But Sabir knew the truth. It was just… hard life, long struggle, and no shortcut. And getting there… was not simple. For someone like Sabir… it felt almost impossible. No family support. No savings waiting. No backup plan. He built his own way. CIMA was not one exam. It had many levels of certification.
2007.
Sabir has his CIMA degree now. The certificate was framed, hanging on the wall and looking pretty.
But something was eating him from the inside.
Every evening, he rode his bike through the township. Through the areas where the roads ended, and the mud began. Where the houses turned into tents. Where the smell hit you before the sight did.
Slums.
He had grown up near them. Lived close enough to smell them. Far enough to pretend they didn't exist.
But now he couldn't pretend anymore.
**The Night Waiting**
He saw it first on a Tuesday evening. Or maybe Wednesday. He didn't remember the day. He remembered the face. One day, his mother highlighted the issue in the community: every woman has to stand outside her tent, shifting her weight from her left foot to her right, clenching her legs together, with painful clarity. She needs to relieve herself. But there were no toilets. Not a single one in the entire settlement of maybe two hundred people. So she waits.
She waits for the sun to die. She waits for the darkness to spread like a blanket over the slum. She waits for the men to go inside their tents. She waits for the world to stop looking. Then she could squat in some corner, in the open, and like an animal. Because that's what the system has reduced her to.
Sabir sat; his throat felt tight, his fists were clenched so hard his nails dug into his palms. This is not a sanitation problem, he thought. This is a dignity problem.
Every single day. Thousands of women across Pakistan's slums lived this nightmare. Holding it in for twelve hours. Fourteen hours. Developing infections. UTIs. Kidney problems. Silent suffering that nobody talked about because nobody cared.
And the men? They just peed near their tents. Openly. Shamelessly. The wall of the nearest structure became their urinal.
The children? Same. They didn't know better. Nobody taught them better.
**The Poisoned Water**
It rained in August like it always does in Lahore, heavy, relentless, and the slum flooded. Slums always flood, with no drainage, no planning, and no government attention.
The open sewage mixed with the rainwater. The rainwater mixed with the drinking water sources.
Children started getting sick within days. Kids dying from dirty water. The irony was not funny. It was sickening.
Sabir visited a slum after a particularly bad outbreak. He came home that night and couldn't sleep. Stared at the ceiling again. But this time it wasn't exam math keeping him awake. It was guilt.
**The Name**
He decided to do something, stupid maybe and impossible probably, but he couldn't just sit anymore.
He started small, talking to slum dwellers, understanding their problems not from a textbook, not from an NGO report, but from actual conversations with actual people.
They told him things no report would capture.
"We don't have a place to shit," one man said bluntly. "What will you do about that?" Fair question, direct and raw.
Sabir didn't flinch. "I'll build toilets."
The man laughed, not mocking, just hopeless. "Nobody builds toilets here, sahab. Politicians come before elections. They take photos and leave. You are young, and you will also leave."
Sabir didn't leave. He thought about it for weeks research, planned, failed, planned again, and then he gave it a name.
**Slumabad.**
Not a charity, not an NGO in the traditional sense. A movement and an idea. That slums are not temporary problems to be ignored. They are permanent realities that need permanent solutions.
Slumabad. The city within the city that nobody acknowledges.
He registered it and told a few friends, and most thought he was crazy.
**The Mobile Toilet**
Fixed toilets in slums don't work. Sabir learned this quickly.
Why? Because slums are not permanent. The government demolishes them. The landowner kicks people out, rains wash them away, and families relocate.
You build a concrete toilet. Three months later, there is no slum there anymore. Just rubble and a useless toilet standing alone like a monument to bad planning. So Sabir thought differently.
Mobile toilets.
Portable toilets that can move with the community when it is forced to relocate. Simple concept but difficult execution.
He started with basic designs, cheap materials, easy to assemble, easy to disassemble, and easy to transport on a pickup truck if needed. Not enough but it was a start.
Every toilet had a collection system. Human waste didn't just go into the ground. It was contained. Stored. Processed. Because Sabir had a bigger idea, a crazier idea.
**Waste to Wealth**
Human waste is everybody's problem. But Sabir looked at it differently. His CIMA brain kicked in cost, revenue input and output.
What if waste isn't waste? What if it's a resource?
He researched biogas systems simple technology not new not revolutionary but never applied in Pakistan's slums because nobody bothered.
Human waste goes into a digester bacteria break it down produces methane gas. The gas can be used for cooking for heating for generating electricity.
The leftover material? Fertiliser rich and organic better than the chemical garbage sold in fancy bags at agricultural stores.
The math was beautiful. Not complicated. Just beautiful. But execution? Ugly. Difficult. Frustrating.
Nobody wanted to fund it. "Sanitation in slums" is not a sexy pitch. Investors want apps. Startups. AI. Blockchain. Nobody wants to talk about shit.
Literally.
**The Children**
But toilets weren't enough. Sabir knew this. Sanitation saves lives. But education changes them.
He went back to the slums started identifying children. Kids between five and twelve wandering around and playing in sewage water picking through garbage no school no future just existence.
He started talking to parents, convincing them.
"Send your child to school."
"We can't afford the fees, sahab."
"I'll pay."
"We need them to work. They earn two hundred rupees a day picking garbage."
Two hundred rupees. The price of a child's future.
Sabir swallowed his anger, smiled, and came back the next day. It took a week to convince a family to let their kid be admitted to a school.
He enrolled the first child. Then another. Then five. Then fifteen.
Fifteen children who would have spent their lives in garbage. Now sitting in classrooms, wearing uniforms and holding pencils for the first time.
A small number but massive impact.
**The Man Who Came Back**
People ask Sabir why he does this. He has a CIMA degree. He could work in a multinational and earn millions. He could live in DHA, drive a Corolla, and escape the smell of the slums forever.
He could, but he didn't.
Because every time he rides through those slums and sees a mobile toilet standing there, functional and being used.
Every time a child runs up to him in a clean uniform and says, "Sabir bhai, I got an A in math," he remembers his own days. Teaching tuition to pay for CIMA, the hunger, and the exhaustion.
He didn't escape the slums. He went back to them.
Not as a saviour. He hates that word. Not as a hero. That word makes him uncomfortable.
He went back as someone who knows, someone poor and someone who understands that the gap between a Township government school and a CIMA degree is not just about hard work.
It's about dignity, access and opportunity.
Slumabad is not perfect. Sabir knows this. He is not perfect. He knows this too.
But the toilets still stand.
The children still go to school.
But some.
And something is better than nothing when you start from nothing.
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