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- Empowerment Beyond Aid — Advancing Freedom and Rights
In 2012, a journey to a remote minority community in Sindh took an unexpected turn. What began as a visit to attend a friend’s wedding became the beginning of Samaritan’s Fellowship — a lifelong commitment to stand beside marginalized and vulnerable communities across Pakistan.
What began as a joyful journey became an unforgettable encounter with social exclusion, discrimination, inequality, and human suffering — a moment that changed everything.
In 2012, Afshan Faisal and Faisal Yaqoob travelled to a remote minority community near Kunri, Sindh. What began as a joyful journey soon exposed them to realities they had never experienced so closely before. During the gathering, a young pregnant woman suddenly became critically ill. Afshan immediately asked that she be taken to a hospital. There was no hospital nearby; no ambulance, no emergency service to call. The nearest medical facility was hours away. With no other option, Afshan and Faisal placed the woman in their own vehicle and began the journey through the night. They did not reach the hospital in time. The young woman died on the way.
Her death left behind more than grief. It raised difficult questions about why poverty, geography, social exclusion, and lack of opportunity should determine whether someone receives help when they need it most. Afshan and Faisal stayed, listened to families, and began understanding the wider challenges shaping life in the community.
What they discovered was not one isolated tragedy, but a pattern of interconnected problems — poverty, exclusion, inadequate services, limited opportunities, and barriers to living with dignity and exercising basic rights. Families were living with limited access to healthcare, unsafe water, poor educational opportunities, and economic hardship. But poverty was only part of the story. Social exclusion, discrimination, and unequal access to opportunities made everyday life even more difficult for many families. They could have returned home and carried the memory of that night with them. Instead, they decided to act. That decision became the beginning of Samaritan’s Fellowship.
Samaritan’s Fellowship Foundation began with strong roots among marginalized and minority communities, where poverty often intersects with discrimination, exclusion, and limited access to rights and opportunities. But our mission has never been limited to one community. We serve people on the basis of need and work toward a Pakistan where every citizen can live with dignity, equality, opportunity, and freedom.
The tragedy revealed something larger than one medical emergency. As Afshan and Faisal continued listening to families and visiting surrounding communities, they began to see how deeply different challenges were connected. Limited access to healthcare, unsafe water, poverty, exploitation, lack of education, and social exclusion were not separate problems — each one made the others harder to escape.
What began with a question about healthcare soon became a deeper understanding of how vulnerability is created and repeated across generations.
One need often revealed another. Illness led them to unsafe water. Unsafe water exposed the daily burden carried by women and children. Economic hardship revealed exploitation, debt, and lost opportunities. The deeper they looked, the clearer it became: these challenges could not be solved in isolation.
In the beginning, Afshan and Faisal responded with whatever resources they had — supporting urgent medical needs, helping families with food, and involving friends who wanted to contribute. But the same needs kept returning.
Food could support a family for a few days. Medicine could treat an illness. Emergency assistance could help someone survive a crisis. But temporary relief could not change the conditions creating the crisis.
They began to understand that families needed more than assistance. They needed protection, education, skills, income, access to opportunities, and a realistic path toward independence. This changed the direction of Samaritan’s Fellowship.
The focus gradually expanded from meeting immediate needs to helping people build practical skills, find employment, start small businesses, and strengthen their ability to support themselves and their families.
A sewing machine, a set of tools, a small shop, a food cart, or another modest opportunity could become the beginning of something much bigger: the ability to earn independently, make choices, and move forward without continued dependence on aid. What began as relief was becoming a pathway toward sustainable livelihoods and long-term independence.
Samaritan’s Fellowship did not begin with a plan to create a collection of separate projects. The model grew from what communities themselves were experiencing.
Health problems often revealed unsafe water or poor nutrition. Economic hardship could expose families to exploitation. Lack of education limited future opportunities. Even when an immediate crisis was resolved, people still needed skills, income, awareness of their rights, and stronger connections with the institutions around them. Each experience helped shape the next response.
Over time, healthcare, clean water, education, protection, sustainable livelihoods, human rights awareness, and community leadership became connected pathways toward the same goal: helping people move from vulnerability and dependence toward dignity, opportunity, participation, and long-term independence.
The purpose was never to do everything for communities. It was to walk alongside them, strengthen their capacity, and help create the conditions in which they could increasingly shape their own future.
Afshan and Faisal could not save the young pregnant woman who died on the road to the hospital in 2012. Nothing can change what happened that night. But they could refuse to accept suffering, exclusion, and preventable hardship as normal.
What began with one tragedy became a continuing commitment to stand alongside communities facing poverty, discrimination, exploitation, limited opportunities, and barriers to exercising their rights.
Over the years, that commitment has grown from responding to immediate needs into a broader effort to strengthen health, education, livelihoods, human rights, participation, and community leadership.
The story that began that night is still being written — through every person and community gaining greater dignity, opportunity, confidence, and control over their own future. This is why Samaritan’s Fellowship exists.
Afshan and Faisal had arrived in Kunri as strangers. They had no family connection to the community, no project office in the area, and no formal responsibility for the people they met. They could have expressed sympathy and returned home. Instead, after witnessing suffering firsthand, they were reminded of the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan — the story of a stranger who stopped to help another person simply because help was needed. That principle became the foundation of Samaritan’s Fellowship: Compassion should never end with sympathy. It should become action.
The work continues — and lasting change requires people and institutions willing to work together.
Samaritan’s Fellowship welcomes partnerships with donors, churches and faith communities, civil society organizations, development partners, professionals, volunteers, and institutions that share a commitment to human dignity, opportunity, inclusion, and stronger communities.
Whether through humanitarian action, sustainable development, community empowerment, or mission and service, every partnership can help another community move forward.
Every morning, women and girls left their homes carrying empty containers and walked through the desert in search of water.
For some, the journey was four kilometres. For others, it was six or more. The walk could take several hours, especially under the intense heat of Sindh.
At the end of the journey, they did not find a clean tap, a protected well or a filtration system.
They found open ponds.
These ponds were shared by everyone and everything. Cows, camels, goats and dogs drank from the same water. Animals stood inside it and contaminated the surrounding ground. Insects gathered near the surface, while snakes, lizards and other reptiles were sometimes seen around the water sources.
Still, families filled their containers.
They had no alternative.
The water was carried back home and strained through pieces of cloth before being given to children and other family members. The cloth might remove sand, leaves or visible dirt, but it could not remove bacteria, parasites or other dangerous contamination.
Families drank the water knowing it could make them sick because thirst left them with no other choice.
Stomach illnesses, skin infections and repeated episodes of diarrhoea had become part of everyday life. Children were especially vulnerable. A child weakened by contaminated water was more likely to miss school, suffer malnutrition and become seriously ill from conditions that could have been prevented.
The lack of water affected more than health. Women spent much of the day walking and carrying heavy containers. Girls often accompanied them, losing hours that could otherwise have been spent learning. Families remained trapped in a daily struggle simply to obtain enough water to survive.
Afshan and Faisal understood that medicine alone would never solve a problem caused by the water people were forced to drink.
With their own resources and support from friends, they helped arrange the construction of a well.
For the community, it was more than a water source. It meant fewer hours walking through the desert, less dependence on contaminated ponds, and a better chance for children to grow without repeated waterborne illness.
It was one solution, in one community, but it revealed an important truth: when the cause of suffering was addressed, lives could change far beyond the immediate emergency.
As Afshan and Faisal continued visiting communities, however, they discovered another system that was even more difficult to escape.
Families were not only struggling with illness and poverty.
Many were living in slavery.
Across Pakistan, poor families often travel to brick kilns, farms and agricultural estates in search of work. They arrive hoping to earn enough to feed their children and repay their debts.
For some, the job becomes a trap.
A family may borrow money from a landlord or brick-kiln owner during an illness, a wedding, a funeral or a period of unemployment. The amount may be only $700 to $900, but for a family without savings, assets or another source of income, it can become an unbreakable chain.
The family begins working to repay the debt. Yet the wages are often controlled by the employer. Charges for food, medicine, accommodation, tools and other necessities may be added to the amount owed. The family works every day, but the debt never seems to disappear.
Years pass.
Children grow up at the kiln or on the estate.
Some begin working beside their parents before they ever enter a classroom.
In many cases, the debt passes from one generation to another. Parents inherit obligations from their own parents, and children are expected to repay debts they never accepted. A family can spend decades working under the control of the same employer without knowing when, or whether, they will ever be free.
The debt controls more than their income. It can determine where they live, when they work, how much they earn and whether they are permitted to leave. Families without legal support, education or outside connections have almost no power to challenge the records maintained by their employer.
The walls of a prison are easy to see. The chains of debt are not. Yet they can control an entire life.
Afshan and Faisal met families who had accepted this existence because they had never known anything different. Children born at brick kilns grew up believing they would spend their lives making bricks just as their parents and grandparents had done.
Women and girls faced even greater danger. Community members spoke of harassment, coercion, violence and sexual exploitation by people who held power over indebted families. A woman trapped through debt could have little protection and nowhere safe to go.
Some girls who fled abusive homes or workplaces found themselves alone without money, education, identification documents or trusted support. Their vulnerability made them targets for traffickers and exploiters who promised employment, marriage or safety but delivered another form of captivity.
Even survivors who managed to return home often continued to face trauma, poverty, rejection and social stigma. Their children could also experience exclusion because of circumstances they had never chosen.
The deeper Afshan and Faisal looked, the more clearly they could see the pattern.
Unsafe water caused disease. Disease weakened a family’s ability to work. A medical emergency created debt. Debt pushed families toward exploitative employment. Bonded labour kept children out of school. Without education or opportunity, the next generation became vulnerable to the same system.
The problems were not standing beside one another.
They were feeding one another.
Afshan and Faisal had arrived in Kunri as strangers.
They had no family connection to the village, no project office in the area and no formal responsibility for the people they met. They could have expressed sympathy, made a small donation and returned home.
But after witnessing the young woman’s death and listening to the stories of families living without water, healthcare or freedom, walking away no longer felt possible.
They were reminded of the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan.
In the story, a man is attacked, robbed and left injured beside the road. Others see him but continue on their way. The Samaritan, although regarded as an outsider, stops. He tends to the man’s wounds, carries him to safety and accepts responsibility for his care.
The Samaritan did not help because the injured man belonged to his family, community or social group. He helped because another human being was suffering in front of him.
That idea became the foundation of Samaritan’s Fellowship: strangers standing beside strangers because compassion should never end with sympathy.
It should become action.
In the beginning, Afshan and Faisal responded with whatever resources they personally had. They supported urgent medical cases, helped families with food and involved friends who were willing to contribute.
But the needs kept returning.
A food package could support a family for several days, but hunger would return. Medicine could treat one illness, but contaminated water would make the family sick again. Paying one debt could release a family, but without an income, another debt might soon take its place.
Temporary assistance could help people survive an emergency.
It could not prevent the next emergency.
Afshan and Faisal realised that the communities they were serving did not only need relief. They needed a practical path from crisis to independence.
A family leaving bonded labour needed more than release. It needed a safe place to live, children needed to return to school, and parents needed a way to earn without borrowing from another landlord.
Samaritan’s Fellowship therefore began helping survivors learn practical trades such as tailoring, plumbing, electrical work, barbering, cooking and driving. Some later found employment in other cities. Others began earning within their own communities.
For the first time, families that had spent generations working under someone else’s control began earning income on their own terms.
Yet another challenge soon became clear.
A person might know how to sew clothes, repair electrical equipment, cut hair, cook food or drive a vehicle, but still lack the money to buy tools, equipment or basic stock.
Training had given them skills.
They still needed a beginning.
Samaritan’s Fellowship began supporting families with small businesses and income-generating opportunities.
A sewing machine could allow a woman to work from home. A set of plumbing tools could enable a trained worker to begin accepting jobs. A barber chair could become the foundation of a small shop. A food cart, grocery kiosk, rickshaw, poultry business or mobile-repair toolkit could create a reliable income for an entire family.
The investment was often modest.
The change it created was not.
A family earning independently no longer had to borrow money for every emergency. Parents could provide food without depending on a landlord. Children could attend school instead of working to repay inherited debt. Survivors could begin rebuilding confidence and making decisions about their own lives.
Freedom was no longer only the moment a debt was cleared.
It was the ability to remain free.
This work eventually developed into a wider livelihood pathway designed to move families from dependence toward sustainable economic independence.
Over time, what had begun as separate responses to urgent problems became one connected ecosystem.
Samaritan’s Fellowship did not enter communities with a plan to create a collection of unrelated projects.
The ecosystem grew from what families themselves were experiencing.
A community struggling with contaminated water needed a well, but children already weakened by disease also needed healthcare. A family freed from bonded labour needed legal and financial support, but it also needed skills and income. Children removed from exploitation needed school, but many also needed emotional support, confidence and protection.
Each solution led naturally to the next.
Safe water protected health. Healthcare helped families recover and remain able to work. Freedom from bonded labour restored control over their lives. Vocational skills and small businesses created income. Education opened opportunities for children. Human rights awareness helped people recognise exploitation, while community leadership enabled them to speak, organise and contribute to solutions.
The purpose was never to keep families permanently dependent on Samaritan’s Fellowship.
The purpose was to walk beside them until they could stand independently.
This became the organisation’s model: responding to immediate suffering while addressing the deeper conditions that caused it.
More than a decade of working with vulnerable families has revealed one need that cannot be postponed.
The children.
When a family is released from bonded labour, the adults may finally be free, but their children often carry years of lost education, fear and trauma with them.
Some have never entered a classroom. Others are already teenagers by the time their family escapes. Many have grown up watching their parents experience debt, violence, humiliation and exploitation. Some have experienced abuse or domestic violence themselves.
Children raised under these conditions may begin to believe that powerlessness is normal. They may struggle to speak confidently, trust adults or imagine a life beyond the brick kiln, farm or settlement where they were born.
School enrolment alone cannot repair everything they have experienced.
They need education, safe spaces, emotional support, protection, confidence-building activities and opportunities to play, learn and develop. They need adults who listen to them and institutions that believe their future can be different from the lives their parents were forced to endure.
Samaritan’s Fellowship wants these children to become more than recipients of aid.
It wants them to become students, professionals, advocates and community leaders. It wants them to understand their rights, develop their abilities and become the generation that finally breaks the cycle inherited from those before them.
This is now one of the most important chapters in the organisation’s journey.
Afshan and Faisal could not save the young pregnant woman who died on the road to the hospital in 2012.
Nothing can change what happened that night.
But they could refuse to accept her death as normal.
Every well that gives a family access to safer water is part of the response that began that night. Every patient who reaches a doctor before it is too late is part of that response. Every family that walks free from bonded labour, every parent who begins earning independently and every child who enters a classroom with hope is part of the same continuing story.
One tragedy revealed an entire system of suffering.
That suffering inspired a commitment not merely to provide temporary relief, but to walk with families from crisis to freedom, from dependence to opportunity and from exclusion to dignity.
This is why Samaritan’s Fellowship exists.
The work is far from complete. Communities still lack access to healthcare and safe drinking water. Families remain trapped in bonded labour, survivors need opportunities to rebuild their lives, and thousands of children are still waiting for the chance to learn, heal and imagine a different future.
Samaritan’s Fellowship is seeking partners, donors, volunteers, educators, healthcare professionals and child-protection specialists who believe that vulnerable families deserve more than survival.
They deserve freedom, health, opportunity and the power to shape their own future.
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Support our mission to rescue families trapped in bonded labour. Create your own fundraiser and help change lives.
Support our mission to rescue families trapped in bonded labour. Create your own fundraiser and help change lives.
Support our mission to rescue families trapped in bonded labour. Create your own fundraiser and help change lives.
Support our mission to rescue families trapped in bonded labour. Create your own fundraiser and help change lives.
