by DR. CLAIRE PANOSIAN DUNAVAN
By now, half the world knows Malala Yousafzai. She’s the brave Pakistani teen whose fight for female education drew a brutal attack last month.
After barely surviving a gunshot to the head, weeks later, Malala is finally recovering in a Birmingham, U.K. hospital, thank God.
Today, when I catch her dark-eyed, determined gaze on my TV or computer screen, memories flood back. In 1987, I spent four weeks in Pakistan. I still treasure friendships I formed with colleagues and students – male and female – at the Aga Khan Medical Center in Karachi.
My memories of nursing trainees are especially strong. Some were forced to defy parents in order to pursue their studies. (At the time, many privileged Pakistani families considered nursing an “unseemly” profession for women.)
All Aga Khan students spent a day a week in Karachi’s slums. There, they taught basic hygiene, given life-saving vaccines, and dispensed antibiotics, oral rehydration salts and micronutrients. I also spent time in those dingy, crowded alleys housing Karachi’s poorest of the poor. I recall one tiny home thick with flies where a cloaked woman and three daughters worked day-in, day-out cleaning dates. None of them could read or write.
Here’s another unforgettable scene. One weekend, I traveled to a dusty hospital in a remote corner of Sind province. “No men allowed” read hand-lettered signs circling the compound. Indeed, it was thanks to the signs that some men allowed their wives, sisters, and daughters to enter its gates and receive decent obstetric and gynecologic care. All employees at the guarded facility – from sweepers to surgeons – were women.
Standing back, the math isn’t hard to do. A dearth of educational opportunity means Pakistan, Afghanistan and other conservative Muslim states have way too few female health professionals for their needs. And here’s a second irony. By barring girls from basic education, male extremists not only condemn a certain number of women to premature death and disability, they endanger children of both sexes.
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(Thanks to reader)