[lit-ideas] Hope and energy

From: JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sun, 12 Feb 2006 04:47:23 EST

<<She walked for hours to get here, not for treatment, but because she had
never seen a doctor before and wanted to know what one looked like," Ms.
Caughey says.>>

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_Among Pakistan quake's fallen structures: barriers for girls - Yahoo! News_
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Among Pakistan quake's fallen structures: barriers for girls

By David Montero, Correspondent of The Christian Science MonitorWed Feb 8,
3:00 AM ET

Attending school for the first time is somewhat magical for Niaz Begum, one
of the survivors of the devastating Oct. 8, 2005, South Asia earthquake. Urdu
class is her favorite, the 12-year-old says with dancing green eyes, using
the ruffle of a tent door to veil her embarrassment.
While her school is simple - a tent and chalkboard - the smile it brings to
the children attending is symbolic of a quiet revolution.
Like Niaz, many girls from this valley near the quake's epicenter used to
spend afternoons working the fields, just as their mothers did before them.
Cycles of poverty combined with strict religious mores have meant a literacy
rate of less than 2 percent for women and girls in this North West Frontier
Province.
But now hundreds of girls are attending school for the first time, learning
math and science, Urdu and English in tents at the Maira Camp, a relief center
where some 20,000 people live. Many parents, when presented with the option,
eagerly agreed to send their daughters.
"Whether they send their girls [to school] is largely an economic reason,"
says Sara Lim, an education adviser for Save the Children USA, which is
teaching nearly 2,000 girls throughout the quake zone. She explains that many
parents were not sending their girls to school before the earthquake because
they
needed them to work. But life in the camps has lifted many of those economic
restraints.
Another reason they were kept out of the classroom before the quake was the
"lack of female teachers," Ms. Lim adds, explaining that parents would not
allow them to be educated by male teachers in classrooms where boys were
present.
The fault line of October's quake encompasses some of the most conservative
areas of largely Sunni Muslim Pakistan, where the rigid observance of purdah,
a segregation of the sexes, has deprived many women of education, healthcare,
and their own means of livelihood. Thousands of women have now been widowed
or maimed by the quake, thousands of girls injured and orphaned, rendering
even more acute their challenge of building a new life.
But there is an emerging silver lining. Many relief agencies have begun
highlighting the "unexpected dividends" afforded to women and young girls in
the
wake of the tragedy. The earthquake, they say, has opened up the nearly
impenetrable systems of gender segregation that poverty and religion have
created.
Across the quake-affected areas, girls like Niaz are seeing their first
schools, while their mothers are learning sewing and math skills. Many women
are
visiting doctors for the first time, learning how to take better care of
themselves and their children. But perhaps most important of all is the growing

sense of self-reliance among the women, many who will have to cope on their
own.
Ruqia, who is 17, lost her ability to walk due to injuries sustained in the
quake. But she has not lost hope. On a recent afternoon in Islamabad, she sat
in her wheelchair with her arms out to the side, leading 45 other paraplegic
women in an exercise routine.
Like Ruqia, who uses only one name, they come from the devastated area of
Kashmir; most are unmarried, some are widowed or engaged. "Before I could not
sit. I learned how to sit in the wheelchair, how to dress myself, how to
exercise," says Ruqia, adding with a smile that her fiancÃ© visits her every
week.
"When they came here they were ... drained of energy. Some of them were
suicidal," describes Nafeesa Khattak, owner of the Melody Relief and Rehab
Center, a home for paraplegic women. "Now they have future plans. They've been
empowered - by the end they'll be able to take care of a household," she says.
Changes like these, observers say, are challenging traditionally prescribed
roles and rules for women. Perhaps the most subtle but powerful outcome is the
community that women like Ruqia have found with other women.
"Men did not let women socialize with other women," points out Rukhsana, who
uses only one name and works with Save the Children USA in the Maira Camp.
For weeks, Rukhsana has gone tent to tent encouraging women, with permission
from their husbands, to attend classes at a sewing center. Social spaces like
this have given hundreds of women the first community they have ever known -
even if it is tightly shrouded behind the walls of a tent - allowing them to
dream beyond the boundaries set for them. Rukhsana says some of the women plan
to create their own sewing centers when they return home, not only to make
money, but to socialize with their new friends.
Exposure to facilities like this is also fostering something of a shift among
many women, observers say. When they return home, women expect the same
opportunities to be available that they received in the camps, particularly
healthcare.
Michelle Caughey, an American doctor who worked in Bana, a town high above
Allai Valley, will never forget one patient who visited her hospital.
"She walked for hours to get here, not for treatment, but because she had
never seen a doctor before and wanted to know what one looked like," Ms.
Caughey
says.
She and other doctors say women in these areas have never had access to
healthcare because female doctors have been absent, while religious
sensibilities
prevented them from being treated by a man.
"They were depending on old traditional methods," says Haris Ahmed, health
manager at Save the Children USA's Bana hospital. "The breakthrough with our
facility is it's the first time they have access to a female doctor."
Dr. Ahmed says his team plans to train female health workers to continue the
effort, because women are demanding that healthcare be made a permanent part
of their landscape.

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[lit-ideas] Hope and energy

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