Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman

  “I hope my own children have more to do than housework and embroidery,” Nasreen says, without much conviction. She’s working on a yellow tunic, triple-stitching the long reinforced pocket that women use to thwart pickpockets. “It doesn’t always help, because they just cut the bottom.” They know, because they have brothers who are pickpockets.

  Zeynep, a woman in green with a furrowed brow, finishes the eggshell-blue kameez she’s embellished with tiny red diamonds and struggles to her feet, pausing to collect two pails she left by the door. “I’ve aged before my time,” she declares, “staying up all night waiting for water to appear in the tap.” She’s given up on ever having it in her house again, and now walks five blocks to fill pails for her six kids from a public spigot. After her last three pregnancies ended in miscarriages, she took a daring step and got sterilized. To her surprised relief, her husband didn’t object. Balochi relatives in Iran helped her with money from their government pension. “It was a nice hospital,” she says wistfully.

  As she leaves, two young men enter, Rashida’s brother Nawab and his cousin Shahid. Both are dressed in white, with short-cropped hair and beards. “Assalam-o-alaikum, Auntie,” they greet Zeynep as she passes. Everyone on this street is related.

  The men sit on the floor. With fabric scraps, Shahid begins to clean a pistol. “We aren’t criminals,” he says. He looked for a job last week, but no luck. “They don’t hire Balochs. Jobs come easier to other sects.” Meanwhile, one of the local strongmen pays them a thousand rupees a day to guard the community. “The guns are to protect our neighborhood from outsiders—you can’t depend on the police.”

  One political party recently promised two hundred construction jobs in exchange for their votes, says his cousin, but they didn’t materialize. “All we get from them are free body bags.”

  These men are uneducated and unemployed, working as armed goons for their street. Their city has plunged into havoc, yet in this room all seems calm. Women fuss over a girl’s trousseau, men polish weapons, and life proceeds.

  “We don’t think about the future,” Nawab says. “It’s up to God.”

  But where is God amid all this killing and rage?

  “We don’t all shoot each other in streets,” he says. “We take out our anger at home.”

  The women’s eyes stay averted.

  In a provincial family-planning clinic a mile away, the benches are jammed.

  “Always,” says Asma Tabassum, one of Pakistan’s ninety thousand LHWs—Lady Health Workers. “The only time it eases up is when a bomb goes off.”

  Now that tensions from the last grenade battle have eased, a rainbow of women wrapped in yards of colored fabric has landed in her office all at once. Usually she gets from fifteen to twenty a day, but by 10:30 a.m. she’d already seen that many. With a stethoscope dangling beneath her pink hijab, she checks blood pressure and gives prescriptions for progestin contraceptives: monthly injections of Norgestrel or oral packets of lo-femenal and ferrous fumarate tablets. Women can also request IUDs, longer-term Depo-Provera shots, condoms for their husbands, or tubal ligation, but shorter-term birth control methods are preferred here. The goal of most Pakistani women is birth spacing, which husbands are more willing to accept. Anything beyond monthly medication prompts fears of unintended sterilization.

  The women in her windowless office, fanning themselves with pamphlets describing Bayer progesterone, represent several Pakistani ethnicities. Some have arrived in Karachi seeking work; others came as refugees from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in northern Pakistan along the Afghan border, including one woman whose chador resembles camouflage fabric. As Asma takes her pulse, she confesses that for the past three days she has been self-medicating, because she has irregular periods. Now her head hurts; she thinks she made a mistake by experimenting with two pills a day. Asma tells her not to worry since it was just three days, and recommends regular injections so she won’t accidentally overdose again. But the woman declines and leaves.

  The next chador is black, trimmed in fine gold thread. Asma checks the woman’s pulse; she is in her thirties and diabetic, so she should avoid anything hormonal. They discuss an IUD, but the negligible chance of infection is magnified because of her condition. “Your husband should use condoms,” Asma tells her. They cost two for one rupee here: about a U.S. penny. Everything else, including an IUD, costs three rupees. Logos on a wall poster above Asma’s head indicate that contraceptive funding comes from USAID and the Population Council, an NGO founded by John D. Rockefeller III.

  The woman says she’ll try to ask her husband, but she doesn’t see him often. She is the second wife of a man who was her brother-in-law until her husband died in a bombing. In northern Pakistan, a man will often support a brother’s widow by marrying her. He has six children with his first wife, and three with her. She wants to keep pleasing him so he’ll be attentive. Alma takes her hand. “But in your condition, more pregnancies are a risk.”

  The overhead fan quits and the deadened air is immediately stifling. The women exchange worried glances, because load-shedding was over for the day, and unexpected blackouts often signal yet a new civil disturbance. Asma pulls a flashlight from her desk drawer and motions for the next client. An entire bench stands and approaches: five women in white burqas bordered with lace, their dark eyes peering through woven lattice grills in their face hoods. They are Pashto speakers from Pakistan’s own version of Switzerland, the Swat Valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa: a sublimely beautiful region wedged between Afghanistan and Kashmir in far northern Pakistan. As one woman sits and gingerly lifts her veil, revealing a round, anxious face with a triangular nose ring, her companions stand protectively around her. The other clients titter at these monochromatic women, calling them cabbages and shuttlecocks—the term that colonizing British coined to describe their full burqas.

  These women are rarely seen here, and birth control isn’t this patient’s agenda: in fifteen years, she’s been unable to conceive. She’s endured many treatments in villages and is tired of trying, but she really wants a child. This is her third visit, and Asma has test results for her. “You’re fine,” she tells her, her own diamond nose stud glinting as her penlight illuminates the page. The answer came in the semen test: “The problem isn’t yours. It’s your husband’s.”

  The woman’s reaction is a confusion of relief and trouble. She retreats behind her veil. “If a man can’t conceive, he gets by,” says Asma as the Pashtun contingent files out. “If a woman can’t, she gets left. Or he gets a second wife.”

  The hot afternoon crawls on, the line of colorful women advances. Without asking, Asma knows which are housewives, because they want help with birth spacing. Nearly anyone who works, usually either a schoolteacher or an LHW like herself, wants to stop after two. When one housewife pleads that she wants to wait after her second child is weaned before starting on her next, Asma asks how many she wants to have.

  “My husband wants at least six.”

  “And you?”

  Shyly, she raises two fingers. The other women in the room are watching. They nod.

  “You’re wise,” Asma assures her. “We’ll never be healthy and have enough schools if our population keeps growing.” More nods.

  A middle-aged woman named Nazaqat in a full black chador and rectangular wire-rimmed glasses appears. She is today’s vaccination technician on duty, responsible for seeing that pregnant women have their tetanus and polio shots, but she won’t give a contraceptive injection that Asma has just prescribed.

  “I don’t believe we should practice family planning. Our community should increase in number.” Asma gazes at the ceiling. “It’s not for me to question why,” Nazaqat continues. “It’s God’s will. He determines destiny.”

  She would have had as many as possible, she says, had she ever married. Yes, she knows, it’s a problem that kids roam the streets because there aren’t enough schools. And yes, it’s heartbreaking to watch women try to feed eight children. An
d yes, her own work is made harder by men who forbid women to take polio vaccine, because they suspect it’s really birth control.

  “But every country has problems,” she says. “Ours is overpopulation.”

  iii. Coeducate

  Because schools, although constitutionally guaranteed, are so often scarce, and population grows so fast, a Pakistani child is less likely to get educated than a sub-Saharan African child. One summer night in 1995, six Karachi businessmen found themselves at dinner, whining again over their country’s dismal descent. Especially infuriating, they concurred, were teachers who collected government salaries but showed up only once or twice a month. That night, they decided to take matters into their own hands. When they announced plans to start 1,000 private schools in the poorest parts of Pakistan, friends asked if they’d gone crazy.

  “An insane country needs crazy solutions,” they’d reply.

  Eighteen years later, TCF—The Citizens Foundation—is up to 830 schools. One of the first was in a ramshackle colony near Karachi’s harbor, whose name, Machar, means “mosquito,” being Karachi’s epicenter of malaria and dengue, as well as leprosy. Unlike its surroundings, TCF’s Vohra School has solid whitewashed walls and a pleasant brick courtyard filled with ornamental plants. There are classrooms for kindergarten through fifth grade and, rare in Machar, electricity and plumbing. A nearby TCF secondary school also has science labs with microscopes and dissecting tables equipped with sinks, and a computer room.

  Vohra School’s upper windows look out on a jumble of unplastered walls and corrugated roofs held in place by stones, and columns of smoke rising from cooking braziers sliced from fifty-five-gallon oil drums. With eight hundred thousand residents, Machar is called the biggest illegal squatter community in Asia, although there are many contenders. Few streets are wide enough for vehicles, which navigate with their horns through the cows and goats. Most are lined with ditches filled with plastic debris and a scum of shrimp shells. Women and children sit in doorways, peeling shrimp that arrive in port around 3:00 a.m., an event so critical that it’s announced by the mosques, like a muezzin call. It is the sole source of local employment, but only for woman and children, whose small fingers are fastest.

  The children peel from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., then change into tan shirts and slacks for boys, tan salwar kameez and white hijabs for girls, and head to school. Their first stop is the washroom, where they soap their hands with filtered water and get Vaseline to treat the cuts on their fingers. Most have stomach and eye problems from the water at home. When her parents first visited the school, says a fourth grader, “I brought them here because the bathroom smells so beautiful.” Her mother inquired why, and took home a bottle of disinfectant.

  The businessmen founders decided that to foster responsibility, everyone must pay something. Sliding monthly tuition ranges from 10 to 200 rupees (10¢ to US$2.00); the school subsidizes half the cost of the 300-rupee uniforms, purchased in installments. Half the students are girls, and classes are coed so that boys learn respect for the opposite sex. All fifty-four hundred TCF teachers are female, because most parents won’t send girls to male teachers, nor allow daughters to teach where men are on the staff. Although the monthly salary—the rupee equivalent of about US$200—is below the government rate, they get many applicants, because it is considered safe: a fleet of minivans, small enough to negotiate the warren maze of Machar streets, transports teachers daily to and from home. They get full support from mosques, says Afshan Tabassum, the school principal. “Some TCF schools are inside madrassas. They want kids in religious class in the morning and in our school the second half.”

  Although their per-school budget is half that of government schools, 95 percent of The Citizens Foundation students pass national exams, versus the 55 percent national average. The minuscule dropout rate—under 1 percent—is partly because Tabassum and other principals constantly visit students’ homes, coaxing parents not to take their daughters out of school to marry them off.

  “That’s the key. When a girl receives an education, she educates the entire family.” They started with 60 students, and now have 410 (TCF student enrollment nationwide is 115,000) in double-shift classes taught in Urdu, 30 students per class. There is a waiting list of 250. Because they take siblings, the size of families is a huge burden. Machar has nearly doubled since Tabassum came nine years earlier.

  “Every family has six or seven, and is expecting another.” There are so many kids that people sleep on roofs. She’s had success with hygiene and literacy classes for mothers, but talking to parents about family planning usually doesn’t work. “The more kids in a family, the more pails of shrimp the Karachi Port Trust will bring them to peel.”

  But the girls enrolled here figure out family planning for themselves. By eighth grade, along with math, science, social studies, geography, and English, they enter a mentoring program that pairs them with professionals in fields they’d like to pursue. If they complete school and find work, most, like their role models, have no more than two children.

  “I want to be a doctor, and help heal and feed people,” says Rubina, braids bouncing under her hijab.

  “I want to be an air hostess and travel on airplanes,” says Nimra.

  “A teacher, like you,” Naeema tells Principal Tabassum. “You are always in my heart.”

  The boys want science and engineering, or to be pilots in the Pakistani Air Force. But in Vorha School it is clear that in the coming years Pakistan will be blessed with many women doctors and educators.

  “Which is how we’ll change Pakistan,” says Citizens Foundation vice president Ahson Rabbani. He’s proud that this has been a success, that they’ve raised more than $100 million to build these bright, well-equipped schools, and 95 percent of that money comes from Pakistan. But the most important measure, he agrees, is the number of girls they’ve reached.

  “In northern Pakistan, they blew up two hundred fifty schools because they were teaching girls. In the entire Swat Valley, girls stopped going to school. When we get threats from the Taliban, we tell them: Blow up one school, and we’ll build five more.”

  The dirt-scrabble of Machar ends at a wide mudflat of green mangroves separating it from Karachi Harbor to the south. As the community’s population expands, more rubble foundations push into this natural area, even though cutting mangroves is prohibited. A timber mafia pays squatters to down more trees, and pays police to overlook the plunder clearly visible from the school’s roof.

  Past the harbor, the mangroves resume on a thickly forested 400-hectare sand-spit that protects the city from typhoons. Endangered green turtles nest on the Arabian Sea beach where fisherfolk, as they are known, launch dinghies to catch mackerel, kingfish, and grouper. When they realized that city effluent was poisoning the mangrove lagoon where they catch crabs, prawns, shrimp, and cuttlefish, they contacted the United Nations Development Programme and World Wildlife Fund. Eventually, a wetlands center was built, and both organizations gave grants to two adjacent fisherfolk communities to help to protect the mangroves and plant more.

  One community used the money to start an ecotourism project, with lagoon boat cruises. It was soon attracting 250 people on the weekends. Visitors marveled at this placid oasis, filled with flamingos and frogs, that most never knew was at the edge of their churning city.

  But the other group began cutting mangroves and selling the wood. They divided protected land into lots to sell to Saudi and Dubai sheiks for beach and harbor view vacation homes. The first group filed complaints. One night in January 2011, their computers were smashed, life jackets were shredded, and their office was riddled with bullets. They reported it to the police, who never responded. A lawyer advised them to forget it.

  They moved to another office. On May 5, a grenade blew off its roof, bending the steel I-beams into parabolas. Two tour boats and the jetty that UNDP built were burned. Men parked outside the house of the ecotourism project founder, Abdul Ghani, and fired guns into the air. T
he fisherfolk fled into the mangroves. At 3:00 a.m., they returned, except for Ghani and a colleague, Haji Abu Bakar. The next day, they found them floating in the lagoon. Bakar’s hands were tied behind his back, and his neck was broken. Ghani was mauled and strangled.

  Two days later, Ghani’s three brothers, his nephews, and his twin twelve-year-old sons sit barefoot on the flat green carpet, looking at photographs of the dead leader and at an entry in his journal, signed in blue ink, written after the January attack. “I had spoken against the destruction of the forest, and [X] became my enemy. He and his men threatened my life. If anything happens to me, they are responsible.”

  The mattresses they hid behind that night still block the windows. Ghani’s wife, daughters, and sisters weep in the next room. Over and over, the men watch on a Nokia mobile phone the video of his body being hoisted from the lagoon. The man he named, a well-known local strongman, is said to be hiding in Karachi. The UN and WWF staff came by; they took the names of the twins, their four sisters, and their eight-month-old brother, and promised to provide for them. No one has come from the government. The police van and unmarked gray sedan with a blue light slapped on its roof outside are supposedly for their protection, but everyone knows who pays them. Twenty-five witnesses, no arrests.

  “All we tried to do was save trees and the lagoon,” says Ghani’s brother Mohammad Harun, a thin, deeply bronzed fisherman in a crumpled knit prayer cap. “All is now madness.”