Slumlords of the sea – via Dawn.com
Before the factories belched their putrid fumes, it was green. Before an entire megacity’s waste submerged the land and seafront, mangroves clustered in marshy colonies, protecting villagers from high tides and providing fish a safe haven to lay their transparent eggs. But when the trucks arrived, the ancient coastal town of Ibrahim Haideri slowly began to decay beneath the refuse they brought with them. Today, home to a population of 70,000 mostly indigenous Sindhis, it cooks in the grime and stench of Karachi’s discarded filth.
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The mafia has spun Ibrahim Haideri into a cocoon of pestilence. Skin diseases are rife among the children who pick through the refuse brought by the trucks. An acute lack of clean drinking water spawns infections and upset stomachs, the latter of which, if untreated, are lethal for infants. Chemicals in the buried waste seep into the groundwater, lacing it with arsenic and other toxic substances. Oral cancer is not unusual, caused by the ubiquitous chewing of gutka, even among children. Widespread drug addiction keeps people afloat until the next day but escapism can’t obscure the fallouts of mental illness and hard living forever — depression and schizophrenia are the most common mental illnesses haunting the populace. “When you live like this, it is expected,” affirms Dr Anita Zaidi, associate professor of paediatrics and microbiology at the Aga Khan University Hospital (AKUH) and the recent recipient of a million-dollar grant, through the US-based Whole New World Foundation, to combat infant mortality in the nearby village of Rehri Goth.
Read here http://www.dawn.com/news/1093961/slumlords-of-the-sea
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