We received and posted Hamida’s case on social media 10th of February 2025
Hamida was abducted and sold sixty years ago. Here is what she remembers.
I am originally from Mardan, a city in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. My father’s name was Noor Khan and mother’s name was Naz Bibi. My full brother’s name is Yar Muhammad, and my elder brother from my stepmother’s side is named Hussain Bakhsh. My sisters’ names are Mujanna and Sangha.
My father and brothers used to work at a brick kiln near a bridge that stood not far from Baghdadi Bazaar in Mardan.
My parents had passed away.
A few years ago, I went to Mardan with my sons and was able to recognize the area, but my brothers had already moved away. Some elderly people present at the time confirmed my recollections, saying such a family did live there fifty years ago, but they didn’t know where they had gone afterward.
My sister used to live in Dargai, in the Malakand region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.That sister’s name was Sangha, and her husband’s name was Nazeer, who used to make traditional rope beds (charpais). The sister had four daughters and one son. I can’t recall the nieces’ names, but the nephew — Sangha and Nazeer’s son — was named Sher Afzal.
When I was a child, I once visited my sister’s home in Dargai. There, a man named Gulzar and his wife Shareena, who lived near my sister’s house, abducted me and sold me off. After being sold from hand to hand, I ended up in Shikarpur, a city in Sindh. The man who finally bought me married me, and for the past fifty years, I have been living in Shikarpur, separated from my family. Please help me find my family.
Link to our first social media post
Now, we needed to find her sister Sangha, her brother-in-law Nazeer who made charpais, and their son Sher Afzal, in Dargai or anywhere in Malakand or Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
We appealed to our friends across the province to spread our post far and wide.
Hamida now lives in Shikarpur. She has children and other relatives from her husband’s side. She is financially well off. She only wants to meet her brothers and sisters.
Within 48 hours of our going live on social media, Hamida’s family was found after 55 years. The story of how we found them is also a fairy tale. This is how we broke the news to her family and showed her the pictures. She has forgotten to speak Pashto, her mother tongue and can only speak Sindhi now.
And then we took her to meet her family in Mardan, about 1100 kilometres away. Watch below what happened.