The military operation in North Waziristan has displaced hundreds of thousands from their homes and forced them to live in makeshift arrangements in the boiling heat of D.I. Khan, FR Bannu, Karak and Lakki Marwat, etc. There are now over 950,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) with many still unregistered. Only a tiny fraction of registered IDPs are receiving shelter, cash grants, food rations, potable water and healthcare facilities. Khwendo Kor – a non-government organisation working in these areas – has created the Gender Network for IDPs (GNI) to better coordinate and streamline activities involving relief and aid for the IDPs. Dawn spoke to Khwendo Kor founder Maryam Bibi and asked her about the assistance they were providing IDPs in this time of need.

Q: What is the ethos of Khwendo Kor?

A: A lot of people are working for women; some say that we need to bring about economic empowerment; others say that laws need to be enacted and implemented. Some organisations even focus on health.

In my experience, you cannot compartmentalise women’s concerns. A healthy woman who is not educated is in as dire a strait as one who is educated and unable to leave the home and as desperate as one who is receiving no pre-natal care or is malnourished.

We have also ensured that as Khwendo Kor works for women, women are represented at all levels of the organisation from the governing body to the management and the grass-root level in the villages.

Amongst the Pakhtuns, particularly at the village level, there are no spaces for women to interact. They can meet and talk when they go to collect water or meet family but they are given no space in the jirga or hujra or masjid. We need to create those formal spaces with the involvement of men.

Q: How do you decide which areas to work in and what are the challenges you faced working in KP and Fata?

A: One of our primary objectives is to work in the rural areas with the grassroots where opportunities and basic facilities, particularly for women, are very limited. In my experience a few women demonstrating in a big city have virtually no impact on the lives of the women in villages. The other thing we ensure is that we must be physically present in the areas we work in so that there is a long-term relationship between the organisation and the people and we remain accountable to them. If anything we do becomes controversial then we have to be there to respond so we have regional offices. We also work where we can engage the local people, so in Karak we have Khattaks working with us, in Waziristan we have Wazirs and so on.

The challenges were immense. Right in the beginning there were life threatening situations from death threats to kidnapping. There were bomb threats at our offices. But if five per cent of the people were determined to stop us, 95 per cent of people supported our struggle. It is because of their support we survived – the people who gave space for the schools, the educated girls who said they could teach, people who recognised that what we were doing was to better the lives of the whole communities.

Q: How do you successfully engage the men?

A: I will give you an example of a training we conducted in a village. It was a 45-day intensive health training that the villagers had asked us to conduct. We started the training at a time when the men had gone for tableegh. They came back after 12 to 15 days of the training had passed and were not pleased to discover the training was going on. I was allowed to speak to the jirga because of my age and I asked them if prayer, fasting, Haj are mandatory for women, why would the men want to take responsibility for the women’s actions. If women are not empowered then how can they do what they are supposed to? After discussions they decided they wanted the local imam’s wife to sit in the training because they trusted her judgment. She came one day and then ended up attending the entire training. We also speak with the local imams and encourage them to discuss women rights in their sermons.

Change is slow but it is happening as authority figures such as local imams have started supporting us over the years – when they send their daughters to our schools, others follow, when they give rights to their sisters, others do the same.

— Text by Syeda Sheherbano Kazim

Published in Dawn, October 9th, 2014