI_Training_Day2?feat=directlink
No comments:
Post a Comment