Fatima beamed broadly as she knelt in the mud outside her tent and filled two-year-old Reza Khan’s baby bottle with milk.
“Look, he’s not crying anymore,” she said, as he sucked down the liquid.
It had been a month since the little boy had tasted milk.
The mother of eight kept an eye on her son as she lifted the lid on a blackened aluminum pot, her only one, that was bubbling over a campfire and stirred the yellow lentils inside.
“Tonight my children will sleep until dawn on full stomachs,” she said.
The Guardian first met the displaced Afghan family several days ago, after a photograph of Reza and several of his siblings, covered in flies, featured in the newspaper. We tracked them down to a roadside camp in Azakhel, 30km from Peshawar, capital of Pakistan’s insurgency-plagued Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, bordering Afghanistan.
On Monday a story in the newspaper and on the Guardian Web site highlighted the family’s plight: The devastating month-long deluge had driven them from their mud brick home in the nearby Azakhel Afghan refugee camp. Fatima, her husband, Aslam, and their eight children, along with their extended family, were camped in an empty field relying on the charity of passersby.
The response to the story was immediate and overwhelming. Readers from the UK, North America and Europe contacted us with offers of help. Aijaz Ahmed from the Pakistani group save-humans.org had also offered immediate assistance.
On Tuesday, three members of the Pakistani group rented a truck, loaded it with 500,000 Pakistani rupees (US$5,842) worth of goods, including flour, rice, oil, lentils and milk, and headed north from Islamabad on a two-hour trek to Azakhel.
“The article compelled us to act,” said Sufyan Kakakhel, 30, one of the three. “When I read that they were Afghans, I knew that they couldn’t get rations from the government because they don’t have Pakistani citizenship, and I didn’t give a second thought about whether I should come here.”
About 53 Afghan families are living by the railway track and the parallel pools of stagnant water that separate this makeshift tent city from the wasteland on the other side that was once the Azakhel Afghan refugee camp, home to 23,000 people. Now, it is just a pile of muddy rubble, broken timber and straw.
The aid group promised to return with fumigation equipment to reduce the vast population of mosquitoes and flies. They also promised to study ways to help the family rebuild their home across the railway tracks. Fatima kept her eye on the boiling pot perched on the campfire. She was smiling. Tonight, her children would have dhal for dinner.
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