Islamabad: Pakistan’s unique and colourful truck art, also known as moving canvases on roads, is now being used for a bigger cause: to find missing children and bring them home.
Rights activists, painters and drivers joined efforts under the ‘Truck Art Child Finder’ campaign to help find children by painting their portraits with helpline number on the trucks that travelled thousands of kilometres carrying the message of hope. The response was promising, thousands of calls were received and seven of the 20 children were recovered and reunited with their families in one year.
Muhammad Ali, the founder of Roshni Helpline and filmmaker, activist Samar Minallah Khan together with the support of Berger Paint and BBDO Pakistan, launched the campaign in late 2019.
Samar Minallah, who volunteered as the art director for the project, said that they decided to utilise truck arts as it was “a more powerful and effective way to spread the message” rather than putting up ‘talaash-i-gumshuda’ (search for the missing) posters on walls as trucks move all across the country. They got in touch with the families for photos and then the usual images of celebrities, women and mythical creatures on the back of trucks “were replaced by portraits of the missing children with a hotline number on trucks that covered the routes where we hoped to find those kids.”
Describing the painful experience, Minallah said the most difficult part was persuading the drivers to use their vehicles as a medium of awareness and missing child alert. “For us, it is just a beautifully decorated truck but for them, these trucks are very special and are affectionately called brides,” she said.
Hayat Khan, the 65-year-old truck driver from Peshawar who offered his truck for the cause, confessed that it took some time for him to understand and realise the importance of the message. “The drivers feared they would be questioned by police for putting this message and number. But within few weeks, we realised we were only helping the families who lost their children. Now, we are proud to be among those who helped find some of those children,” Khan said.
The child finder campaign is part of a bigger social movement led by Karachi-based Roshni Helpline (RH), a non-profit organisation dedicated to the cause of missing children.
“We found truck art and posters on water tankers a creative and compelling medium to spread the message while also educating people how to report a missing child,” Muhammad Ali, rights activist and founder of Roshni helpline 1138, told Gulf News. Since 2003, the organisation has helped recover more than 5600 children. Roshni has a strong network of 4,900 volunteers which also includes transgenders and also work with 118 police stations across Karachi.
Over 3,000 children go missing in Pakistan every year. Each day, at least 5 to 7 cases of missing children are reported in Karachi, a city of 20 million people, according to Ali. Over the years, Roshni has developed a unique system in liaison with law enforcement agencies, legal advocacy groups and children and women’s rights organisations to locate kids as quickly as possible. “If we can recover the children on time, they can be saved from all sorts of crimes, physical and sexual abuse, forced labour.”
In many cases, a significant amount of time is lost in deciding whether a child is missing or kidnapped which leads to delay in registering the FIR at the police station and “then the chance of tracing the child begins to fade” Ali explained. To bridge this gap and change the mindset of police officers, “we are working with police to report, investigate and locate missing children and protect them from begging and trafficking rings and abuse.” The helpline also educates parents on how to report and lodge a police complaint.
The organisation has recently launched the ‘Roshni on wheels’ initiative to immediately report the case of missing children who are under 10 years old by sending the vehicle with a police officer, counsellor and caseworker, to their home the same day. The project will cover all seven districts of Karachi.
