The solution of an old man

I used to work during winter breaks of my school and college years. In one of such winter breaks, I was working with an old man whom I really respected for his real life experiences. He had spent his large part of life traveling by wandering, doing random jobs and interacting with people of different cultures. Of course, this type of life has its costs and the cost for him was that at the time that he was an old man and needed to rest, he hadn’t saved enough money to retire. He had to work to support his family having a decent life. It was the biggest regret of his life that was the source of pain for him.. But out of this regret he was thinking a way of out by looking towards his community that he was always proud of as well as boastful about its unparalleled uniqueness and qualities. He was saying that, “OK, I am an old man but still I have a skill that is paying me well but what about those old men (he was referring to his friends that he was meeting regularly on weekends and was sharing their views) who unlike of me stayed at one place and worked hard their entire life because life wasn’t kind enough to them to provide opportunity of learning a skill or a freedom to travel. They had to stay at one place and go every day to work so they could support their families. But now when they are old and their physical conditions hardly allow them to work as hard as they were doing, they can’t sustain their lives very well. They need a rest but they can’t afford it…

He had simple solution for it and definitely you don’t need to be genius to come up with such solution or not to understand its logic… He was saying that, the population of our community in Quetta is almost half a million.. If everybody just gives one rupee that even a child refuse to take as one rupee can hardly buy a candy then in each two days they can grant a decent retirement of 1000,000 rupees to an old man. That means 15 retirements per month and 180 old men per year. That is a real big figure for such a small community as Hazaras of Quetta. His idea stuck with me and I knew that our community was much generous than this and also had much more capacity but what he was realizing was the lacking of a mechanism. People are always more than ready to help to their vulnerable but they don’t know how to do it…

It was then, when there weren’t terrorism and there weren’t victims of terrorism.. Since last decade our community has been the target of non-stop terrorism and a lot of families have suffered in the process. I know there are some organizations that are helping these families but still the problem is much bigger than the capacity of such organizations and also this problem is getting bigger as terrorism is on rise. A recent TV interview of a family (You can watch it at end of this knol) whose head was a vegetable-seller and was killed in a terrorist attack on vegetable-sellers’ bus on by-pass road in October was really painful for me to watch. It was even more painful to learn that there is no mechanism through which people learn about such families and have their contributions… In the rest of world, people really come up with innovative ideas to help vulnerable parts of society... I was just wondering if our youths who really want to have their contributions to their community, start scratching their heads to think of innovative ways and roll back their sleeves to use the potentials of our community to support the vulnerable parts of our society who have no other way to look for support except their own community….