A Higher Class of Women

When the Jalal family went door to door 20 years ago urging parents to let their daughters attend a new girls school, people in this desert outpost branded them heretics.

The town’s elders, many of them illiterate, declared that the Jalals were “opening the gates of hell.” Once girls started getting educated, one man charged, they’d be able to write letters to their boyfriends.

But a few dozen brave parents, particularly those working as servants, enrolled their girls anyway. And that has made all the difference in their lives.

A decade after the first class graduated, this isolated desert region near the Iranian border has been affected in ways both simple and profound.

The school, which now hums with the voices of nearly 1,000 girls, has brought jobs here. It has tilted the economic balance in favor of the graduates, who have emerged as their families’ breadwinners and hold the best-paying jobs in town.

The school also has brought colorful clothing, confidence and even condoms here. Girls as young as 10 have learned to just say “no” if they don’t like the men their parents have picked out for them to marry. Several have gone on to college, living in hostels a three-hour drive from home--independence inconceivable just a few years ago.

The classism and racism that still are powerful forces here are also beginning to erode. Darker-skinned servants’ daughters--the descendants of African slaves--who never would have been chosen as brides by the town’s landowners now dream of becoming doctors. One black student became a teacher and has built her family a house that sports a big new satellite dish.

These changes are no small feat in Pakistan, an impoverished, largely rural nation whose problems are compounded by the vast illiteracy that contributes to festering Islamic extremism. Two out of three girls nationwide still get no education at all. (One in three boys is uneducated.)

Tribal leaders still wield great clout, and family and clan continue to be the dominant influences. In this patriarchal society, young women typically are expected to tend house and raise hordes of children, sometimes living in compounds they share with their husbands’ other wives.

Named after its founder, the Zobaida Jalal School is testament to the difference one woman with an education and a dream can make. And it illustrates the hurdles that still must be overcome so that everyone in this nation can learn to read.

The school’s success prompted President Pervez Musharraf to name Jalal his education minister last year and has led Jalal to implement similar initiatives nationwide; President Bush cited the efforts of the “very brilliant” education minister and pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to Pakistan’s education efforts in a meeting with Musharraf in Washington last year. Jalal served until recently, when she resigned to run for a National Assembly seat against several men in Thursday’s parliamentary elections.

Jalal herself is as unusual as her school’s success: She didn’t marry until last year, at 42, an age when most Pakistani women have grandchildren, some even great-grandchildren. She seems like a modern-day Western career woman and until recently commuted by plane from the capital, Islamabad, on weekends to see her husband in Quetta. Except that her husband also has another wife.

Wearing a headscarf, like most women in Pakistan, Jalal is confident and poised and speaks fluent English.

“We need to bring change gradually, to make people themselves accept it, not push it on them,” she says. “Being economically independent has created much more respect for women. They now have power to make decisions--the power to make their own decisions.”

Although revolutionary, the school hasn’t been able to cure all her hometown’s woes. Mand, a sleepy place that appears to have a few thousand people but actually is home to 35,000, still seems stuck in another century. Phones and computers are scarce. Much of the electricity comes from portable generators. Jobs are few. And girls still get married at what most people in the West would consider frighteningly young ages and have babies soon thereafter.

Still, the school is as much of an oasis here as the underground karez system that brings water from the mountains, allowing the trees to grow lush amid the desert and bear the world’s largest crop of dates. Although she was the force behind the school, Jalal couldn’t visit prospective students’ families because of the purdah tradition, which prohibits contact between unmarried women and men outside their families.

Unlike her sisters, who married in their teens, Jalal turned down suitor after suitor picked by her father, demanding that any husband be sufficiently educated.

Jalal and her nine siblings were lucky. Their father, Haji Jalal Khan, had moved the family in 1948 from Mand to Kuwait, where he worked as a police interpreter. Oil-rich Kuwait provided quality education for all there, including the many migrant workers from poorer nations.

When the family returned to Mand in 1978, Khan found that the town had regressed, becoming even more remote from the rest of the world. He believed the family had a duty to spread the education they had received in Kuwait.

“No one will come from outside to educate these people,” he said.

He had bought land in Mand a decade before his return, and the family moved into the sprawling compound where many of its members still live. Zobaida had finished eighth grade, but because there was no girls school in Mand, her father demanded that she be allowed to study at the boys school. The compromise: A teacher came to her house. She finished her education at a university in Quetta, the provincial capital, several hundred miles to the northeast, earning a master’s degree before returning home to Mand and opening the school.

To recruit students, Jalal’s mother and sisters marshaled the most convincing argument they could think of: The girls would learn to read the Koran and be good Muslims. The Koran is written in Arabic, and most of the people in this corner of Baluchistan province speak only their tribal tongues, not even the national Urdu language.

When school started in a sitting room in the Jalals’ guest house in 1982, girls as old as 12 came for the first grade. Doubtful mothers and grandmothers, clad in dark attire, came along to supervise, some doing the lessons as well.

Jalal’s father donated land for the school and provided water from his underground karez channels. Jalal taught. And did almost everything else, including planning for expansion and, later, fund-raising.

After a few years, the highest class of people in Mand, members of the Jalals’ Rind tribe, finally started sending their daughters too.

Today, the students, clad in blue-and-white uniforms of tunics and pants, sing out when Jalal’s sister Rahima, now the principal, visits the 30 neat classrooms in a building near the Jalal family compound. Ten 10th-grade classes, the highest level, have graduated, about 140 young women in all.

“Good morning, Madam,” the girls say in English. “Thank you, Madam.” Retention rates are improving. In the first class, 70 students started, but just nine were left by graduation. Although many still drop out in the first few grades, many others forge friendships and want to remain.

These days, many continue classes even after they marry. And while pregnant. In fourth grade, 12-year-old Rukislania married six months ago. In an eighth-grade social studies class, five of 30 students raise their hands when asked if they are married. In a 10th-grade algebra class, five of 30 girls learning how to factor equations have husbands, and a 16-year-old’s protruding belly shows she is eight months pregnant. One has a child in the first grade--they come to school together.

Marriage is undoubtedly still a priority here. “Are you married?” was often the first question posed to a visiting American woman. But a number of the girls in these classes say they intend to remain single.

Asked what they want to do when they grow up, the girls toss out occupations such as teacher, engineer and technician.

A ceremony held late one evening at one family’s home, however, reminds one of other choices. Two cousins, one 11 and one 12, who had no schooling, were to marry two brothers the next day. As women danced and stuck 10- rupee notes on top of the brides’ heads, others painted their hands with henna in elaborate designs, a traditional practice.

Such scenes, however, are not quite as common as they once were, thanks in part to Jalal’s school. But as successful as it has been, the school struggles to meet its payroll, sometimes borrowing money to pay the teachers’ salaries of about $100 a month.

About 40% of the students can’t afford the $1 to $3 monthly tuition. They are orphans or children of drug addicts who partake of the opium that comes through here on camels and trucks en route to Iran.

Despite the budget squeeze, the simple classrooms are immaculate and the school is well organized.

The girls learn English, Urdu, Arabic, science and social sciences. They learn about Islam and their rights as women under the Koran. They keep current-events journals chronicling happenings such as the attack on the World Trade Center and the role of Osama bin Laden. They learn that if their fathers propose that they marry someone unpalatable, they can refuse. Many have, and their fathers have backed down. (If the fathers insist, however, the girls probably have no choice.) The married girls interviewed at the school say they wanted to marry their partners.

Inspired by their teachers, they also learn that it’s all right to wear brightly colored clothing, in contrast to the dark attire their mothers still wear.

Several graduates who went on to college have obtained respected positions as “lady health workers,” traveling to outlying villages to teach health, hygiene and family planning techniques. They report to the husband-wife team of doctors that runs a maternity hospital here funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

One in 10 women nationwide dies in childbirth, and one in five children dies before reaching age 5. The new clinic provides birth control, delivers babies and tries to reduce pregnancy risks and malnutrition through prenatal counseling. It also gives sterilization kits to the untrained traditional midwives who have been helping with births for decades.

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Educated Girls a Boon

Without the school, it would have been hard to find staff to help treat the 300 women seen each month and win their trust.

“It’s a blessing, because we couldn’t do the job if the workers weren’t from Mand,” says Dr. Tarique Zaheer Arain, who manages the clinic and comes from the port city of Karachi. “The women trust them because they’re from the community.”

The health workers tell the women of the merits of birth control and smaller families, about vaccinations and the advantages of breast-feeding.

“Some people listen to us, some don’t,” says Tahira Khudabakash, 20. As the first in her family to go to school--her father was a taxi driver--she dreams of furthering her education in Karachi, hoping to study computers.

“There’s everything available there,” she says longingly. Her well-paying job has encouraged many other families to offer her their sons’ hands in marriage, but she has refused. “I want to be something,” she says. “I want to study. To progress.”

Of the 4,500 rupees, or $75, she gets each month from the Gates foundation, she keeps almost half for herself.

It is stories like Khudabakash’s that have made believers out of most of those who first doubted the school, including the men who fought it.

The students’ knowledge has benefited all: They can interpret television programs in Urdu for their Baluchi-speaking families. They accompany them on doctor visits to the big cities, where their families otherwise would be unable to communicate. They do their families’ writing.

And what has happened here is being replicated in surrounding villages, where a dozen new schools have opened, because of graduates who now are available to teach.

Behind the gated walls of one family’s farmhouse, goats with ears that droop to their thighs lazily roam near groves of lush date, lemon and mango trees. Two wives of one man--who live in different parts of the compound but appear to get along well--discuss the school’s impact on their lives.

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Regret for a Lost Chance

When the school first opened, the Ali family allowed their second daughter, then 8, to attend but kept the elder daughter, then 9, at home.

The younger girl, Nejah Mohammed Ali, became a teacher and is now the family’s breadwinner. Says their father, Mohammed Ali, “She’s the only one working in the household.”

“Our fathers were uneducated, illiterate,” says Ali’s wife, Nuoribibi, who doesn’t know her exact age but guesses about 50 or 55. “So we didn’t know what would happen, what she would learn. We thought education wouldn’t be useful for us. Our daughters were 8 and 9, and we thought it wasn’t unreasonable to keep one home because they’d be married soon anyway.”

She glances at her illiterate daughter, and says, “There is a big difference between being educated and uneducated, in terms of manners, politeness, way of sitting and eating.”

The other wife, Pari Khatoon, 60, laments not sending her children.

“They could have learned a different language. They cannot write to anyone. They could have a job, have an income. The burden would be so much less.”

But then Khatoon looks at her 1-year-old granddaughter and hugs her.

“We didn’t send her mother to school, but we will send her.”