AJMAN When a pot of hot boiling rice fell on Mohammad last October severely burning his shoulders, arms and back, it took the four-year-old more than three months to be treated by a doctor.
With no passport, visa or any other form of identification, no hospital was ready to admit the young victim of a third degree burn. Only after several rounds of desperate pleas with a Sharjah doctor did his mother Maryam finally have her way this January when a skin grafting surgery was performed on him. The wounds may only be healing slowly every day since but Maryam, 38, a Filipina from the island province of Palawan, says her five children – including Mohammad – are scarred for life already because of the pathetic conditions they are living in, sharing a ramshackle two-room apartment in Ajman with the second wife of her husband, Ida, 32, from Peshawar, Pakistan, and her four children.
Overstay fines
Father Mohammad Ali, an Afghan from Kabul, has a Dh115,000 cheque case after his previous landlord registered a police complaint for non-payment of rent and over Dh100,000 in overstay fines incurred by him and his large family.
He says his problems date back to 2010 when the partner of his maintenance company absconded, leaving him in the lurch. “I had to let my employees go. Slowly all my clients left me as a result and I was left with no resources or opportunity to renew our papers,” says Ali whose family of 12 has been living without visas for six years. Five of his nine children from two wives don’t even have passports and the rest have passports that are no longer valid.
Meanwhile Ali himself has been driving a friend’s car using a driver’s licence that expired last year, but he says he needs to take all the risk to keep the fire in his kitchen burning. “I can be caught anytime, but I have to do this for the family. With the summer coming, I am hoping I will get a few contracts for AC maintenance which should keep the house going,” adds Ali whose bigger priority is to sort out the paperwork of his children. “Unless that’s done, they can do nothing, go nowhere – not even to school or even a hospital for treatment as we saw in Mohammad’s case.”
Mounting debts
With mounting debts and overstay fines rising every day, he says, the family have almost hit a dead end. “Only the children don’t understand and that breaks me,” cries Ida, who got married to Ali in Abu Dhabi in 2003, just months after he had wedded Maryam in Dubai.
Yet when it comes to showing love and affection to the nine children there is no discrimination, says Ida, who herself is the third of seven siblings. “They are all the same and they all call me mamma,” she says. However if she has to turn to someone for an important job, she says she has both Abdullah, 10, Maryam’s eldest child, and Fatema, 12, eldest of her own four children.
One wants to build bridges and buildings as a civil engineer while the other wants to be an eye doctor. Both are smart, assured and speak a slew of languages including fluent Pashto, Arabic, Urdu, English and sketchy Tagalog. Yet the only schooling both have ever received is just a year in a kindergarten in an Indian school. “Our poverty is crushing their dreams,” says Ida, who suffers from bouts of depression and regular headaches. She sat in a corner with her hands on her head as her three other children – Zahra, eight, Ruqqaiyya, four and Ismael, two – play around her, blissfully unaware of the world around them.
Only Zahra has some idea of the problems her family faces and knows she can’t go to school as a result. Yet she can’t contain her yearning to be on the school bus she sees kids her age hop onto every morning in bright sparkling uniforms from her first floor window. “I wish I could go to school,” she gesticulates using a mix of languages the family uses amongst them.
With Ramadan around the corner, the two mums hope someone will hear them out and help end their miseries. “It will be nothing short of a miracle, but we do believe in miracles,” says Maryam, who converted to Islam to marry her love after arriving in the UAE in 2002 to work as a cashier from the Philippines. Fourteen years on, her only desire is to see her children and step-children go to school and resume a normal life.
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