At the local school, a group of 21 families from Mingora also praise their fellow Pashtuns for opening up their village to them. “We went to the camps first,” says one of the refugees, a male in his mid-30s who prefers not to give his name, “but the facilities were terrible. The tents were in the open air, under the sun, and our children were getting sick. But finding this place has been a blessing. The local people have welcomed us.”
For Jehangir Toru, providing for these people is as much a pleasure as it is a duty. Everything, he says, has been organized and funded by donations, and supported by the Pashtun code of honour and hospitality. “We have not asked the government for anything,” he adds, pointing out that corruption makes it difficult to deal with officials. “We don’t want money from them. All we want is food. These villagers are poor, but they are still providing for the displaced people. The problem is they will not be able to do this indefinitely.”
As for medical facilities, the Toru Tigers have partnered with a grassroots medical team, the Anum Health Organization from Haripur, 80 km north of Islamabad, which has set up a hospital at a Toru administration building. In terms of its supplies and staffing, it far surpasses anything in the camps, even though the doctors are all volunteers who bought the medicines themselves and cobbled together the equipment from their own resources. Shahid Mirza, the chief coordinator for the hospital, believes this is the way aid should be done in Pakistan. “The official system is broken,” he says. “It can’t be trusted. But what you have here in the villages is a culture that has an affinity for looking after their own. That culture should be mobilized.”
For now, the mobilization is self-generated. But as Jehangir Toru points out, it could lose steam as the war in Swat drags on. “The government has to realize that the opportunity to help these people is right here, at the grassroots,” he says. “But it looks to me like those officials are more interested in lining their own pockets or increasing their political prestige than they are in helping the people.” And if refugees are forced to leave the villages, they will have no choice but to join the hundreds of thousands crowded into the camps. That will only add to the misery of the displaced, and strengthen the Taliban recruiters there. What’s needed most is a place of refuge, one that apparently already exists in the Pashtun culture, if only the government and aid industry would look past their own culture of corruption.
