AS Your Voice

  The Silent Struggle of Our Unhoused Neighbors | AS Your Voice | It’s easy to walk past a tent city or avert our eyes from someone sleeping on a park bench. We might offer a fleeting thought, perhaps even a dollar, but how often do we truly pause to consider the intricate web of circumstances that leads someone to that point? I remember a particularly cold winter morning last year. As I hurried to grab my coffee, bundled in layers, I saw a woman trying to start a small, sputtering fire in a discarded barrel.  Her face was etched with exhaustion, her hands blue with cold. I t hit me then, with a sharp, undeniable pang, how easily we become desensitized to suffering. We rationalize, we categorize, but beneath it all, there's a human story. The narrative of homelessness often falls into tired tropes : mental illness , addiction , personal failure.  While these factors can certainly play a role, they paint an incomplete and often unfair picture.  The truth is far more...

The Echo of Unseen Tears  |AS Your Voice| Have you ever felt it? The quiet ache in the world? It is a sound that is not a sound. It is the echo of unseen tears. Today, I want to tell you about three of those echoes. They are not grand stories on the news. They are small stories, whispered in the dark, and they are asking for one thing: justice . Story 1: The Hands That Built Our Home  |AS Your Voice| This is the face of the man who cleans our streets. Look past the dirt and see the person. See the dignity. See the pain. Kareem Bhai ’s hands are a map of pain. Each line is a road he has travelled, each callus is a brick he has laid for someone else’s house.  He is 65 years old, and his body is a machine that has run out of fuel.  His knees creak with the sound of gravel, and his back aches with a weight that no one can see. Every morning, before the sun is awake, he is on the street, sweeping away the dust of our city. People rush past him.  They see the clean s...

 How Pakistan's Socioeconomic Issues are Contributing towards Child Labour | AS Your voice | There is an age in our lives when the world is supposed to be soft.  An age when our greatest worry is a scraped knee, and our safest place is hiding behind our mother's legs.  But for millions of children in Pakistan, that age never comes. Instead of a mother's hand, they feel the rough handle of a tool. Instead of a classroom, they have a factory floor.  Instead of dreams of becoming a doctor or an engineer, their only dream is to make it through the day. Today, I feel helpless. I feel a scream building in my throat because it feels like no one is talking about them.  It feels like we have accepted this stolen generation as a normal part of life. But it is not normal. It is a heartbreaking, soul-crushing injustice.  And if we don't feel this helplessness, if it doesn't break our hearts, then we have lost a piece of our own humanity. This post is for them. ...