PESHAWAR: The language that the physically-challenged children speak in a sprawling building of ‘Angels Home’ here makes little sense to the hale and hearty visiting this place.
No cheers here, no cries of children in a park, reverberating through the air as they clamour for a ride on the slide, the seesaw or a swing.
The Angels Home, which houses 125 mostly bedridden children, is on the verge of closure due to funds’ shortage.
“The helpless people you see here are abandoned by parents and relatives who think they are a burden and have no place in their lives,” says a caretaker working in the home. Listen closely and one can detect the lament in the sobs of the children abandoned and forgotten for so long.
It’s the first thing one hears, this collective senseless babble, upon entering the Angels Home in Chamkani, a Peshawar suburb. The ‘angels’ here are no celestial beings but abandoned children, men and women with multiple physical and mental disabilities.
Angles Home housing special children on verge of closure due to funds’ shortage, says its administrator
“The helpless people you see here are abandoned by parents and relatives who think they are a burden and have no place in their lives,” says a caretaker working in the home.
“The organisation running the home has named these special kids and persons with multiple disabilities as ‘angels’ for that’s what they are, harmless and in constant need of our help,” she said.
“Some in a dire state due to their physical challenges have been sheltered here since 2022, with assistance from philanthropists and donors,” says Syed Hamid Ali, manager administration of the Angels Home Welfare Organisation.
“With the closure of the home, these special persons will again be on the roads from where they were picked a couple of years back,” Mr Ali said, adding no one will take care of them as they have no one in this world.
He said there was no government or private organisation in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to take care of the special persons with multiple physical and mental disabilities.
It is worth mentioning here that Maria Anna Bugeja, affectionately known as Baji Maryam, a lay missionary from Malta, had founded the Angels Home on July 9, 2022, which consists of around 50 rooms, four big wards, and sprawling lawns. The building is the property of Church of Pakistan. With nearly 50 years of humanitarian work in Pakistan, her unwavering compassion has impacted thousands of lives.
Mr Ali said taking care of the persons with disabilities was as very expensive job. He said the monthly cost of the organisation was around Rs2.5 million, which included the salaries of 33 employees, electricity and gas bills, medicines and food.
“Around 70 percent of the special persons use pampers as they cannot use bathroom and pampers are changed thrice a day,” he said, adding the monthly medicine bill of the organisation was Rs300,000.
“In the morning, first we bathe all the persons as they make their uniform unclean despite wearing pampers,” one of the female caretakers told this scribe while sharing her experiences.
“Then we arrange breakfast for them and then let them have free time in the sprawling lawns,” she said.
“No one knows their names, and we give them a name and register them with the same,” she said.
Some of the special persons used to be in chains at their homes,” she said.
The caretaker said even the police and other government departments admitted special persons to the house, but the government never bothered to think about funding the organisation for fulfilling its requirements.
Pointing to a 27-year-old woman roaming in the lawns and speaking with herself, the caretaker said she was brought by someone who said that she used to sleep outside his shop.
By the end of 2024, the Angels’ Home was about to stop its operations as it had no funds to pay the employees and arrange food and other needs of the special persons. However, they took a sigh of relief when secretary social welfare department Syed Nazar Hussain Shah arranged funds from government and philanthropists helping them to spend 2025 with ease.
Morris Khurshid, founder and chief executive officer of Angels’ Home Welfare Organisation, told Dawn that they would not be able to continue their services if funds were not provided by the government and philanthropists immediately.
“If the angles home is closed then the special persons will be returned to the roads and streets from where they were picked,” Mr Khurshid, who himself was brought up in such an institution by Maria Anna Bugeja, said.
He said the Sindh and Punjab governments were patronising the organisations sheltering the special persons, but in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa these ‘angels’ were ignored.
Meanwhile, sources said recently, the social welfare department moved a summary to the finance department seeking Rs100 million grant for the Angels Home, but the request was turned down.
Published in Dawn, March 2nd, 2026.
