Zafar Dehraj
Pakistan has faced one major crisis after another. In the last ten years some of the largest movements of refugees the world has ever seen has taken place due to the Afghan war and the war on terrorism. The 2005 earthquake saw a tremendous loss of life and infrastructure in the northern areas of Pakistan. The recent flood of August 2010 was an unprecedented disaster with over 20 million people displaced from all over the country and a complete collapse of infrastructure along the Indus river basin in the food basket of the country. Under these circumstances, Zafar Dehraj’s leadership with HANDS is critical, and he says if it wasn’t for his push, HANDS, traditionally a health service delivery NGO, would not have responded to the floods as it did.
Ajab Khatoon belonged to a village called Malhar Golo in a rural district of Sindh, Pakistan. Having fractured her leg the previous week, she was unable to move when the floods came.
On the night of August 6th Ajab and her husband Qaim Din were sleeping in their home along with their two children. Just as the clock struck midnight, they heard panicked voices and shouts from their neighbors. They went outside and saw chaos sweep the village. The flood waters had hit their village with surprising speed and the quantity was more than anyone had ever expected.
Qaim’s family and neighbors started to move toward higher ground for safety. All of their belongings had either been swept away or submerged by the currents. Ajab’s husband tried to support her as she walked on one leg against the raging river, and amongst the confusion, pandemonium and struggle for survival, the two became separated from both their children. Grief stricken and with little hope, they nearly gave up.
Meanwhile, news of the fatal floods reached members of the HANDS disaster team in Sukkur, and they immediately started rescue operations. The local NGO dispatched their team in boats, one of which rescued Ajab and her husband by depositing them on a river embankment, the only safe place left. Fortunately, as the HANDS team continued their evacuation activities throughout the night they were also able to safely rescue their children.
The successful disaster management team of HANDS is led by their General Manager of Social Mobilization, Advocacy and Disaster Management, Zafar Dehraj. The tall, gentle and soft-spoken man, has been an LDM Fellow since 2005, and though he now holds a national position at HANDS, has had a very modest beginning. From the small and economically strained village Mohammed Ibrahim Dehraj, Zafar was the first of his village to attend university. After earning a Masters degree, Zafar entered the development sector, first as a volunteer and then as an employee.
Witnessing maternal health issues all his life, Zafar’s passion has always been Reproductive Health. From youth he had seen mothers die for lack of a local health facility, pregnant women in labor and in need of emergency services transported in bullock carts, and district hospitals that could not provide services due to lack of adequate staffing. He had grown up seeing harmful traditions practiced such as swara in which a girl’s family is required to give large amounts of money to the groom, girls being married off to the Quran to ensure her inheritance did not go out of the family, and small children being married even before puberty. The training provided by LDM, Zafar says, has helped him work on the issues he’s experienced first hand from an organizational perspective.
Having previously managed the largest reproductive health project in Pakistan for 9 districts in Sindh, Zafar was confident that the women displaced by the floods needed special care, especially those who were pregnant. With the help of a Packard Foundation funded project, they established a system through which pregnant women were given vouchers for free pre natal and delivery services at identified hospitals. HANDS also distributed 4 types of kits amongst 30,000 families in the camps. These kits provided tools for safe delivery, contraception, menstrual hygiene, and treatment of sexually transmitted infections.
In the current flood disaster, 350,000 people have benefited from different services provided by HANDS that include safe drinking water, shelter, food, sanitation and hygiene, health services, and education. They ran 1,500 medical camps in 11 districts, established oral dehydration therapy corners for malnourished children in every camp, ran nutritional projects, conducted health education through health and hygiene promoters in camps and schools, and raised over $11.5 million dollars.
Zafar has ambitious plans for HANDS. He says “we have a $70 million rehabilitation plan in place, and are planning to provide rehabilitation to 40,000 families in 8 districts”. His dream is to establish a Disaster Management Institute at HANDS, and already has the land allotted for this project.