Happy? New Year's
There was a lot of this going around yesterday. Too much, possibly. It makes sense if you're in a good place, with things to be happy about, so most places but Pakistan. There are of course, a few worse too – very few, our passport is 4th worst in the world for a reason – hence my usage of most. Of course, if you happen to be in unfortunate circumstances, you have my heartfelt sympathies – there really is no ideal place but you can get darn close with the right people. Take my colleagues, they're from privileged families and their discussions revolve around things like Macchiatos (I literally had to google what this was, and the spelling too) which place has a more authentic steak and so on, and there is me who pictures a carpentry business when he hears them talking about Sabrina Carpenter (yes, I was called a country hick for this already) so they might as well live in their own world – heck they kind of do, it's scary sometimes.
But back on Earth, Parachinar is locked down, Shias – a minority – are being genocided – and rather than helping them, the government is cracking down on those protesting for their rights, while people just celebrate New Year's day, turning a blind eye to yet another genocide. So, everyone's celebrating Happy New Year's, even here at work. Very, very desensitized, Orwell would feel the worst kind of existential horror here. Then again, I suppose that's how the world's always been, seldom do people notice atrocities not near them. Far from home, far from the mind is a mantra often cited by those whose family members died in drone attacks simply due to living in a certain area, reminding one another their own tribes were all they truly had – because you certainly don't have the government in your corner, or the army and intelligence services – they'll just accuse you of being someone else and send you off to Guantanamo for a bounty of $5000; the case of Ahmed Rabbani is just one example, where the intelligence services misidentified him on purpose as Hassan Ghul – a known terrorist – to the CIA – and he ended up languishing in their custody for almost 20 years with the bulk of said time being in Guantanamo. https://reprieve.org/us/client/ahmed-rabbani/
Now, for the suffering majority, there was no power in many parts of Peshawar for over 9 hours on Happy New Year's Day, sounds pretty bad, but hey, as those in charge will tell you, it's not the worst thing that ever happened. See, the thing is, in a bottom of the barrel, or I should say cesspool, country like ours, the barometer is usually lives lost. Now hospitals don't usually get loadshedding, well, they're not supposed to. And it didn't happen in Peshawar, so, no biggie, life goes on. I am making a mountain out of a molehill, so what if power was gone for 9 hours, no one died. True, not in Peshawar. But many lives were played with somewhere else, nearly lost in District HQ Hospital, Battagram. The pain of many patients has been worsened, many conditions exacerbated, no one dead so far, thankfully.
Now, what is loadshedding, you ask? It's when your power gets cut, usually done by the power company itself because they can't quite handle the load. It's a complicated mix of issues, and the solar panel revolution has caused its own set of problems for our monster of a power grid, so hacked together that it makes the Atari Jaguar seem well thought out. But that is its own problem, one I will delve into some other day (the power grid, obviously)
Back now to Battagram. I am something of a semi-regular visitor here, and it is very serene – in my humble opinion, anyways. So, it does hold a special place in my heart.
Beautiful, huh?
Now, there's a lot that can be said about Battagram, but for now, the only pertinent fact is – recovery rates are over 90% – this means that over 90% of people there pay their electrical bills, so the issue of power theft – one so serious in Pakistan – isn't that big a concern here. This is important because, while they vehemently deny it, power companies always cut power on low recovery feeders. Makes sense, right? People aren't paying, don't give them power. There's also the issue of ghost bills, and made up bills, so yeah, PESCO, the electric company, is downright nasty. And despite a presidential ruling meant to end said ghost bills over a decade ago, that still hasn't happened – but I digress, that is a matter you can look up at your own leisure, if interested.
So with such high recovery rates and a populace that pays its bills regularly, plus a dam nearby, you'd think there wouldn't be any loadshedding in hospitals. Sadly, PESCO does not care about the law, for they are above it; just like most institutes, wealthy people, connected people, a lowly cop, and so on and so forth; unfortunately, we have to exclude those who smoke scorpions, they are not above the law, they only think they are until the large hand of the law comes down upon them.
So, unlawful loadshedding happened. In Battagram. Hospitals in such areas are more in need of power than say, your average hospital in some big city. Besides the usual catalog of dialysis, diagnostic imaging, incubators, operation theatres and the like – you need to run it for tube wells and sanitation, thus making an uninterrupted power supply even more mission critical to the smooth functioning of the hospital. But that would never occur to those at PESCO.
Thing is, outside of the fudged “we are reducing inflation” figures, the country is in dire straits right now, the ground reality is far worse than one can imagine. Both gas and electricity are in short supply. You may have solar power if you are privileged, but you still have to go out and get your cylinder filled with gas. Of course, the privileged have servants for that so it's a non concern to them, but your average joe will still suffer daily in search of gas.
Yeah, slavery is a thing here – for instance one of my colleagues has two servants, both basically do all the housework, cooking, cleaning, chores, all for the equivalent of 53 USD a month.
Sorry, I digress as always, anyways, what happened was bad enough to cause both doctors and families who had brought their patients to come out on the roads, as well as most of the patients that were OK to mobilize – a rare showing of unity at a time when doctors are more despised in the public eye than anything. They stormed the PESCO offices, and locked the workers out. About the only thing they could do. Now, there are some privileged people calling them criminals, anarchists and the like, but let us look at why they did this.
A few examples:
An elderly patient said that he had been hospitalised for two days but couldn’t undergo surgery due to the power outage.
Another patient said that his wife had to return home without receiving treatment because the hospital’s equipment was not working due to the power outage.
To give a more specific example: Mobeen Madakhyal, a patient’s relative who traveled from Torghar to the DHQ Hospital, said: “We came all the way from Torghar hoping for treatment at the DHQ, but the protest has left us stranded. My relative’s condition is worsening, and we don’t know where else to go. This situation is extremely difficult for us.”
Starting from Torghar, literal translation being Black Mountain is a 3 or 4 hour drive to Battagram, and people in that region are poor, it takes a serious amount of their means to reach Battagram. Now imagine, you are a poor person, you need healthcare, you travel 3-4 hours on a critical percentage of your funds only to get this in return. To make matters worse, the road is dangerous to put it mildly. It is the kind of place where bombs have gone off, the army has killed terrorists, terrorists have killed soldiers, so on and so forth for police. Torghar itself is one of those places that faces the constant gloom of being a gathering spot for terrorists, there was an army operation in 2014 meant to get rid of them, yet to this day the people of Torghar are resisting terrorists – this was just to give some context about why Mobeen's journey was so dangerous.
There are also woodworkers suffering due to this, engineers, tailors, computer shops and the like. Life, in general, is interrupted.
Someone on Mastodon once asked me why I had referred to Pakistan as a resource extraction colony for our establishment – meaning most of our areas except where the privileged are, and especially my own province and Balochistan – to this day I don't know why they did it in my private messages, were they Pakistani too? Probably.
I went into it at length initially, but upon the final message I never did get a reply from them. For a while, I was even scared that somebody as important as me, who has a readership somewhere between none and three people had attracted the ever paranoid eye of the state. Here, though, I will just say this:
There is a dam in Battagram. It is known as Allai Khwar hydropower station, it tops out at a capacity of about 121 MW and is connected to the national grid. Despite there being electricity generation in 29 village councils of Allai tehsil, not a single electric pole has been installed to supply power to the area.
In 2020, the people were asking for a mere 9 MW. Now, they are asking for 5. I doubt they will get any.
If you read all this, you have my sincere thanks, my only aim is to raise awareness about what's happening here. Battagram is just one case, if you look close enough you'll spot similar exploitation and issues all over Pakistan.
Let us hope next year we have cause to be happy.
It's kind of like this these days, sigh.