Reminder: Be human.

By~ Romesa Qaiser Khan, 1st year

Say, you have a cough. Maybe it’s the air, maybe just the season for infections. You don’t think much of it. After all you’re an adult and you’ve had infections hundreds of times. It’ll go away. But let’s say it persists for a day or two. You get a fever too. Your parents worry. Especially your mom. They go out and buy you medicine if you don’t have it at home already. They hover over you, pamper you, cater to you. In a few days, you recover.  Everything’s forgotten and you go back to your happily ever after.

"There is no exercise better for the heart than reaching down and lifting people up.” 
― John Holmes

          We’ve all played this scene many times over. But how many times, if ever, have you wondered, that what if, just what if, you couldn’t get that medicine? That you couldn’t afford it? That your condition was so much worse than a fever and yet both you and your parents were helpless to do anything but stand by? We’re all doctors here.  People  think we’re the ones who’d have the most compassion but ironically, we’re the jaded ones. We get so used to dealing with suffering  everyday that somewhere along the way it’s just loses it’s humanitarian impact. A patient is a body that needs to be puts right and sent on its way. Rinse and repeat.

“Give, but give until it hurts.” 
― Mother Teresa

                Isn’t it lucky then that at least once a year, forcibly, by cajoling we’re made to take out time every year to do good? You may not want to do charity. Maybe you don’t have the time. Or maybe you  just give it away to get those annoying SPWS reps off your back. And then you forget all about it after fleetingly wondering where all the money goes.

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.” 
― Charles Dickens

               Meet Ahmed.  He’s nine years old.  His father is a rickshaw driver with a meagre  income. He lives in a rented house with five of his siblings. And he has thalassemia.

                                

                                   

 In these times of inflation, when even food is hard to come by, Ahmed’s father has a hard time supporting his family to survive, let alone buying medication worth 3800 PKR each month for his son.  Maybe for a month or two, they could manage. But thalassemia doesn’t end in a month or two does it? It’s no fever nor a flu that’ll die out on it’s own. Being parents regardless, they couldn’t just stand and watch him suffer. So they bought him medication whenever they could, on and off. Neither they nor little Ahmed tho, could fool themselves into thinking that he would hold out for long, let alone get better this way. And this picture of dejection is what his life would’ve been if not for a relative and charity from an unexpected source.

 

Ahmed’s uncle is a peon at K.E’s old auditorium. He approached SPWS as a last resort to help his nephew out like so many others do. And just like always they were able to. Ahmed now has found himself an anonymous zakat donor who pays upto PKR 9500 per month for his medication and has promised to do so as long as needed, even throughout his life. Thanks to a random act of charity by a stranger, both Ahmed and his parents can sleep at night with peace, knowing that their son has a chance at a future, knowing that they have a back up to fall on, a godfather of sorts.

And Ahmed isn’t the only one with a story. There’s Nusrat bibi who has been suffering from epilepsy for three years now and yet hadn't sought any treatment because she put her labourer husband's and her children's need before her own. Yet finally somehow she ended up at Mayo and now another anonymous donor funds all her MRIs and medications. 

                     

So what is the point of telling you all about this? It's not to show off charity or the work our societies are doing as skeptics would say (the former would be rendered void this way and the latter is self-explanatory) but to send out a little reminder as well as an appeal to all of you, that a little heart goes a long way down the road to salvation and if you haven't lived for others, you haven't lived at all. Take out a moment or two from your priviliged world to look through the mirror at the other side, at those who live with bigger problems everyday than petty grieviances we encounter in our entire lifetimes. 

“You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.” 
― John Bunyan

Give and forget, but never forget to give.