After 12 long years of separation, Sajida has finally been reunited with her family. This emotional reunion serves as yet another reminder that hope, patience, and consistent effort can bring families back together even after decades apart. The successful reunification was made possible through the continuous work of Mera Pyara – Virtual Center for Child Safety, an initiative run by the Punjab Safe Cities Authority (PSCA).
Sajida went missing from Faisalabad back in 2014. Because of her mental health condition, she wasn’t able to share her home address, family details, or any information that could help identify her. With no way to trace her relatives at the time, she ended up under the care of Edhi Home North Karachi, where she lived safely for the next twelve years.
As part of its nationwide mission to reconnect missing and unidentified individuals with their families, the Mera Pyara team regularly visits shelter homes across Pakistan. During these visits, they document unidentified cases, conduct interviews, and kick off the family tracing process.
It was during one such visit to Edhi Home North Karachi that the team met Sajida and sat down for a detailed interview. At first, she couldn’t offer much in the way of useful information. But through patient counselling and repeated conversations over time, small details slowly started coming back to her. She recalled that she was from Faisalabad, that her father used to make decorative strings and beads for a living, and that there was a mosque near where she’d grown up.
These clues might have seemed minor on their own, but they gave the team something to work with — and that’s exactly where the real tracing effort began.
The Mera Pyara team started their search in Faisalabad based on what little information she’d shared. After a lot of fieldwork and coordination with local sources, they managed to trace the mosque she’d described to the Samanabad area of Faisalabad. From there, the team reached out to the mosque’s Imam and shared Sajida’s photographs with people in the local community.
Their persistence paid off.
Almost twelve years after she went missing, Sajida’s own brother recognized her and got in touch with the Mera Pyara team. During the verification process, he confirmed that Sajida had disappeared in 2014, shortly after their father’s death — an event that had taken a serious toll on her mental health.
Her original national identity card was still with the family, which turned out to be a key piece of evidence for verification. Once all the legal documentation, identity checks, and family verification steps were completed, Sajida was safely reunited with her loved ones.
The reunion was an emotional one, full of tears, relief, and gratitude. After twelve years of uncertainty, a sister finally came home, bringing comfort and joy back to a family that had never given up hope.
Every successful reunification like this one highlights just how important shelter home visits, careful tracing, public cooperation, and dedicated fieldwork really are. Through this ongoing work, Mera Pyara – Virtual Center for Child Safety continues to reconnect missing individuals with the families who have spent years waiting for them to come home.
Read another emotional reunification story of lost child Tayyab, who reunited with his family after 6 long years of separation through the dedicated efforts of Mera Pyara.