Widow looking for help

Islamabad : It is going to be almost two years now that these children saw some people coming one night to their home, carrying a cot on which lied their father. Dead!

They saw their mother burst out screaming and wailing, beating her head and chest. Some people tried to console her but the grief was too much to bear for her. The daughter and son, Fajar 4 and Muaviya 3 years respectively at the time, were looking in utter confusion at their mother and the strange people who have entered their home.

They glanced at their father, lying still on the cot. All this was so strange. This has never happened in their life. Father has always returned home every evening, loaded with goodies for them. And if he had forgotten something, he would always be offering one excuse or the other with the promise to fulfil their wish the next day.

On that day he was just lying there, eyes closed and absolutely still while mother seem to have gone mad! By the time some ladies from adjacent homes have rushed in and started trying to make her stop screaming and crying.

Muhammad Yousaf, 27, was a happily married young man, bestowed with the blessings of a daughter and a son. He was working as a labourer in Dubai but found it hard to be away from his family and decided to return home in Lahore back in December 2016.

He started working as a ‘Captain’ with a private cab service. That fateful night he accepted a ride from a wedding party and dropped them near timber market on Ravi Road at around mid-night.

As he was about to leave after dropping the passengers an unknown number of persons attacked him, trying to rob him and on resistance they shot him in the head, leaving him dead on the spot. Only 28 years old, Mst Saba Yousaf, the poor widowed mother, was abandoned by her in-laws and started living with her widowed mother in a small two-room house in Imamia Colony in Shahdara, Lahore, already accommodating five persons.

With no source of income she started sewing clothes for a readymade garments factory at home. She is stitching a shirts for Rs15 per piece and spends hours and hours on the sewing machine to stitch around 30 to 35 shirts per day, earning around Rs500.

Both children are now going to school, studying in preparatory and nursery in a private school, which charges them Rs1,100 for each student. And that is subsidised fee the school is charging after the mother submitted the death certificate of the father. She pays another Rs10,000 to the rickshaw driver who picks and drops the children to and from school.

After the murder of her husband she tried to approach the then Chief Minister and police, trying to get the killers arrested and also to get some help, but could find no one to offer a helping hand. A few months later she realized that whatever she was trying was futile. She gave up and started working to earn a living for her children.

She is only 26 but the hard work has already started reflecting on her health and physique. She has become almost a hunchback, not keeping good health and is continuing to work for her children.

Any institution or individual willing to extend a helping hand to this widow, enabling her to raise the two innocent children, can reach her directly through contact number: +92-336-4088078.