THE INTERNATIONAL NEWS: GURDWARA SRI PANJA SAHIB (Hasanabdal): Jaswant Kaur is a middle aged mother of four, full of life and smiles as she makes tea for us and reminisces about life in village Pir Baba in Buner. But while she is glad that she took her children away from the hell like situation back home, she can’t stop fretting about her husband who stayed behind. The three days that she has been at Gurdwara Sri Panja Sahib, Hasanabdal, already seem like an agonising lifetime. It’s never easy being a refugee within one’s own land.
But like many others around her, Jaswant is a brave woman. She is already a commanding presence in the sprawling kitchen of the massive Gurdwara which otherwise has the capacity to house up to ten thousand people. It’s amazing how the majority of the women here can still smile, even those like Jaswant who have had to leave their spouses behind, for one reason or another. Maybe they are smiling because unlike the Muslim displaced people of Swat, who are forced to languish on the roads of Rawalpindi and elsewhere and eking out a living in miserable circumstances, the Sikh community has suffered a much better fate, at least till now. None of us can even imagine the trauma of someone waking up happy and all settled in their home one morning, and becoming a helpless refugee the next. >>> Mariana Baabar | Monday, May 4, 2009
