06/01/2021, 15.47
PAKISTAN
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Rehan, a Good Samaritan in Faisalabad

by Shafique Khokhar

With a small organisation, a social worker in Faisalabad’s Warispura district helps people, not by giving them cash, but by buying equipment for them to start a business. In the last six months, more than 10 small enterprises have been created for poor Christian families. Financial support comes from two cousins in America who expect to be repaid only by God.

Faisalabad (AsiaNews) – The Good Samaritan Resource Centre, a small NGO started by Rehan Masih, a social worker in Warispura district, does not give money directly to the poor but helps them start a business in order to earn a living.

Inspired by this philosophy and with limited resources, the Centre heeds to the letter the Parable of the Good Samaritan and the evangelical call to “Take care of him. If you spend more than what I have given you, I shall repay you on my way back” (Luke 10:35).

For Masih, life has taught him that it is much better to teach someone fishing than to give him a fish. Hence, he helps people start up small activities like rickshaw services, small shops, tailoring, beauty salons, etc. He even supplied cows and goats to those who knew how to use them profitably.

Thanks to the Good Samaritan Resource Centre, people have been able to do honourable work and support themselves rather than end up in the streets begging, or strangled by debts,

Masih explains that the Centre does give anyone money. Instead, he buys the equipment needed and hands it over, thus ensuring that the money is not used for other purposes. The people he helps choose what they need for their business and he delivers it.

He has two cousins in America, Nayer and Issac, who are his financial backers. For them, the only reward is the kind of inner satisfaction that only God can repay. In the last six months they have helped launch more than 10 micro enterprises run by poor Christian families while another 50 are waiting.

Rehan’s goal is to give families as much as he received “without any interest” – in fact, he does not keep a single rupee for himself; everything goes into the supporting beneficiaries’ activities.

Now he is planning to help other small business endeavours, in one case providing a barbecue, with about ten families ready to talk to him for possible ventures.

“They helped me at a difficult time to stand on my own two feet,” said Irfan Masih, a disabled man who wanted to be a tailor. “Rehan and his team provided me with the machinery, threads and cloth,” he told AsiaNews.

He now makes school uniforms and garments for men and women earning of at least US$ 20 a day, which allows him to support his family.

Another beneficiary, Niyamat Masih, explains that he used to work as a janitor in several buildings when he heard about Rehan. After a couple of months of working out the details, they got him a rickshaw, thanks to which he now makes a honourable living for his family.

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