‘Humans of New York’ fans donate $2m to help end slave labour in Pakistan

Brandon Stanton, the photojournalist behind “Humans of New York”, a photo blog which is widely popular across social media, travelled to Pakistan this summer to document incredible stories of people and their everyday lives, and the responses from the followers to those stories have been massive.

Stanton published a series of photographs from his travels in the South Asian nation this month featuring Syeda Ghulam Fatima, an activist in Lahore who is working alongside her husband to the cause of ending bonded labour, a practice identified as one of the most common forms of modern-day slavery by the United Nations, reports Huffington Post.

Fatima is working with the Bonded Labor Liberation Front, an NGO attempting to connect the bonded workers who are exploited in the brick kilns in Pakistan with legal assistance, education and rehabilitation. She was featured in a mini-documentary by VICE earlier this year. 

According to Stanton, at least a million people across Pakistan face a lifetime of growing debt and hard labour in the brick kilns. The kilns owners are wealthy and influential and are protected by the authorities, and Fatima has been threatened, beaten, electrocuted and shot because of her work against them.

Fans of “Humans of New York” across the world have come up to help her quest against bonded labour, donating over $2 million to an “Indiegogo” campaign launched by Stanton to support Fatima’s work. They have also come to the assistance of an ill mother in Lahore who was struggling to find housing and medical treatment, and had since been relocated, with a local resident helping her to receive the assistance she needs.

These photos focus on Pakistan’s struggles with violence and show a side of the nation that does not often receive international media coverage.

The other photos show a medical student discussing his studies, a young boy chatting about swimming in Hunza Valley, 20-somethings being "set up" to date by their friends and a pair of youngsters modelling beautiful, colourful fashions at a public square in Lahore, depicting the parts of Pakistani life that hardly ever made the headlines.

One fan from Pakistan, Hasan Saeed, posted his own thank-you message on the Facebook page of “Humans of New York” being delighted by Stanton’s visit, which has gone viral across the social media platforms.

Saeed’s message echoed the voices of a lot of people across Pakistan, an enormous and populous country with diverse citizens and lifestyles, and that is why it attracted so much attention, currently having more than 8000 likes to it. Stanton’s visit to Pakistan and the photo stories he published in the popular photo blog is showing the nation in a different light.