We are collecting stories from Pakistan that document people’s experiences living through the lockdown and will keep updating this space.
Center for Bio-Medical Ethics: COVID-19 June 2020 Newsletter
The newsletter features art by the talented Ghazal Shahid (left), and diverse stories of everyday life, including stories from healthcare workers and students. What’s striking about this newsletter is how it shows the CBEC family–in Pakistan, Kenya, and the US–navigate COVID-19 a few months into the crisis.
The Impact of COVID-19: How Pakistani Workers are Living with the New Reality
This photoessay in Dawn by Saiyna Bashir, funded through the National Geographic’s Emergency Fund for Journalists, documents the lives of daily wage workers and people from economically impoverished communities.
Published in Dawn on June 7, 2020
The Impact of COVID-19 on Women and Girls in Online and Offline Spaces
This issue of Digital 50-50 explores–through a number of illuminating essays–the impact of COVID-19 on women and girls as they navigate public space and patriarchy in Pakistan.
Cover art by Shehzil Malik.
Alone at the Other Edge
Dawn’s section for young readers, “Young World,” has included this touching essay by Naad-e-Ali Khan, whose mother is a doctor. Young World is an excellent resource for children and young people’s accounts of the COVID-19 crisis in Pakistan; accounts also include poetry. The illustration that appears here is by Ashkan Forouzani.
Published in Dawn on May 23, 2020
Notes Across Borders
Himal Magazine is gathering personal reflections from South Asia about the COVID-19 Pandemic. These voices cover a spectrum of experience, from worries about a parent in lockdown, to the experience of being surrounded by food and hunger, to reflections on gender and class. They are all worth a read and Himal is still adding to this collection.
Published in Himal Magazine on April 8, 2020. (Ongoing)
Art by Taymiya R. Zaman
Voices of the Unheard: Living Through the Karachi Lockdown as a Daily Wager
Ghazal Shahid and Sualeha Shekhani
In this evocative article, Ghazal Shahid (artwork featured above) and Sualeha Shekhani focus on the lockdown experiences of Karachi’s most vulnerable populations, including laborers, vendors, and transgender people. “Karachi makes these people,” write the authors, and “these people make Karachi.”
Published in Dawn on May 12, 2020
The Rupturing of the Clocks
Sadia Khatri
A lyrical, moving depiction of one writer’s sense of time, loss, and change.
Published in Dawn on April 21, 2020.
#HumansOfCovid
Featuring beautiful art by Ghazal Shahid (left), this series from the Center for Bio-Medical Ethics (CBEC) at SIUT consists of short, poignant narratives from workers and medical health professionals.
