by ZUBEIDA MUSTAFA
Parveen Lateef’s daughter Nadia attends school in the morning and serves as an assistant teacher in her mother’s home school in the evening. PHOTO/Saba Jawad
Floods in 2010. Earthquake in 2005. Pakistan has been severely battered by the elements. Thousands have died and millions have become internally displaced. But even without Nature’s unkind revenge, life in Pakistan is not easy for the teeming masses who toil hard to feed themselves and their families. Poverty is their biggest adversary, and according to one estimate over 40 percent of the country’s 180 million live below the poverty line.
Yet in this gloom there are beacons of hope – many of them women – showing the way to people who are on the verge of despair. Parveen Lateef, age 40, is one of them. Her story reads like fiction. But fortunately, it is a true account of a woman’s struggle to change her life and that of her children.
The eldest of nine siblings, Lateef was married at the age of 12. Her father arranged her marriage to a man older than him. Lateef had attended primary school in her village for only three years. Given the short duration of her schooling she should have lapsed into illiteracy by all standards set by educational specialists. But that did not happen even though Lateef’s preoccupation with child-bearing and child-rearing did not allow for any kind of literary activities.
According to the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey in 2006-07, the average number of children a Pakistani woman bears in her reproductive years is 4.1, with four million babies born every year. Nearly 297 women out of 10,000 who give birth die of pregnancy related causes and 94 out of 1000 children under five die every year. Life was tough for Lateef as is the case with many women in Pakistan.
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