I had to strategize.
From 1998 until 2002 and again in 2005, Balochistan had faced devastating droughts. Eighty percent of livestock had died, and hundreds of people perished due to malnutrition and disease. Male family members were not able to find work in the fields, and some families were so desperate for income that they went against their strict rules and allowed their daughters to look for jobs.
“Bhalla Ama,” I said, “if you take me to the houses of these girls, I will Insha Allah [God willing] help them find good jobs by training them.” I didn’t know how exactly I was going to execute this, but I knew it was the best way forward.
* * *
—
AND SO, WEARING OUR long colorful veils, Bhalla Ama and I went into the small streets behind our haveli where some of my childhood friends still lived. Every time we knocked on a door, I held my breath, hoping the girl I had once bested in races down the street would still be there and not married off. And once we were talking, my other fear was that an uncle or father would walk in on us.
Traditional visits to other people’s houses in Balochistan are very formal. As you go into a house, you are greeted silently, not with shouts or with waves but with deep hugs. Then the hosts take your right hand and kiss it. Our relatives in the mountains do this whether the guest is a girl or a boy and will often put the guest’s hand on their eyes before kissing it. This is a form of giving respect to the guest and a rehmat (blessing) from God. The family then leads you to a special room reserved for guests called an otaq. Draped in beautiful hand-embroidered fabrics and tasseled tapestries, otaqs are filled with colorful round pillows and wool rugs. You sit on the far side of the room by the wall while they sit opposite you by the door, mostly because as a guest, you are like royalty and the hosts are your servants. Then the formal greetings begin. How are you? How is your husband? How is your family? How is their health? How are your kids? How is their health?
The questions slowly move from one person to another according to the order in which the conversation began. After the greeting, chai is served. You cannot rush the process, as its love and grace restore your spirits and make you feel welcome. Once the chai arrives, you approach the topic you came to discuss. During this time, I feared that the male family members would look at me suspiciously or even interrogate me. As it turned out, in only one place did the girl in the house refuse to come sit next to us. We were told that her father didn’t approve of NGOs (nongovernmental organizations). The acronym was pronounced in a way that made it sound like a filthy thing.
I kept my message simple, so that girls could easily talk about it and solicit support from their families: “I am here to talk about the current inflation of prices in town,” I would say, then discuss the price of flour and other staples. With the level of poverty rising, the number of jobs falling, and opportunities for work almost vanishing, inflation was the most talked-about topic among locals. I hinted that at such a time, the employment of women could benefit the whole family. I invited them to attend a group meeting. “I want us to sit together and form a union of women who can work together to bring job opportunities to one another,” I told them, and asked them to bring other girls with them to the group meeting.
I recruited my maternal uncle Manzoor as an ally. He had once lived with us and gone to school with us in Hyderabad. My other uncles didn’t love what I was doing, but they didn’t try to stop me. They saw that my father, a man whose organization provided economic aid to their communities, supported me. Manzoor, with his good education and great manners, was able to quickly spread the message I gave the women, except tailored to men. The message was popular.
The day of the first group meeting, I swept the floor of Manzoor’s mud room. I put down traditional rilis, dusted everything, and covered several patis (chests for clothes) with fabrics. The room looked colorful, bright, and full of hope. I dressed myself in the most serious, adult manner I could. I put on makeup, emphasizing my eyes, as I always feared they didn’t show when I wore glasses. The only lipstick I could find was green in the tube but turned pink on my lips. Fortunately the door of the haveli had recently been painted with a fresh coat of cheerful blue, but the rest of the space didn’t look professional at all, with cows and a few goats roaming around. One whole wall was covered with cow dung patties. A stack of wood lined one wall; every evening my grandfather chopped small pieces for the fire. Children’s clothing hung on a line stretching across the haveli. In several places wooden poles stuck out of the ground—they held the mosquito nets every night when the cots were brought out for our beds. The room would have to do.
There was a knock at the door. My heart beat quickly, as it had the day I was told about Khadija’s murder. Someone opened the door, and a girl carefully holding her chador over her face came in, led by a small boy. The presence of a boy, either young or old, is considered safe for women. Boys are taught to be guardians of women and are expected to be man-like from the age of nine, even if all they want to do is to go outside and play. It was sad to me that this girl could not come on her own without a male chaperone, but I was happy she was there anyway. I greeted every girl who came to the door with confidence, as if a huge revolution were beginning right there in our mud haveli in the small village in Khuzdar. It turns out, it was.
Seeing more and more girls come gave me confidence. We put the curtain down over the entrance to the room where we were gathered. My aunts brought water and tea but didn’t sit with us. After the formal greetings, we began. I needed to break the ice because as I had learned from my father, sometimes the things people need to discuss the most are the things they can’t bring themselves to talk about.
I looked around. Girls had taken off their chadors and put on the scarves they usually brought along in small plastic bags to visit someone. They all looked comfortable but shy. Many of these girls hadn’t seen one another since childhood, maybe since arguing in the street or playing with a shared doll. It felt like a moment of freedom to speak and laugh and rejoice, yet the room was silent. Reluctantly, one girl spoke, then another. Soon they were all sharing memories, creating a portal to childhood, while I was focused on the future.
“Masha Allah [praise to God], look at us. Thank you so much for coming, all of you,” I began, mustering all my courage. I had made a list of things I wanted to discuss, starting with the need for women to work and bring income to their families. I told them how important it was for women to help now that the drought was over.
There was silence. Someone smiled a little, but the others stared at their laps—a common gesture among women in Balochistan.
I kept going. “I want to ask you all something. Why do you think we girls haven’t been outside and doing jobs? What is wrong with this idea?”
They shuffled uncomfortably. To a friend who normally loved to talk at any occasion, I said, “Come on, Robeena. I know you want to say something.” A few girls giggled.
Robeena looked up and said seriously, “Yes, I don’t understand that either.” She fell silent.
Then a tiny, thin girl with a loud, bright voice said, “I think it’s because there are so many men outside who are ready to stare you down as soon as you are in the streets. I hear some men even shout vulgar words to women.”
A burst of anger passed through the room. They had all been given similar reasons as to why they were kept home. They were now talking loudly about the injustice of it all.
I asked next if they saw women as problem solvers. Most of them answered that problem solving was the job of the elders. “I think sometimes a woman would like to help the family, but they are not taken as important enough to be heard,” Shahida said.
I knew what she meant. A woman chopping tomatoes in the kitchen and making dinner for eighteen people was not usually invited out to the veranda, where the men sat talking about an issue that affected them all. Very often men decided on a girl’s marriage by
sitting and talking in this way, without involving the women in the other room.
“How can women be powerful?” I asked. “Do you think it will mean talking in louder voices? Having an extra presence in those rooms? Or what?” The room buzzed with excitement, and the girls looked around.
“I think the elder women can be powerful because they can be heard,” Robeena commented.
She was right: in our communities, age brings respect. Age isn’t determined by number of years, because no one really knows when they were born. It is determined instead by the number of children one has married off and how many of those children had children of their own.
A cousin about five years younger than me was always muddy, her hair uncombed. But one summer when she came to visit, all the women got up to greet her formally. She had beautifully oiled braids, miswak teeth (cleaned with a tree bark), and a neat dress. She had been married off at twelve years old, so although I was older, she was treated with more respect. Women who have married off their children and are grandmothers are respected—even by men—for their wisdom.
I had to find a way to get to the most sensitive issue of all, honor killings. I asked these women what they thought about a girl being mercilessly murdered because it had been decided that she had dishonored her family.
A wave of uneasiness went around the room. Just moments before, the girls had been heatedly discussing the topic of respect for women, but there was now silence.
I understood that I had to steer the discussion back to a more manageable task. “What can we collectively do to bring strength to women? How can we help them escape customs that enforce violence upon them?”
The girls had many ideas: respecting and supporting one another in specific daily interactions; carrying ourselves more gracefully; talking to our mothers about respect; talking to our younger daughters about respect. The room was buzzing again with energy.
In the end, we all decided that women create their place in family decision making by earning respect and taking responsibility. We decided that the fight for women’s rights needed to begin with getting girls out of their houses. And so gradually the youth group I had been envisioning became a reality.
On the heels of that meeting, I formed the Youth and Gender Development Program (YGDP), to educate, empower, and strengthen youth against cultural restrictions, enabling them to speak up about customs like honor killing. We would give them skills and purpose and a voice.
Aba allowed me to use his office space at PDI in Balochistan for our first meetings. My family, my friends, and I pooled our money to start skill- and job-training centers. We bought six small hand machines for a sewing center. My uncle Manzoor’s friend, a local tailor, volunteered to train the women and girls. The thread and scissors were donated, and the fabrics they practiced sewing on were old banners used by Aba’s organization. We also started a computer learning center, with three or four computers for both men and women. We offered English-language classes and created a lending library. We used two of Aba’s rooms and split everything into two shifts, morning and afternoon. The men would come in the morning, more than thirty boys and men; girls and women came in the afternoon, eighteen to twenty of them. We had only one volunteer tutor for each group, but all the participants were hungry to learn, so they taught one another, helping one another along.
Before long, scores of youth were flocking to the door of our office. Girls and boys lined up for enrollment, and there was laughter and celebration everywhere. I would stand in a corner and watch the young beaming faces, my heart full of happiness and pride. The YGDP was self-funded, and I was still learning how to solicit donations. We started small, with just one facility in one town. That made sense to me, since I had grown up learning that you don’t need money to create something with big impact—you just need big vision.
Soon we formed a cricket club, which became a way to bring greater cultural awareness to taboo issues. We brought young men together for the games, then during breaks in the play, we would engage them in group discussions about gender rights and the different opportunities that men and women had in tribal societies. Although many of the men were skeptical at first, the cricket matches became a subtly subversive way to encourage men to speak out against honor killings, exchange marriages, and child marriages. When the match got to a point where no one could leave because they were so interested in which team would win, one of our group members would broadcast a message: “Now let’s talk about women’s rights in Islam.” This shocked many men, but nobody left. The messages from the match would spread to the market, over chai, over meals, and slowly once-taboo topics were more commonly discussed. Gradually, more men started seeing their wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters not as secret objects to be hidden away but as valuable human beings who could make important contributions.
We gave official certificates to graduates of our courses to assist them with getting jobs. The English and computer skills we provided ensured not only that more youth got hired for good jobs but also that more women were selected for those jobs. Usually women came in with skill levels below the men’s. Until now, they’d simply had no resources to bring them up to par.
AS THE WORK AT THE YGDP was ramping up, I heard from Christopher Wardle, one of the people I had emailed after the WE CAN launch conference in Islamabad the year before. He recommended that I apply to a youth partnership program by Oxfam Australia, designed to support youth projects and ideas for global change. I had never been outside Pakistan. All I knew of the Western world were the Disney movies that my siblings and I had seen all our lives (and still eagerly watch). If I were accepted into such a program, I didn’t know how my parents would take the news.
I applied anyway. While filling out the application, I felt ashamed to be writing to people in Australia about such a devastating problem as honor killings in Pakistan. It made my country look ignorant and backward, I thought, when in reality the country had so much rich culture, intelligence, beauty, and humanity to celebrate.
Sometime later I got a letter saying I was selected as an “action partner” for the program. I read and reread it, unable to believe it: I would travel to Sydney to learn how to financially support my projects and grow them into something huge.
Life was coming to a beautiful place, it seemed. I was finally using my anger for a purpose—to change mind-sets and lives. And at the same time I was trying to concentrate on school.
As I took on the mission of applying for a visa, it dawned on me that I needed a passport. I didn’t know the first thing about applying for one, or where those small photos came from, but I did understand that governments required them for international travel. But before I could get a passport, I needed an ID card. And before I could get an ID card, I needed an even more basic document: something called a birth certificate. What does it mean to “certify” that I was born? Aba made inquiries at a hospital, and soon enough a crisp white sheet of paper arrived stating that I was born in Hyderabad on October 10, 1988 (mistakenly choosing the same birth year as my brother’s, but I finally had a birthday!). It would be a long time before we came to celebrate it, as this was a new concept for our tribe. Even today it remains a novelty.
The instructions on the application forms might as well have been in Portuguese for all the sense they made to me. Thankfully, Aba had been through much of this for his own work. After weeks of preparation, setbacks, misunderstandings, and a healthy dose of jugar (making things work with creative problem solving), we finally made it happen. All in all, the process took several months.
These days when I am at a conference or speaking on stage, I smile in my heart. People listening to me now have no idea what I went through to get here. I had to collect pocket money and ask my family and friends to help pay for the passport. I stood in line after line on hot days, only to be sent back home empty-handed. But how grateful I am that it all actually worked.
W
hen the visa arrived, Ammi went from being worried to full-blown anxious. I was going to a world completely different from ours. I hadn’t even made friends properly at home. All I knew was our little apartment in Karachi and our two family homes in Sindh and Balochistan. This foreign country with its white people and heavy accents was going to eat me up and destroy my values. And what would we say to our relatives? Most girls weren’t allowed even to go next door, let alone to another continent, and a Western continent at that. Aba had mentioned that he would make up something if someone were to ask, like I was in the bathroom. I thought it was hilarious. Later, when I was out of the country, a cousin came to visit. Aba joked to me that he couldn’t tell him I was in the bathroom because he stayed for days.
When I finally left, I sat proud and fidgety in my airplane seat next to two perky European girls. They were starting new lives in Australia, they told me, and had never been there before. I liked that all three of us in that row felt the same curiosity and excitement. The plane descended into Sydney, and one of the girls exclaimed in a thick accent, “Look! It’s the opera house!” Out the window I could see a building with layer upon layer of shimmering metal roof. It looked like a flower bent down with grace. I was amazed. So Oprah lives in this house? It was beautiful! (Not until 2013, when I met Oprah, did I find out she didn’t live there.)
During my two weeks there, Australia became my door to the wider world. I came to feel deeply connected to the activists who were part of the program. I was suddenly not alone in my struggle, and every time I spoke, I felt I had the support of hundreds of people.
I experienced many “firsts” in Sydney. It was the first time I saw people drink alcohol. It was the first time I saw couples holding hands. It was the first time I saw pubs. And it was the first time I saw dog food. (The first night I arrived, I went to buy cookies and bought dog biscuits instead. I would have never known if my friend hadn’t stopped me from eating them!) It was also the first time I saw girls with real freedom. They traveled freely. They were on television. They ran companies and worked side by side with men. They were free to speak their minds and wear whatever they liked.
I Should Have Honor Page 7
