Webinar: Food insecurity and nutrition in Pakistan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Karachi by PIA

F lying to Karachi on Monday morning instead of Sunday evening was a bad idea. The morning flight from Islamabad takes off at 8:00. I had hoped to be in PACP office by 10:30 which would mean missing first meeting of day but I had thought that I would be able participate in all important meetings with the health and the planning and development secretaries. The flight PK 365 arrived in Karachi 11:30 instead of 9:55. I hired a radio cab for Sindh AIDS Control Program near Jinnah Post Graduate Medical Center.   Kept searching for the PACP office on Rafiquee Shaheed road but it was nowhere to be found. Eventually, I got out of the taxi in front of the Blood Transfusion Center inside JPMC. Met a guy in the corridor who was wearing his staff ID. He led me to another guy in the lab who was able to described SACP location. It was already 1:30 in the afternoon,  which meant I had missed important meetings of the day. Thank you PIA!  The office of SACP was in a walled compound housing m
Read more

COVID-19 Pakistan: Looking back at how events unfolded

Coronavirus entered public discussions in Pakistan in January 2020 when Pakistani students in China were barred from travelling back to their country by the Chinese government. There were speculations in the media about how badly they were being treated by the Chinese authorities and how Pakistani government was helpless in coming to their rescue. They were said to be stuck in their dormitories for days without food and medicine. Their parents staged protests in front of government buildings demanding Pakistani government to evacuate their loved ones from Wuhan and Hubei. The government’s response was that these students were better off under the Chinese care in the prevailing circumstances, and that bringing them back was against public health advice on international travel to and from China. The Chinese embassy in Islamabad tweeted: We will take care of them like our own [i] . The Chinese embassy declined Pakistani Health Minister’s request for a visit to China to meet these students
Read more

Road Safety

When I had a car I preferred to drive 400 or so miles from Islamabad to my village. This journey used to take around 10-12 hours. We traveled during the day for reasons of safety and better visibility on roads, roads that were not in the best of conditions and had two way traffic on them, including carts and bikes. Now that I didn't have a car, there were two options: (1) take a bus from Rawalpindi to DG Khan and get a lift to the village, 10 miles towards the Indus, (2) take a Daewoo coach from Rawalpindi to Multan, then another bus or a mini to DG Khan (60 miles) and finally a lift from DG Khan to the village. Daewoo buses are believed to be better because they have a ‘hostess’ onboard who offers you a drink and some snacks. The driver wears a uniform and a cap like an aeroplane captain  and there is an armed security guard onboard. This service was started by a South Korean multinational which also built Pakistan’s first motorway M2 (from Lahore to Islamabad). With Daewoo's
Read more