Monday 29 February 2016

Why one of our young men is here


Naseer was pacing outside the operating room in a Peshawar hospital. Inside, surgeons were trying to extract a bullet from his wife's leg and grenade shrapnel from his son and a young relative. They had been wounded when the Taliban attacked their house.
Then Naseer's cell phone rang. "This is the Taliban. Give us $2,500 or we'll kill you and your family."
"What do you mean?" Naseer yelled. "You already tried to kill us!"
"You think bullets are free like the air?" Naseer recalls the Taliban commander saying. "That attack on your house cost us money. Pay us or we'll finish the job."
The night before, Naseer and his wife, Bibi, had gone to bed just before midnight, exhausted after three days of hauling a cooler full of polio vaccines along country roads between fields of mustard and cane, going from farm to farm giving vaccine drops to children. But Naseer and his family were jolted awake by a deafening blast. Then a second blast. Grenades.
Val say the report from the National Geographic. The same story from the same place as one of our young men who worked helping this programe of vaccination for polio whilst studying at University. His friend was killed and he received a stamped letter from the Taliban telling him of his forthcoming execution. His mother made him leave quickly and now his asylum application is pending.
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