IRC-Tent City (A general overview)

The tent city in Khairpur is the oldest and was designed and set up before Eid. It has two blocks – Bhitai and Sachal and the road in between – Shahrah-e- Sami. Ten neighborhoods after the names of 10 communities are living harmoniously. A city council consisting of 10 representatives, one from each community facilitates the distribution of commodities, use of services, and helps in planning for the improvement. Some norms for living together have been designed and have been pasted at a visible place. Apart from cleanliness and discipline, the norms do not allow violence of any kind particularly on women and children. Only one complaint of an old father beating the young son had been reported otherwise there had been no instances of violence.
The residents of this tent city are mainly from Jacobabad. The other districts of their origin are Shikarpur, Jafarabad, Dadu and Kandhkot. Most of them are victims of Thori breach and found shelter in Khairpur in early August. By profession they are either unskilled labourers or landless farmers except very few who claim to have their own small pieces of land. Out of a population of 1221 persons in one camp, 685 are children below 15 years of age, 53 women are pregnant and 7 safe deliveries (all in city hospital) had already taken place.
Tent city has three Teaching and Learning Centres with an enrolment of159. Except a few, all of these children of various ages are out of school either because the teachers in village schools are absent or not posted or the building is used for some other purpose by the influential individuals.
Health standards of our guests are poor however, all the pregnant women in the camp now have access to pre-natal check ups. The government doctors come for OPD at least twice in a week and IRC provides ambulance service in the case of emergencies.
Now we have started a vocational centre in two large tents for women. IRC Crafts Centre staff trains women in various crafts. A crash programme by a trainer from Karachi will be held in the last three days of this week when the groups of women will learn flower making, candle making, block printing, envelopes making etc.
The constraint in expanding vocational centre is the limited number of manual sewing machines. We need at least 16 more sewing machines so that we can well equip Khairpur centre more.
The tent city receive important visitors such as district officials, donors and international agencies, multi national executives, other NGOs and media. ` Occasionally cultural programs are also organized in which the talent from IDPs participate.
Nights have become cool in Khairpur and there is a need for light woolies. We have already ordered ‘razaiyan’ and ‘gadday’ for 185 families of Khairpur Tent City.
Our mission is to make the lives of our guests enjoyable, memorable and useful. We have been receiving reasonable help from various donors in doing this. The pressing needs now are manual sewing machines, woolies particularly for children, and resources to set us skills centre for men in Dadu and Sehwan camps. We do not want to set up a skills centre in Khairpur as we expect that we will have to wind up the Tent City soon IDPs have already started planning to go back to homes districts.