🌊 Roca Reports from a Troubled Country

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By Max Frost

On the outskirts of Islamabad, Pakistan, the sun beats down. Thick black smoke pours out of a massive, round chimney. There’s no tree in sight – no place to escape the heat, which is still 100ºF in the early evening. Everything is hot, even the ground, because beneath our feet is the massive oven that’s baking the bricks.

A thousand bricks sell for $3 – a daily wage. But no one can make 1,000 bricks alone. It’s dishonorable for women to work, so a man must use his kids. Every day, the men of this slum wake up at sunrise and take their kids to make bricks. They work until sundown, aiming to make $3 a day. 

But there’s a catch: These families have taken out loans from the owner of the brick factory. To pay back the loans, the owner takes a cut of their daily wage. So every day, the family gives over, say, $1 of the $3. Some of these families owe thousands of dollars, meaning they are trapped in perhaps generations of indentured servitude.

100 miles away, Afghan refugee children rock back and forth in a madrassa, reciting verses from the Quran. The teacher says that these children are receiving a good Islamic education. When we ask them what they want to be when they grow up, they all share the same answer: An Islamic scholar. Why? To spread Islam in order to achieve a better place in the afterlife. 

It was in a nearby madrassa – Islamic school – where the Taliban formed among Afghan refugees. 30 years later, thousands of refugees remain, attending the same types of schools. The students, their teachers, and parents say they are learning valuable morals. Many abroad say they are learning the roots of extremism. What’s the truth?

20 miles from the Afghan border, a man saws a metal tube. Nearby, another carves a piece of wood. These men are making an AK-47, one of the many weapons available at this underground gun factory in the tribal belt on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. 

This region is infamous: It’s likely where Osama Bin Laden hid in the years after 9/11, where the Taliban regrouped after the US invasion, and from where countless attacks on American, allied, and Pakistani troops were plotted. Today, Pakistani soldiers patrol the streets, checking suspicious cars for weapons and bombs. Yet just under their nose are dozens of factories, churning out weapons day and night.

Each of these stories will be one episode in our upcoming saga from Pakistan, from which Roca videographer Drew and I (Roca co-founder Max Frost) returned on Friday. Our journey took us to each place above, in addition to dozens of others, ranging from slums to a yacht club and the compound where Bin Laden was killed. 

We’ll be releasing the episodes as mini-documentaries on our RocaNews YouTube channel. It’s some of the most intense reporting we’ve ever done, and we are sure you’ll love it. To ensure you don’t miss an episode, subscribe (free) at that link. We’ll be writing up stories here as well, but the videos in particular will mark a major step forward for Roca.

Editor’s Note

We’ll be back tomorrow with our regular programming. If you celebrate, we hope you had a happy Easter. If there are any topics you want us to cover this week, please reply to this email to let us know. 

In the meantime, in case you’ve missed any of our last stories, here are the past five:

• The terror attack that remade the Middle East

• Inside the Raw Milk Renaissance

• Does America Need a Caesar?

• US Army recruitment is booming

• A look into the widening Gen Z gender partisan gap

That’s all, see you tomorrow.

–Max and Max