Irishman Caron Rawnsley's adventures in Pakistan

When Irishman Caron Rawnsley decided to move to Pakistan from England in 1989 to work as a volunteer in education and for campaigns on environmental issues, he didn’t think his stay would be that long — maybe two or three years. “It turned into 20 years,” he tells Weekend Review. “That was strange and difficult to explain, both to my family and to myself. I just felt I could do so much in Pakistan. It would be better than returning here where no one really needs what I am good at.”

Rawnsley had visited Pakistan before and liked the country. For a ceramics artist living in Norfolk, life had been easy and enjoyable. Yet, as a person with good education, he felt that he had a duty to engage himself with a country that needed help. “Pakistan seemed to me like an ideal country,” he says.

So he went to Karachi where he initially taught as a volunteer at a school for the deaf, training them in making clay models of farms, irrigation systems and buildings. He noticed that the deaf children were being trained as mass-production workers with very little emphasis on being creative.

“Children were told to copy,” he says. “They were given a picture and they were told — copy that. If you can copy it successfully then you have got skill. And that is all that seemed to matter. But being creative is a different thing.”

He found this “copy” mentality in not just art, but in all subjects in Pakistan.

The quality of environmental education also left a lot to be desired. “They teach that there is pollution,” he says, “but are not told that pollution is happening just a hundred yards from your back door, and that is what you need to do something about.”

As years went by, he taught at some other schools in the city, including more reputable ones such as the Karachi Grammar School — “Supposed to be the best,” he says. “I think Benazir Bhutto once went there.”

Eventually, he decided to leave the big city and go to the interior of Sindh. “I just left Karachi,” he says. “I said, I have had enough. Why should I teach the rich children of the city who can well afford to employ European teachers? They could well afford to modify their curriculum. People in Pakistan are very rich, the elites who live in the big places, such as Clifton and so on — these areas are full of multimillionaires. They could do so much for their children.”

So he moved to the town of Umerkot, near the Thar desert. “It is a wonderful town because it is full of Hindu people as well,” he says. “I felt it was a cross-section of the society of Sindh, and a place where all the cultures of India and Pakistan meet. Because it is the last sort of major town in lower Sindh, just near the border.”

He visited desert areas and saw the hypnotic beauty of the cover of green trees in spring, when all the flowers appear. Camels would stroll across, and children would have the camels and goats carry water.

While out in Umerkot, he visited schools and began setting up nurseries. “We built a nursery within every school where I was invited,” he says. “And this programme that I had going on was not supported by anyone financially. Only the headmasters sometimes gave what they could from their school funds. Maybe a few thousand rupees, but even that was very helpful.”

Rawnsley also travelled to other rural parts of Pakistan, including Khairpur, Sanghar and Gujranwala. He did his environmental work in the desert areas on his own, although sometimes he linked up with agencies such as UNDP and Scope (Society for Conservation and Protection of Environment). He also worked at the biodiversity centre at a university in Khairpur.

He found primary schools were denied the most elementary facilities such as decent latrines. School teachers often just ignored children and spent their days drinking tea out in the courtyards. Discipline could be rather brutal for primary-level children. “They get a lot of beatings,” Rawnsley says. “Even torture is meted out to them on occasions. And I have seen this happen often in schools.” There were also exceptional, well-run schools.

Not all children Rawnsley came across attended schools, although the majority did. “They were probably better off than children in school, who were put in dark rooms,” he says. “The rooms didn’t have proper lighting. The fan often didn’t work. The experience of going to a classroom regularly in the heat of summer was more than a nightmare — it was the most terrible experience any child could undergo. Much better to be in a big factory, working on a farm, or picking cotton with their mothers.”

Poor facilities was not the only problem. “Much of the foodgrain they produce is exported to keep up with their payments to the World Bank,” Rawnsley says. “Now you can’t buy decent mangoes. And they are all pre-ripened with carbide. You can’t get them at the prices that were reasonable. And poor people are hungry now.”

According to some news reports, Pakistan has the highest deforestation rate in Asia. Rawnsley studied the canal systems of Sindh and Punjab, and feels they are ideal plantation areas for millions of trees. “Very little is happening,” he says. “They could be planted with sheesham, and neem and bubur trees — these are all local names. I studied about the best trees for different areas.”

The deforestation is linked to rising floods in recent years. “You have the flooding, the percolation of water back into the soil,” Rawnsley says. “Originally, Sindh would have been an alluvial plain covered in forests before human intervention.”

For agricultural purposes, people had to level the land. “If you look at Sindh — its undulations, its sand dunes, and its variations of topography — they make the place suitable for agriculture,” says Rawnsley. “But because it is levelled, it floods. The moment there is a heavy downpour, the whole country gets devastated. In the last ten years, there have been numerous floods in the country that are devastating for the ordinary people. The peasants suffer terribly in these floods.”

While working near Gujranwala in Punjab, at the farms and schools of some villages, he noticed that the farmers sprayed a lot of pesticides on rice crops. “Many organisations are resisting GM [genetically modified] crops, but they are trying to promote these particularly in Pakistan,” he says. “Pesticide levels in many areas are so high that the children are falling sick even in schools. I noticed a lot of children with eyes and skin irritations.”

He observed that many sick children at school, who were struggling to stay awake, had allergic reactions, and lung and bronchial problems. “This is due to the massive poisoning of the environment in Punjab,” he says.

Are the locals able to link this with the pesticides? “No, they are totally unaware,” he says. “The farmers themselves know how hazardous this work is, so they get their workers, usually uneducated, to do all the spraying. The educated farmers sit in their havelis [mansions] and don’t go out into the fields until the levels of pesticides have declined a bit.”

Rawnsley has made Pakistan his home and has learnt Urdu, as well as some Sindhi. He has developed a taste for the local cuisine. “I just eat the local parathas, rotis, and drink a lot of tea,” he says. Being Irish, he prefers dairy products such as yogurt and kheer.

Rawnsley fondly recalls singing to the children. “They loved that,” he says. “I used to sing Irish songs, ballads.”

He fell in love with the famous 18th-century Sindhi poet and Sufi mystic, Shah Abdul Latif, whose message of empowerment of women is still relevant. “In all his stories, ‘risalos’ as they are called, the heroine is the central component,” he says. “The basis of society is womanhood. How they rear their children, how they feed their families — the fundamental duties that make civilised human society possible.”

Rawnsley has concerns about the status of women in present-day Sindh. “They are not allowed to own property,” he says. “They are not allowed to go out to work. They are not allowed to do this, they are not allowed to do that. And yet, here is this teacher from 300 years ago who was saying women are very important. And the main followers of Shah Abdul Latif appear to be women.”

Rawnsley also found an environmental message in Latif’s work. “He is always talking about the birds, nature,” he says. “About the power of nature to make our lives better. He basically was a Sufi, and Sufism has a great love for gardens, for the way nature operates. The laws of nature are respected by Sufis as one of their fundamental tenets. Nature should be our guide. We look at nature as the harmony that Allah has created in the world. It is our lesson to look at nature. Through nature, we learn the harmony of Allah. Nature is truly made by Allah, if you believe that Allah has created the world and its beauty and harmony.”

Rawnsley, who is a Muslim, feels the West does not understand Islam properly. “We have a prejudice against it due to our Christian background,” he says. “And so animosities have been developed by the media, which is very mistaken. There is dogmatism is every religion, and blind spots. And I think Islam is no exception. I am a Muslim. I have taken Islam as my religion. I feel, I don’t emphasise that because I don’t want to suffer prejudice, reverse prejudice, here.” He laughs nervously.

Rawnsley worries that being known to be a Muslim might cause him more difficulty. “So I stay away from religion mostly,” he says. “Not in Pakistan. I engage with religion there because I find religion very useful and interesting. And it’s a way to people’s hearts. And what will touch the hearts of people is a better understanding of their religion. If you live harmoniously and in peace which Islam orders — peace above all — [you end up with] the harmonious mixture of all the communities.”

Yet, when it comes to religion, Rawnsley feels often that he isn’t given any credit. “They don’t believe I am a Muslim,” he says. “I don’t dress often like a Muslim. I wear Western clothes. I don’t make a fetish of explaining myself a lot on religious guidelines because they have heard it all before. They know that you shouldn’t cut the trees, they know that you shouldn’t contaminate the water.”

The economic pressures on people are so enormous that many people feel the environment is a subsidiary issue. “Most people feel powerless,” he says.

Pakistan, already the world’s sixth most populous country, has a rapidly expanding population. Rawnsley feels that there is need to broaden Islamic dialogue to include urgent issues such as population growth.

“Even Zakir Naik doesn’t ever talk about population,” he says. “He always justifies the Quran, and says this and this and this. The population problem is actually building a tidal wave of difficulties for countries such as Pakistan. If you didn’t have this expanding population, the educational system could start improving.”

Rawnsley also developed a concern for Pakistan’s endangered wildlife. He tells me that he discovered a “prehistoric dinosaur” on a visit to the Karachi zoo. “It was a strange animal with a sort of huge swollen nose,” he says. “It had very long thin sort of jaws.”

He checked in the wildlife library in Saddar, in central Karachi. “I found in the books that this was a gharial,” he says. “Not a crocodile, as it was labelled to be.” The gharial is a unique species in its own right, with an evolutionary history much older than the crocodile.

Rawnsley explains that a lot of gharials were wiped out after partition in 1947. “Everyone went shooting,” he says. “If you had a gun, you just killed anything you could find. So they obliterated all these animals — there were none left.”

Rawnsley found that there were two male gharials at the Karachi zoo, and three females in the Lahore zoo, which were gifted by India. He studied their breeding methods and wrote articles about the need to breed the male and female gharials, and reintroduce then into the canal system of Sindh. “I compiled information,” he says. “I gave all that information to the WWF. They never came back on it.”

He feels it is a missed opportunity to get young people engaged. “A creature, just like the turtles, that has got a history of 150-200 million years,” he says. “It is like a dinosaur, it is a living fossil. One of the rarest animals on the face of the Earth. But still it has been wiped out, just by incompetence. The politics of the zoo officials stopped the breeding programme.”

His interest in conservation has taken Rawnsley to strange places. A few years ago, he made a survey of the graveyards of Sindh. “They have a great meaning to Sindhis,” he says. “The graveyards are full of their Sufi saints and great historical figures.”

Rawnsley says, nowadays, landlords in the vicinity are trying to encroach on the graveyards, cutting trees and selling wood. “The graveyards are being lost,” he says. “They are biodiversity hotspots of Sindh where you get all the wildlife such as snakes, other reptiles, and sometimes rare birds such as owls.”

Unfortunately, like all good things, Rawnsley’s adventures in Pakistan didn’t last for ever. It turned out that the authorities weren’t too comfortable with his work in the border region. “It started to get worse, especially after the Afghanistan problem, and the spread of war into Pakistan, with drones being dropped on the villages in the northern areas.”

It reached a stage when he got picked up by the “intelligence” people. “They took me to a room and kept me there for about two days,” he says. “And then they released me and took my passport away from me. I realised that I was in trouble all the time working in these areas. There was nothing I could do about it.”

He recalls being called to the chief of police in Badin. “They lectured me — you shouldn’t be in Pakistan. Why are you here? What are you doing here? Why are you working here? And I said, it is my work in schools. I am working in the schools. Then the schools stopped asking me because they were told foreigners are not supposed to be in Pakistan.”

Rawnsley remembers even being taken off a bus, just for being a foreigner. The paranoia that goes with Pakistan being a war zone has made the situation worse for foreigners. “They slowly spread this idea that I must be a spy,” he says. “Why should I work in isolated places? Why should I work free of charge? Why would I do this? They couldn’t understand this.”

American activities in the country have contributed to the climate of suspicion. “It was people such as that terrible American, the CIA chap Raymond Davis,” he says. “He went and shot people in Lahore, and they let him go. After he had killed Pakistani people indiscriminately, and was just roaming around hunting down the so-called Taliban or whatever. This is what gave me a feeling that I was no longer safe in the country because I was being looked at as an agent, or a spy, because I was working in the interior.

“Foreigners don’t do that unless they are supported by the church or are members of very powerful organisations and are driven in Pajeros everywhere. I didn’t do that. I walked, I went on buses, I served the community in a way that I felt I could.”

Amid all this, Rawnsley hurt his foot after being hit by a car while crossing a road in Karachi. He wanted to leave the country, but the Interior Ministry had imposed a huge fine on him for overstaying his visa. Being a volunteer worker, he couldn’t afford to pay. “The British government also refused to help me,” he says. “They said you are here. You have broken the law by overstaying a visa. And I said I didn’t do it by choice.” Eventually with the help of the Ansar Burney Trust, he managed to leave the country.

Rawnsley is now in London, which is where I interviewed him, at his brother’s bronze-casting workshop. He tells me he has recorded several hours of video, documenting his environmental investigations in Pakistan. We watch a few clips together, one of which is of a sewage plant in Hyderabad. “We are not living by those values as we like to pretend,” he says. “We like to dress beautifully when we go to the mosque, we put our hats on, we wash ourselves and everything — but look at the way we are treating our drinking water. This is a sewage outflow straight into the canal, and you expect millions of people to drink this? This is the main sewage plant of Hyderabad city, a huge city of millions of people.”

His foot is much better now, and he plans to travel to India soon to work with the environmental activist Vandana Shiva’s organisation. “She is talking about food security,” Rawnsley says. “She is talking about the demolition of agriculture by the transnationals such as Monsanto that are affecting the farmers enormously across India.

“And the traditional crops that have kept people properly fed are being demolished to be replaced by cotton — toxic GM-type cottons which are replacing the traditional food crops of people.”

It might also be a less troublesome venture for Rawnsley. “I can work in India without causing any difficulties,” he says. I joke the Indians may suspect the secret service in Pakistan have sent him there. “Anything is possible in this present world,” he laughs.

In Rawnsley’s view, his kind of work comes within the category of jihad. “True jihad is to help people,” he says. “To help improve their society, to construct a better life for people.”

I ask him what his feelings were at Karachi airport when he was waiting for his flight back to United Kingdom. “I was thinking that this is not the end of the story,” he says. “My link with Pakistan is very deep, and I want to go back when it’s a bit safer to work there, particularly, if I could get some support for my work.”

Syed Hamad Ali is a writer based in London.