KARACHI: Bhooro Menghwar, a landless peasant belonging to the Dalit caste of Hindus (so-called untouchables), sold his last pair of goats and a cow after having sold everything else in his house to save the life of his six-year-old daughter Veena, who is suffering from severe aplastic anemia.
“The cure is bone-marrow transplant,” doctors told him, which he cannot afford.
“What can I do? I have sold almost everything I had,” said Menghwar, adding, “I have no option left but to watch her die every day.”
Menghwar is a resident of a small village Ulhando Khararo near Samaro in Umerkot district.
He has to feed two daughters, a wife, elderly parents and two unemployed brothers. He works as a farmer on the lands of a landlord in the area and has no property to his name and hardly manages to earn bread and butter for his huge family.
The landlord has allowed him to keep some animals for milk. Poverty never gave him a chance to go to school, but he always wanted to educate his children, but he could not fulfill that dream.
Whenever any of his family members falls ill, he has to take a loan from the landlord, and as things stand right now, he will not be able to pay it back even if he works all his life and eventually the responsibility will fall on his children.
Three years ago his minor daughter Veena developed a severe fever. She was taken to a village quack who treated her with some injections and medicines. As her conditions deteriorated, the worried father borrowed another loan from his landlord, and took Veena to Mirpurkhas for better treatment. The doctors there, after having admitting her, asked him to take the girl to Hyderabad or Karachi.
He sold his goat and took the Venna to National Institute of Child Health (NICH), Karachi. Even though it is a government hospital, the administration asked him to buy medicines from medical stores outside the hospital.
The money he carried after selling his goat was spent in four days. His brother sold the other goat and sent him the money, which did not last long either.
He took his daughter back to the village. During the last three years, Menghwar took his daughter to the NICH four times and each time he took a loan from different people, eventually selling all his assets.
Three months ago, she was admitted to NICH for 25 days and he had to sell his cow.
After a lengthy diagnostic process, the hospital administration declared that she was suffering from severe aplastic anemia and the only treatment was a bone-marrow transplant.
“It came as a shock to me. After losing all my assets on her treatment, she has been diagnosed with a disease the cure for which costs around Rs 2 million and I don’t even have Rs 20 to buy a cup of tea,” Menghwar told Pakistan Today with tears in his eyes.
Menghwar asked his brother Ramchand to find a philanthropist who can afford his daughter’s treatment. Ramchand works as tailor in a garment factory and is searching for help.
