By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn
The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.— Kahlil Gibran
HOW many university teachers in Pakistan would fit this definition? Today there are over 46,000 academics in our universities and the quest for better standards in our institutions of higher education is endless.
Continue reading Homage to a teacher
A boy — seemingly healthy — is born to a young couple and there is much rejoicing in the family. But little do the parents know at the time that tragic news awaits them. The infant has urethral valve obstruction at birth and if he is not treated in time he will head for kidney failure.Today there is hope for the infant, thanks to the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation (SIUT), Karachi, which is the only medical facility in Pakistan that has a unit for paediatric urology. Dr Philip Ransley, a paediatric urologist from the UK, who helped in the establishment of a paediatric urology unit in SIUT, finds it ‘crazy’ that there is no other unit of its kind in a country of 180 million where 45 per cent of the population is under 15.
The parents of the children — 20,000 of them who visit SIUT’s biweekly paediatric clinic every year — have much to be thankful for. They are provided the best state-of-the-art treatment free of charge by specialists trained by world renowned urologists in an environment that is child friendly. Bladder extrophy, spina bifida, and traumas caused by accidents that could become the cause of much anguish to children and their parents no longer lead to despair. There is hope.
The silver lining in Pakistan’s dark cloud of the public health sector is the SIUT which is the creation of the iconic Dr Adibul Hasan Rizvi who recently received a standing ovation in the National Assembly where every political party head lauded his efforts.
It was his vision — he always speaks of having a dream and then goes after it like a driven man — that saw the birth of the paediatric urology unit in 2002. The significance of this was driven home to me by Mr Philip Ransley who was in Karachi last week to conduct the Second International Paediatric Urology workshop. Mr Ransley retired a few years ago from London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital where he had trained under Sir David Innis, the legendary father of paediatric urology in Britain. He has made it his life mission to help the children of Pakistan and says, “Like many other areas of medicine, urology is a discipline that requires specialists trained for children. A urologist who operates on adults cannot really treat children’s urological problems with the expertise needed for it.”
“When I first started coming to Pakistan (he has been here dozens of times) my idea was to do surgery to rescue children from problems which no one could do here. Then following the dictum ‘give a man a fish and he feeds himself for a day but give him a fishing rod and he feeds himself for life’ I decided to pass on my expertise to the surgeons in Pakistan. The essence of our success is that SIUT’s paediatric urologists now take care of the vast majority of cases themselves — they have been quick on the uptake. They are even doing bladder reconstruction surgery which they had never done before,” Philip Ransley comments.
That explains the importance of the four day workshop held at the SIUT last week. The idea was to transfer knowledge of the new techniques that are continuously emerging in the world of medicine. Along with Philip Ransley and his colleague from London, Jeeta Dhillon, a perinatal urologist, the workshop was conducted by a guest faculty of four from France, the US, Germany and Italy.
Run with “amazing organisation of a military nature” (in Ransley’s words), the workshop was found “mind-blowing” by Jeeta Dhillon. There were three operation theatres running simultaneously throughout the workshop — unheard of in any surgical workshop anywhere in the world — ensuring continuity and intensive interaction. It also allowed the faculty to introduce the participants (about 150 of them from all over Pakistan) to different techniques. Laproscopic surgery, the latest entry in the field of paediatric urology and practised the world over, topped the agenda. Another area of interest was reconstruction of the bladder — a complex and time-consuming procedure.
What made the workshop so successful was not just the minute-to-minute scheduling done by Jeeta, the wonder woman of the exercise, but also the care and time taken in the selection of the 17 children operated upon — a nine-month process undertaken by Dr Sajid Sultan and the paediatric unit of the SIUT he heads. Jeeta pointed out that urologists don’t get to see so many cases in any workshop — and all free.
It was therefore a pity that the delegates from abroad — excepting the Turks — didn’t turn up. It is the image of Pakistan being an unsafe place that put them off. But the faculty who came were so pleased with their experience in Karachi that, as Philip Ransley hopes, they will talk about it and more people will visit.
Not surprisingly, WHO has decided to select SIUT as its collaborating centre for organ transplantation in the eastern Mediterranean.
Source: Dawn
By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn
A YEAR ago, on Feb 19, 2009 Christian Zainab Abbas “slipped into the past”, to borrow her own phrase from a poem she wrote five months before her death. Ever since I had wanted to write about Chris, as I had always called her since she walked into my office at
Dawn with an article she had written for the paper several years ago.
Continue reading Remembering Chris Abbas
by Steve Inskeep
On a narrow, unpaved Karachi street that has never had water service, a handful of men were digging a trench recently. They were digging it for their own water line, at their own expense.
For this part of Karachi, that’s normal. But surprisingly, for this part of the world, a woman was supervising the men.
Sabra Khadun has a cold, steady gaze and a stud in her nose. She explains that everybody on the street is donating money for the water line.
She lives in a tiny house, in a settlement that you could call a slum. The living room is painted pastel blue. And there’s a cushioned wood couch, big enough to hold a few of her 11 children — four sons and seven daughters. Every child’s name begins with the letter “S,” just like hers.
It’s not unusual to find women in leading roles in Karachi’s development. At the city’s public universities, female students vastly outnumber the men in key fields like architecture.
People aren’t sure why, but it’s happening.
One of Karachi’s former architectural students is Parveen Rehman. She started her career dismayed by the work she was doing.
“When I graduated, I was very confused,” she says.
Rehman worked for a famous architect, designing a hotel, when she decided to walk out and change course. She ended up going to work instead for an organization called the Orangi Pilot Project. It gives poor people the help they need to dig their own sewers, or water lines, when the government does not.
Rehman vividly recalls something that she heard from the project’s male founder, who spoke of the power of women. He compared himself to a grandmother — “not your grandfather, because your grandmother gives love … and through love she’s able to encourage and make people grow.”
Women are active in the development of Karachi, but Rehman says “they do not like to publicize” their roles.
‘Gentle but Persuasive’
A woman “is in charge of the entire house, [the] entire budget,” Rehman says. “And if she’s not convinced, no money can be let out for the development. No house can be improved, no child can go and get educated. It’s a woman who [makes] the decision.
“But when you go into some house, a man will come and talk and be very upfront and high profile, because by nature the women have been very gentle but persuasive. They know how to persuade their men … to do the things that they want to get done.”
Dealing with government officials initially was difficult for women, Rehman says. If women told an official, ” ‘You do this, you do that’ … he would start avoiding us. There’s a lot of things he can’t do. The system is such. But now we go and we say, ‘We want your advice. Please tell us what to do,’ and they feel very happy.
“I feel sometimes — not with men and women — with any group, if you come just upfront and try to be … the person taking credit for everything, that’s where things start going wrong,” she says. Once you rise up horizontally, you take everybody with you. But if you want to rise vertically, you will rise, but then nobody will be there for you.”
Rehman heads a research center in Orangi, a section of Karachi. She also teaches a college class in architecture. The list of students right now includes 11 women — no men.
It’s not unusual to find women in leading roles in Karachi’s development. At the city’s public universities, female students vastly outnumber the men in key fields like architecture.
People aren’t sure why, but it’s happening.
One of Karachi’s former architectural students is Parveen Rehman. She started her career dismayed by the work she was doing.
“When I graduated, I was very confused,” she says.
Rehman worked for a famous architect, designing a hotel, when she decided to walk out and change course. She ended up going to work instead for an organization called the Orangi Pilot Project. It gives poor people the help they need to dig their own sewers, or water lines, when the government does not.
Source: NPR
Reviewed By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn
“ON the night of June 22, 2002, our family reaches a decision.” In these words begins the story of Mukhtar Bibi (now called Mai, in veneration), a household name in Pakistan today. This ‘decision’ changed Mukhtar’s life for ever. She was deputed to appear before the powerful Mastoi clan in her native village of Meerwalla (in southern Punjab) to seek forgiveness on behalf of her family for a ‘wrong’ supposedly done by her younger brother, Shakur. The boy, a low-caste Gujjar, had spoken to a girl of the Mastoi clan who kidnapped him, beat him up and accused him of theft and illicit conduct that called for atonement. The charges were false, but such are the ways of power relationships not just in the backwaters of Pakistan but also in the most modernised of cities. The upper-caste Mastois had to be appeased.
Mukhtar had to pay the price. On the order of the village jirga dominated by the Mastois, she was gang raped. Thereafter, Mukhtar had a choice between suicide and revenge. “I have made up my mind: I want to kill myself,” she writes (through the pen of the writer of this book Marie-Therese Cuny). And then a ‘surprising fit of anger saves’ her and she decides to fight back. In the Name of Honour is a sordid tale of rape, oppression and subjugation of women under patriarchy. It is also an inspiring story of a woman’s fight against these evils which makes her an icon of the women’s struggle in Pakistan.
The course the legal struggle takes makes familiar reading for a Pakistani reader. A newspaperman picks up the story and the publicity the case receives forces the administration to send the police to Meerwalla to have the case registered a week later. A long road lies ahead involving police pressures and manipulations, the start of the case with a kind judge in the chair, detention of the rapists, police protection for the victim, and the judgment sentencing six men to death and acquitting eight others. Then starts the second round of the legal battle -— appeal in the High Court and the reversal of the judgment in March 2005. The five of the sentenced men are acquitted.
No sooner than they are out of jail that Mukhtar is in mortal danger again. In a dramatically narrated account of her meetings with the interior minister and the prime minister in Islamabad, she tells the readers of her race against time to have those men hauled back into prison. That is where the matter stands today. Mukhtar’s appeal is before the Supreme Court which decided to re-open the case.
The story of the legal processes, which is central to Mukhtar’s fight against her rapists, is interestingly told. For foreigners and many of our own readers not fully familiar with Pakistan, it is also instructive. But that is not the only struggle this simple illiterate peasant has waged — and that too with a marked degree of success. She was intelligent enough to realise right at the start that her biggest handicap was her inability to read and write. Not wishing the other girls in her village to fall victim to many social evils that are the bane of Pakistani society, Mukhtar used the funds she was given to open a school primarily for girls but boys have also been enrolled. Today there are over 300 children in her school.
In the Name of Honour is not just a story of a woman who has been raped. It is a spirited account of Pakistani society and sheds ample light on the low status of women, the unequal power structure that divides the various classes and the sluggish and corrupt working of the machinery of the state. It is a book for sociologists, lawyers and women counsellors to read if they really wish to understand Pakistan. Here they will see how the wealthy exercise their power and control over society; how women resign themselves to total submission to the men in their life; how religion subtly moulds the mindset of people; how jirgas dispense summary justice in a state where the judicial machinery can be excruciatingly slow but they also have a positive dimension when they seek to create bonds between deadly enemies forced to live as neighbours by reconciling their differences.
And how does Mukhtar, the central character in this inspiring tale, emerge? Reading the brisk and direct narration full of lively comparisons one gets the impression that she is sensitive, intelligent, imaginative, deeply religious, and has an unbounded stock of humanism and empathy in her heart — Mastoi children are enrolled in her school. The book is interspersed with remarks such as, “I am a fatalist.” “You have to struggle against yourself and break out of your own prison.” “I am a divorced woman, which places me in the lowest rank of respectable females.” “I’d no idea that speaking about one’s pain, about a secret that feels shameful, can set both mind and body free.” “I wasn’t an ardent feminist. I became one through experience because I am a survivor.”
One important factor that Mukhtaran refers to repeatedly but implicitly is the sisterhood of women. She recalls the support she has received from many women activists and human rights supporters in Pakistan and abroad. This has sustained her in her hour of trial, although there were times when her passport was taken away and she was not allowed to travel. This book is one product of this process of joining of hands.
A joint project undertaken by Mukhtar, the French writer Marie-Therese Cuny and her translator Linda Coverdale, this book wouldn’t have been possible if they had not worked jointly on it. Naseem Akhtar, Mukhar’s close friend and confidant, and Mustafa Baloch and Saif Khan, two social activists, also pitched in to help with the translation since the only language Mukhtar speaks is Seraiki. This posed a challenge, especially to the writer whose knowledge of the local language, culture and geography is minimal. Punjab has been referred to as ‘a remote province’ and the ‘Nanny’ is described as a paternal grandmother. But these are minor problems for a reader engrossed in the text. One may also add, Mukhtar emerges as the “empowered” one, as her name implies.
In the Name of Honour: A Memoir
By Mukhtar Mai
With Marie-Therese Cuny and translated by Linda Coverdale
Virago
Available with Liberty Books,
Park Towers, Clifton, Karachi
Tel: 021-5832525 (ext: 111)
www.libertybooks.com
ISBN 1-84408-409-8
172pp. Rs595