That morning, one of my aunts who had been married off in a distant village arrived with a long burqa covering her whole body, two small children in tow. Women encircled her, hugging her and kissing the children’s cheeks.
That was when I saw her face. Brown and purple patches covered her skin, and there were scratches on her swollen cheeks. “My husband beat me with a broom,” she explained, sadness pouring through her eyes. Many women tsk-tsked in disapproval. They asked her to take off her burqa and offered her water. There were so many sounds: the women talking and tending to my aunt; children crying and laughing; distant men speaking and laughing loudly. But I felt as if everything stopped when her mother said, “My daughter, if you feed him and take care of him, he would never do such a thing.” Women sitting and nursing their infants nodded in agreement, as if passing along a piece of wisdom that everyone except my aunt with her battered and bruised face knew.
I was confused. Who is at fault here? I wondered. The woman for not feeding and caring for her husband, or the man himself, who should learn to respect the woman who gives birth to and feeds and nurtures his children in his home? Many other times I’d heard women talking to one another after meeting with abuse or mistreatment from men: “Adi [Sister], it’s our fate.” “Ama [Mother], it’s our fate.” “Women are made to go through such trials. Have patience [sabr]. Remember, Allah loves patient people.”
Back when I was a girl in Hyderabad, I used to go with Ammi to the neighbors’ houses, where she would sit and chat with the women for hours while doing embroidery. These were the happiest, perkiest women I had ever met, able to make a joke out of anything. They loved to talk and laugh.
But usually at some point one of the women would mention a sad incident in her life and begin to cry. Soon the whole room would be weeping silently. The women would sit close together, holding one another and sobbing into their scarves. The mood, once joyful, happy, and full of song, would suddenly change to one of mourning, all because of one woman bringing up a difficult story.
It didn’t make sense to me. One day as Ammi washed clothes in our yard, beating the wet ones with a stick, I asked her, “Why do the women cry together? Why so quickly and so easily?”
“Khalida, my dear,” Ammi began, holding the clothes, “these women have seen pain in their lives. From birth to death, they face discrimination, at times violence, and injustice, but they never have a chance to speak. Many memories burn their hearts with pain. They have all seen so much sadness but have still tried to live happily, to serve happily as wives, sisters, and mothers.” Feeling helpless and locked in a system of injustice, they take every opportunity to soothe their hearts. When one shares her pain, they all shed tears because that pain deeply resonates with all of them. They console one another through their tears and at the end remind one another to be patient. Then they go back to their embroidery and their daily lives.
By sharing that pain, the women find strength in one another and become more united. But their shared belief in their own helplessness does not allow any of them to rise above that system. And that is what has to be changed.
Sabr. Patience. Women used the word generously with one another. Sabr is a jewel for a woman. A woman who doesn’t speak about her own mistreatment meets with good fortune in the end.
I realized that our fight for women’s rights was failing because we had targeted the wrong people, in the wrong way. Too many women in Pakistan were programmed to believe that they should accept everything that happened to them as their fate. They had been taught and encouraged to practice sabr in the face of all misfortune and abuse, no matter how intense or horrible. They accepted violent, unethical behavior in men because they believed they should. Women encouraged one another to keep silent when they were mistreated, to keep waiting, to be patient, in the belief that one day things would be fine.
In fighting for women’s rights, we had forgotten to involve the women most impacted in the change-making process. Our method of activism, to insult the cultural values of our tribes, had been wrong. So they got angry at us, defending their identities and the only world they had ever known. I felt embarrassed and ashamed at my behavior. We had to learn to talk to the tribal elders in their own language. More than anything, we had to involve the women in our cause, not just work on behalf of them. I began to brainstorm about this new approach.
One thing I knew: globalization was becoming a hot topic of discussion among the tribal cultures, even if they did not understand it as such. They could see that tribes were losing their unique identities and that everyone was beginning to look the same. Once I asked my father what globalization was. He looked at me thoughtfully and said, “It means we will all wear jeans and eat hamburgers.”
At the time I didn’t connect it to my work with women’s rights, but now a bright beam lightened my heart, and I knew I had found a better way to tackle the issue of honor killings in Pakistan: by promoting traditions in the tribal areas. By strengthening old tribal bonds and rituals that made people feel seen and safe, we could, paradoxically, work against the ones that did the opposite. We could change the definitions of honor and dishonor: dishonor should refer to a tribal community’s loss of cultural identity, when it was no longer identified as separate and sacred.
I wrote a proposal to the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development to fund a new project. We would promote local language, music, and embroidery in every village where we worked. We would compile a tribal language book. We would collect tribal songs that were becoming endangered and make a CD of them.
And we would create a skills center where women could come to do embroidery every day. While they worked, we would teach them about their rights and also about ways to sell their products to earn an income. And in the process, they could learn how to work in peer groups and how to speak up and become leaders in their homes and communities.
The proposal was accepted: we were approved to create the new project in ten villages in Balochistan using $25,000. Aba was still not happy with me, but I was thrilled to get a second chance to do something that mattered so much to me.
But when the time came for me to travel to Balochistan to start the project, Aba wouldn’t let me leave Karachi. The threats against my life were still very real and ongoing. Until the danger was resolved, he would not let me even visit my relatives in the village, let alone do work there. Seeing my disappointment, he compromised by helping me build a team in Balochistan that I could manage remotely. Although it was difficult, I trained the team from afar. Our plan was to return to the villages, sit with the tribal leaders, and ask them for forgiveness for earlier actions or initiatives that had offended them. We secretly called it our Apology Project.
When my team in Balochistan told me that our first Women’s Literacy and Skills Development Center had started, I danced and laughed in our little room in Karachi. Times were finally changing. Women would now gather in safe places and speak what was in their hearts instead of telling one another to be patient in the face of violence and injustice. Voicing their fears would make them strong. I finally had a great strategy.
OUR CENTERS IN BALOCHISTAN MULTIPLIED in such numbers that I needed to know how to manage them strategically and effectively. At one point YouthActionNet of the International Youth Foundation—the organization that had brought me to the United States—encouraged me to apply to the Unreasonable Institute. This organization offered a ten-week crash course in incubating new ideas from around the world, obtaining financial support, and learning business planning and management. It could teach me how to grow the centers, to increase their scale and replicate them.
The only requirement for admission was that the participants and their ideas had to be “unreasonable.” Finally, I thought, a program for me! The word unreasonable had been used to describe me so many times that it had started to feel like a negative brand. But at the Unreasonable Institute, it would be celebrat
ed!
I applied, and within a week they told me I was shortlisted. The day I heard I was selected, I was shocked and excited, because I knew this experience would change my life. Finally I would learn what I desired the most—how to create a powerful movement for women in Pakistan.
The crash course would take place in Boulder, Colorado, where I and twenty other entrepreneurs from around the world would spend ten weeks learning how to run a nonprofit organization. Ammi and Aba were nervous, but it was a one-time chance for me, and I knew I had to go. I assured Aba that I would come back an expert in strategic action on sensitive issues, that I would learn to manage teams and make better decisions and avoid the mistakes of the WAKE UP campaign. This assurance helped my parents see it through my eyes. So in June 2010, I flew to Denver, where I was picked up and driven an hour northwest to Boulder.
My eyes stayed glued to the window of the car as I saw open green fields, small hills, yellow flowers, and a crisp bright sky bejeweled with clouds. In Balochistan the mountains have no green on them. Their barren rocks hold their own beauty, but this green was mesmerizing. We arrived at the Unreasonable house, which was surrounded by tall trees that whistled with the wind and had a garden in the front.
I was to share a room with two young women, one American and one Indian. Right away I decorated it with hand-embroidered sheets and pillows, colorful, flowering rilis from my tribe. I switched out all the plain pillowcases with Pakistani patterned ones that I pulled from my big suitcases. I had even brought colorful teapots and more pillow covers as gifts.
Once the course started, I felt like a misfit. None of the other Unreasonables had decorated their rooms, but they knew so much more about business than I did. They were all such great English speakers, I couldn’t keep up. Their words befuddled me—they referred to money as “capital” and used other managerial terms I didn’t know. I felt lost and ashamed of calling myself an activist or entrepreneur. I was not business minded. I had no written plan, no portfolio filled with papers, no business model, no ideas for generating revenue. I had only myself and my raging fire of a heart. I was embarrassed. My decorated room seemed silly. I wanted to go home.
There were coffee-making machines and trampolines. My fellow entrepreneurs introduced me to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, watching wide-eyed as I ate my first ever bite of this traditional American food….And then there was sarcasm. Sarcasm isn’t a thing where I’m from. I believe almost anything I’m told.
At mealtimes, while the other entrepreneurs sat sketching important-looking diagrams and graphs, I sat alone at a table, miserable. Then Daniel Epstein, one of the institute’s cofounders, came over to me. With a huge smile, he whispered, “Khalida. Tea? You and me, later today?” I felt so shy, I could only squeak a small yes.
Later, while Daniel and I sat drinking tea, he asked how I liked the classes. I blurted out everything to him. By opening up about my insecurities, I started down a whole new path with Daniel and the other Unreasonable founders. They took time to help me separately with my idea. They went out of their way to make sure I progressed along with the other entrepreneurs and did not feel left behind or inadequate. Soon I was fitting in in my own way. I began to make friends and embrace new experiences. I drank coffee without making a sour face (but with lots of cream and sugar). I ate biscuits with ice cream in the middle. I learned the electric slide. I learned not to use toilet paper for drying my hands. Most important, I learned about scale, about taking your ideas from one place to another by making them sustainable, and about mobilizing forces toward your vision.
At the Unreasonable Institute, I thought about how I had made Aba suffer through my unrealistic goals, by pushing my agenda so quickly. I felt like we had become strangers. I missed being his Khali. So that night I wrote him a long email, thanking him for everything he had done for me. I told him that I was working on media strategies, weighing risks and assumptions of security, all while learning how to play volleyball and ultimate Ping-Pong, go hiking, and throw a Frisbee. I told him that when I returned home, I would do everything in my power to create the best programs for women. And I would.
I RETURNED HOME DEEPLY INSPIRED AND ready to take on the world. But I found that while I was gone, huge monsoon rains had flooded most of Sindh Province, including Karachi, putting it under water. It affected about twenty million people, forcing thousands to migrate, while others lived in desperate conditions. I was shocked because while I was in America, I had heard no news about the floods at all. All I had seen on television were reports of local bombings and shootings.
This was more disastrous news: one of my cousins, Khadija’s sister Sajda, had left home with a boy she had fallen in love with and was in hiding, fearing for her life. Khadija’s murder, as happens with many honor killings, had cast doubt on the integrity of the family’s remaining unwed girls. To hedge the family’s honor, Uncle Liaqat had betrothed Sajda to a man in a distant village. So when Liaqat found out about her escape, he sent people to kill her wherever and whenever they found her.
Back in Boulder, I had wondered why my father never responded to my heartfelt email. Now I knew. He had been in Kotri trying to talk sense into his brother.
Ammi was the one to break the news about Sajda to me. She watched me carefully as she told me how my younger cousin, whom I had patted on the head as we played years ago, was now hiding from her own uncle, God knew where.
“They can’t kill her!” I shouted as soon as she finished. “Allah! Ammi, they can’t kill her!” My lips were dry, and my heart was barely beating. I felt selfish for feeling hurt that Aba had not responded to my heartfelt note. In fact he had been chasing his brother around, trying to convince him to spare the life of his niece. Ammi tried to console me, while in the background the television broadcast news of the floods wreaking havoc and devastation all over the province.
Families were living on roadsides, and children were dirty and thirsty and suffering. I put my own projects aside and joined Aba and his team in the rescue and relief activities. For five months, we lived in a rented house in Shikarpur, hiring sixty people to assist with relief and rescue. To seek help from the world, I started blogging, a skill I had strengthened at the Unreasonable Institute; now I used it to write stories about people who needed help. Soon people emailed me asking how they could contribute. The power and speed of the Internet amazed me! In five months, working seventeen-hour days and rarely getting more than four hours of sleep a night, we were able to help some thirty thousand people. Although I felt extremely useful to my people during that time in Shikarpur, Sajda and my other women were never far from my thoughts. I felt acutely that my other plans were going unfulfilled.
Right before the New Year, we came back to Karachi. I ached to find Sajda, to know how she was doing—and even if she was still alive. The men my uncle sent had not been able to find her, but that barely made me feel better. Her situation was unbelievable. Everyone in our tribe thought she was a criminal, even though she’d been promised to a man much older than her, to live in a village where she would have had barely enough to eat, let alone that she was in love with someone else. My father had tried to help but failed, so my chances of finding her were slim.
My heart burned with a sense of helplessness—a foreign feeling that I refused to tolerate. The devastation and poverty that I had just witnessed from the floods made me even more anxious to right such injustices. One positive thing had come out of the flood experience: more villages had become willing to let us in and to work with our projects. I was determined to make income-generating ideas a big part of the projects so that rural communities would be better able to sustain themselves. Once these opportunities were in place, the men would allow us to work more with their women, which meant that we would be able to help prevent more situations like Sajda’s.
On New Year’s Day 2011, I arrived home from a powerful meeting with my team reflecting on the past year and pl
anning our year ahead. Everything was normal: Ammi had guests in our otaq (the room where we entertained guests), while children were reading, coloring, and watching TV in the living room. I felt a strange sensation on my pinky finger. It burned as if it were on fire. The pain radiated to my palm, then to my elbow, and soon my whole arm felt consumed in flames. Sounds became distorted, much louder, and smells were sharper. I rushed to where Ammi was sitting with guests and said, “Ammi, Ammi, I’m—”
The burning sensation reached the back of my head where it stabbed me with a final blow. I lost consciousness and seized.
When I came to, the whole family was huddled over me. Fatima cradled my head in her arm, trying to feed me orange juice through a straw. The guests had tears in their eyes, chanting verses from the Holy Quran and blowing on me so their prayers could enter my heart. Ammi was wailing with more tears than I had ever seen. Ali, also teary-eyed, was calling, “Khalo, Khalo!” (his loving nickname for me). And my younger siblings were in shock, their faces pale and frozen.
I thought I was dying. I started crying too and tried to raise my head, but—nothing. It did not budge, despite my command. My body felt like it was falling into a well, just falling and falling. I must have passed out, because when I woke again, I was in a hospital bed, in a gown with wires running down my chest. The doctors spoke hurriedly. Ammi, still weeping, stood next to me, as everyone else peeked in from the door. My family thought I had had a heart attack, so they had brought me to a cardiologist at a small local hospital. He had done an EKG, which turned out to be normal. But the blood tests revealed that I was dangerously anemic, with a hemoglobin level of 5.3. (Between 10 and 12 was normal for our women.) I needed an immediate blood transfusion, but the hospital did not have the resources to do it. I would have to be taken to a larger hospital, and my family would have to find volunteers to give blood.
I Should Have Honor Page 9
