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UNHCR and its partners give runaway Afghan children a happy ending

May 28, 2004

ISLAMABAD, 28 May (UNHCR) - Running away from home to find a life of freedom and adventure is a common childhood fantasy. The reality, as two young Afghan boys in Pakistan discovered, can be a lonely life of poverty and danger.

What started as a spur-of-the-moment decision by Said Mohammad and Mohammad Gul turned into a futile attempt to go home and a year-long search for their parents. In their case, there was a happy ending. This week the UN Refugee Agency and SHARP, a Pakistani non-governmental organisation that is a partner in caring for Afghan refugees, reunited the family. "At the beginning I was happy but then I became very sad," said Said Mohammad, sitting beside his smiling parents at the Islamabad office of SHARP - the Society for Prisoners Aid and Human Rights. "I realised I had made a big mistake."

The problem began a year ago when Said Mohammad had a fight with his father. The family tension was exacerbated because their mother had moved away temporarily to the city of Jalalabad in Afghanistan.

Accompanied by his younger brother, he ran away. The two boys, the youngest of eight children in the family, were soon far away in the city of Attock, a centre in the Punjab near the Indus River, where many refugees have settled over the years. Although their parents say Said Mohammad is now 14 years old and his brother 12 years old, aid workers suspect the diminutive children are each two years younger.

The boys slept outside and tried to earn enough rupees to buy food by selling glasses of water to people. It did not take long for them to realise that life even in a poor refugee household was better than the street life of an orphan.

"We were in Attoch selling water for four or five days," said Said Mohammad. "I tried to reach my home but then the police stopped us. They took us to the police station, gave us food, let us sleep for the night and then took us to a shelter."

That turned out to be fortunate. The boys thought their home was in the town of Chakwal, but the family had actually moved to Mandi Bahauddin, about 150 km away, long before they ran away so they did not know their way back. It also complicated attempts by anyone else to reunite the family.

The boys were initially placed at a home in Peshawar run by the Ehdi Foundation, a Pakistani charity that provides humanitarian services ranging from shelters to ambulance services. They were later moved to another Ehdi shelter in Rawalpindi, beside the capital Islamabad.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees and Sharp's Project for Refugee Children learned that the children were at the shelter, which housed adults as well as children, and began trying to locate their parents.

Unable to return the children to their home in Chakwal where the boys thought they had lived, UNHCR asked the International Committee of the Red Cross for help in locating the mother in Jalalabad. That also proved futile.

Meanwhile, UNHCR had moved the boys at the end of August to a shelter for children run by the Afghan charity RAWA, the Revolutionary Afghan Women's Association, in Rawalpindi. There they received nourishing food and medical care and began receiving the formal education they had never previously had.

All this time, SHARP continued their search with no results. Finally this month, a relative of the boys walked into the SHARP office and asked if they had information on the missing boys. The parents were now back together and anxious to find their missing children.

On 26 May, UNHCR picked the excited boys up at the RAWA shelter and brought them to the office where their parents were waiting. With his arm around his brother's small shoulders, Said Mohammad burst into a smile when asked how he felt and replied simply: "Very happy."