KARACHI: “There are many who offer free iftar to all during Ramazan. But there won’t be many who offer Sehri. We are here just to do that,” Sajid Bin Zia told Dawn.

Under the umbrella of their NGO Faith Foundation, which they started in 2010 to help guide and mentor people to choose careers they had an aptitude and potential for, Sajid and wife Wajiha also run the langar kitchen from inside the Navy Housing Scheme in Zamzama, Defence Housing Authority (DHA). The couple live there, inside the gated area, with Sajid’s parents. His father is a retired Navy officer. Sajid and Wajiha are jewellery designers as well as gold and diamond jewellery wholesalers. He is also a certified gemologist and a financial construction and reconstruction consultant.

Working during the day, the couple come to their kitchen in the evening after Taraweeh to prepare Sehri. Wajiha, who is also a trained chef, cooks everything herself. “I make continental dishes too but for Sehri in Ramazan, I’m concentrating on Pakistani food,” said Wajiha, who cooked daal gosht for the first Sehri, Chicken Changezi for the second, chicken nihari for the third and Karahi chicken for the fourth. “Ever since I remember, I’ve loved to cook. And doing it for a good cause motivates me even further,” she added.

Starting around 10.30pm, the couple are done with the cooking by midnight. Then leaving the food to cool for a bit they start packing portions, per person, into plastic bags. “It’s all ready to be distributed by 2am. That’s when we step out of our home to neighbouring areas such as Neelum Colony and some commercial areas where there are hundreds of people with no means of preparing Sehri themselves,” said Sajid.

Couple start cooking at night and distribute food packets in poor neighbourhoods

This Sehri drive is recent. It was started this Ramazan only. Earlier, the couple used to distribute lunches. “We have been in and out of poor neighbourhoods to have a fairly good idea of the poor localities where you find deserving people, and daily wagers,” said Sajid.

“And not just poor neighbourhoods, we also distribute food packets to servants of the rich. Sadly, there are houses here in DHA who hire more domestic help than they have household members. And they do not provide food to the people who work for them. Their employers expect them to buy their meals from some nearby hotel or something,” Sajid pointed out.

“You know even if we can ease their burden by helping them save even Rs100 a day, it would be a great help for their daily economics. Maybe the money they save this way can be used for something important such as for their children’s education,” he said.

“Our NGO, Faith Foundation, also invites people to feed people. You can feed one person for Rs90 and 100 persons for Rs9,000. A bag of rations for a home can also be bought from us for Rs3,000,” he said.

“We always wanted to do this. But earlier, we didn’t have a place for cooking food for so many people. Now, we are grateful to the Pakistan Navy to have provided us with a space for our langar Kitchen. We cleaned it up, renovated it and painted it to make it hygienic. We also set up a reverse osmosis plant there as we needed clean water for cooking. Now that we also have a gas connection there, we have started cooking curries or rice. But we don’t have enough funds to also set up a Tandoor as yet.

“I have tried remedying this by visiting nearby Tandoors myself and asking them to donate us some rotis for free. And this way I have managed to get around 200 rotis for free every day to pack with the curry packets before delivering them to the people,” said Sajid, who has himself been wheelchair-bound since 2002 when he was in an accident at a construction site.

Published in Dawn, April 7th, 2022