One of my first childhood memories is of a never-ending sea of small yellow rooms, sprawling across a desert with not a single tree. Many people wore the same kind of clothes. I saw men, women, children all working to reconstruct their lives. It was 1949 and what I was seeing was a settlement for the refugees pouring into Pakistan, newly divided from India two years prior. My parents were among the millions who migrated to Pakistan. This would be my community for the first 12 years of my life. This place shaped my core character of survival, a place where at least ten times a day I heard this plea: “you have to make it.”
I was the eldest of my four siblings, a natural comrade to my young, energetic, hardworking parents. They had extraordinarily high ethical standards and expected the same of me in all my responsibilities.
I made sure our water basin was filled before the government water tanker vanished. I got the groceries and did the errands. I took care of the siblings and stood up to the bullies. I learned to bike with the boys on biked we rented by the hour. My friends and I earned money by collecting pieces of steel as we roamed all over the settlement.
My parents raised me by one fundamental principle: solve your problems before you get home. It was up to us to get our issues resolved. “Just get it done,” they’d tell me. Both my parents were working, I was mostly on my own with my siblings. My parents were very active in the rehabilitation work. They cared for widows and orphans and sent me with groceries to the homes with no male members or employed people. This work made me happy.
By the age of 12, I led all operations in and outside the household and my character was well established. I was a people person, with no fears or biases, no inhibitions, and completely self-reliant. We were raised with strong community sentiment and a commitment to build our country without complaints. Like it or not, I was always the center of the family. Success or failure, it was due to me. The survival ways of life made me highly spontaneous, a risk taker, a finder of my own path, setter of my own goals.
I was an outdoor person, not a household-bounded girl. The entire society—including my parents—wanted me to change my ways. I was growing into my teens, a time when girls are kept under close watch.
Ninth grade class at St. Joseph’s School in Karachi. Quratul seated far right next to the door.
My parents’ solution? Marry me off. After marriage, a girl is free to do what she likes, I was told. Married women could move around. My mother was highly active, a teacher, working for the rights of the poor in the community. I became convinced that marriage was the way out of parental control. Immediately after my high school exams, my marriage was arranged. Before my 17th birthday I was married to a traditional, hard-working, honest, and law-abiding family. This was a conventionally decent, socially respectable family, who believed in following rules without deviation from strong patriarchal values.
Soon I found that marriage is nothing even near to freedom. After ten months, I had my first son, a great gift from Almighty. I was trained to fix situations without complaint, to make the best of it.
My life was financially very comfortable, with social respect and honor. Intellectually, it was a high-quality environment, mostly within the males of the family, whose company I always enjoyed.
By the time I had my first son, I made up my mind to complete my education. I joined college, but could not keep up with my baby. In class, my whole shirt would get wet with milk. On one hand, I was embarrassed. On the other hand I would feel a very strong pull toward my baby. After a week I left college, resolving the issue.
When my first born, Ehsun, was six months I loved to bathe him and play with him in the water. One day I picked him up, dried him. As I held him close and powdered him, suddenly I could feel my roots begin to grow in this marriage I was placed in. It was the most beautiful feeling I cannot express As my hands went all over his body that day, he was so active, kicking happily with both legs and moving his hands, laughing, and his eyes focused on my face.
He caught my finger, curling his around mine and held on to it, looking deep in my eyes, and we held that gaze. These words flowed from my lips: “Ehsun, I will make you proud one day.” As if he understood, he let my finger go, and something in me caught fire.
I started to study at home as a registered external student of St. Joseph’s College in Karachi. In my third college year, I was blessed with a second lovely son, Mohsin. For my fourth year I got my third and youngest and most determined kind of son, Jami. At 21, I had three lovely children, my main source of energy that helped me adjust as a regular family woman. There was always something more I wanted, though. I just wasn’t sure what it was.
I focused all my energy on my children. I designed my own way of raising them, not the ways of my in-laws, as I lived in the joint family of my husband. To learn parenting and joined Montessori training. I searched for Montessori centers—rare in those days. My ways were not always appreciated by rest of the family, including my husband, but generally all was good and I was mostly in my own world.
I saved money and we constructed a very nice five-bedroom house. We moved into it in 1971, when war broke out between India and Pakistan, causing Pakistan to lose half its land, a great shock for me and all in the family. I watched the TV showing Pakistan flags lowered and the Indian Army taking over. Later the former East Pakistan became an independent country called Bangladesh.
Something moved deep inside me as my eldest son Ehsun sat with me and watched the news, with Mohsin my middle one in my lap, and I was seven months pregnant with Jami. I felt a sense of profound insecurity deep in my guts. I held my children close.
This simple, devoted family life could not get me these answers. I needed to engage with the reality outside my safe and comfortable home. Refugees were pouring into our city of Karachi from the war-torn East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, and I merged with them. From here onward there was no looking back.
How could I live lavishly in my five-bedroom home while hundreds and thousands of refugees slept under open sky? I welcomed a family of nine children—two boys, seven girls, and their mother, to live with us as a family. My home became a center for more refugees coming and meeting this family. My children grew in this sharing and caring environment. As we listened to horrible stories of this bloody breaking of the country, I became more convinced that I had to take my own responsibility as a citizen. I felt the call to build a safe and progressive society for all. I couldn’t do this by simply being a great homemaker.
After my youngest Jami started school, I joined the social work program in the University of Karachi. My community work placement was in the refugee settlements of former East Pakistan. I organized the community as my mother did in our refugee settlement where I grew up. Within a year’s time, I helped construct a home for a widow, and a school for girls, work that received great publicity in the newspapers.
Governor of Karachi awarding Quratul a gold medal for first position in the Masters of Social Work program at Karachi University.
My husband and family became upset with my being away from home for long hours. I was seen too much in male company. I had to team up with men since no women did this type of work in those days. This did not sit well with the traditions of my married family. If I didn’t follow the rules of the family, I was told to return to my parents’ home. This after 11 years of deep engagement in my home and family. I was in shock, but I decided I had to leave. I would show them exactly what I was capable of, even all alone.
I shifted to my parents’ home who had migrated to USA after their retirement to be with my only brother who lived there. Being away from my home and children was painful. I spent my nights crying and my days either at the university or with the refugees. I was on a single-track road of my own, building it and walking it at the same time. All in the city who knew me saw me as a condemned woman who left her family and children.
I completed my masters with first position at the top of the department of social work. I joined a UNICEF project to improve sanitation in the poor settlements around Karachi. Again, I organized the community and in five years, I helped construct 5,000 household pit toilets, and launched an educational program on how to keep the toilets clean, hand washing and hygiene, an integrated approach that improved incidence of diarrhea in young children. The project helped create a national policy on household sanitation and became a flagship project of UNICEF.
Quratul during the Student Union Elections for the Department of Social Work at the University of Karachi
From 1982 to 1987 I was enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Technology in Loughborough, England. My research was my sanitation project. On my return, I was appointed to the core program team in UNICEF Karachi. It was a great position, but I became unhappy. It was too structured for me, just like my in laws’ family. By this time my sons had become teenagers and they followed my work closely from TV news stories and the several awards I received. After six months I resigned from UNICEF. By now I had made my own home with my money. I even had my own car.
Once Jami was in his early teens, he began to struggle in school and rebel against his father. My husband decided Jami should go live with my mother and me in the U.S. to try to get back on track. Over those years he began to flourish, found a passion for filmmaking and eventually continued on to film school. All the while my husband would come back and forth for longer visits, those days together softened things between us. One day Jami insisted we three take a walk to a local park. “Why can’t we all live together,” Jami asked us both. There under the trees, was the site of our coming back together as a family.
In 1987, I was called by Balochistan government to help replicate the sanitation project in Quetta. I organized the communities and helped construct 3,000 toilets, paired with a hygiene education program. In 1992, the same government asked me to help promote girls’ primary education in the rural areas of the state, where girls enrollment was less than 17 percent. From 1992 to 1997, I created a methodology of public-private partnerships, and established 2,200 girls’ schools, enrolling more than 200,000 girls, a 28 percent increase.
Quratul, seated, overseeing the preparation of the site of the University of Community Development in Quetta, Balochistan.
Based on all these experiences I created Institute for Development Studies and Practices, IDSP, in 1998. My story reached the Skoll Foundation—in 2006 I was awarded the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. That same year my husband died of sudden heart attack—another major shock. We were just becoming very close, with true respect for each other, and I had started to really come home in my heart. But he was no more, and my inner emptiness started to creep in.
I started to feel strong resentment from my children. They felt I had not taken proper care of their father, that he had suffered due to my ways of life. While I had soared like a bird, the four of them had suffered. Slowly, a strange void started to emerge deep in my heart, and for the first time in my life, here was a problem that I couldn’t solve. I had become disillusioned with my own self and unable to resolve this unhappiness with my children.
Quratual with students of IDSP in a refugee camp after the 2005 Kashmir earthquake.
But at the same time, with the recognition of the Skoll Award, IDSP was on a great path of impacting the young and vulnerable This was a time of major breakthrough in my work, and by 2014 IDSP had 5,000 graduates in community development practices. Almost all were gainfully employed or had become entrepreneurs.
During this time I felt most supported in my work, and was making meaningful impact in the world, but my inner self was hollow. I had a nagging emptiness, and it was beyond me to understand its roots. I looked to the spiritual path to look for answers: I started reading the Quran, and Rumi inspired me. I learned that I’m just a very small speck in a huge universe and I had been too focused on the immediate successes and accomplishments, rather than a universal vision.
When I enrolled in the Wellbeing Project in 2015, it helped me to find that missing piece of the puzzle. I found the core of my unhappiness, the contradictions I had long lived with, and the roots of my diminishing self-esteem. I realized that I was not empathic in my family relationships, I was only seeing the obstacles, the barriers. I hadn’t focused on the needs and expectations that my husband and my children had from me as individuals. I had held a grudge against my husband for my separation from my children, and the pain of that separation had left me deeply scarred. I had blamed my husband for that pain but had never acknowledged my husband’s and children’s pain.
In the Wellbeing Project session on empathy I was deeply touched by the realization that I had not been empathetic in the closest relationships in my life, while my work with the community was all based on my deep empathic feelings. In all my struggling and giving, I had forgot my own self, and never taken the space to heal my scars.
My youngest one, Jami, was most resentful with me for not being there for him in his growing years.
My heart tore apart with feelings he sometimes expressed. He brought out angles of my motherhood that I had not seen. I had focused more on the outside world where my children will grow, where children of my city and country will live and grow. “But where were you when I needed you most?” Jami demanded. “I was so small—there was no one to even show me how to put my pants on.” His talk shook me. I would sit with him and hold him close and remain quiet. Hearing these things left my soul weeping. The pain would eventually drag me down to the point where I ended up in a depression treatment center.
Quratul with her husband and three sons.
Then I realized that it’s not about me—it’s about him, my son. If it helps him to feel better to reveal his resentment, then I should let him, and I found that I no longer felt that pain. I could finally support my son to help him get over his hurt. I saw that my work to support all the young people on my campus had been the extension of myself that had saved me from drowning in dark world of depression.
The Wellbeing Project helped me map out all the most important relationships in my life. It was painful to see my children were not situated in the way I had imagined. I had not really worked on these relationships to build them stronger. I set a priority: I would put my children’s needs before my work Now though they were all married with their own households. They didn’t seem to need me at all. I found myself in a peaceful, humbling acceptance of my limitations.
Strange things happen when one goes with the flow. In September 2019, I was sitting with Jami, his wife, and his two teenage children at our breakfast table in Karachi. “Ammi, I need your help,” Jami said. I held my breath, and sipped my tea, shielding my facial expression with my eyes focused on the table. “Oh my God,” I thought. “Finally you are giving me an opportunity to reach my child.”
The school his children attended—an international franchise—was about to fail, he explained. The curriculum included music, art, and photography, but the school had discontinued these courses. “Ammi,” he said. “I want the children to go the U.S., and I want you to live with them until their mother gets a visa.”
Quaratul with her grandchildren.
These words created a whirlwind inside me, but I gave no sign though that I was surprised. It’s all very normal and natural for a son to ask for help from his mother when needs arises. As Jami continued to explain his plans, my mind began to race. My work had reached a breakthrough. I was on the verge of launching the University of Community Development, based on my 22 years of practices. The government has given us four acres of land to build our campus. I was again faced with this choice: my work and my creation or my son and his family’s welfare.
“So Ammi, what do you say?” Jami asked while my mind roamed far away to my campus in Quetta and back to our breakfast table, where my beloved son gazed at me with deep expectation.
I could see that he was reading my thoughts. Jami is my more sensitive son and he has been a great help to my work. He respects what I do. “Sure, Jami I will go and take care of the children,” I told him. “When do you want me to go?” Jami decided that he would go first with children, get a place, furnish it, and enroll the kids in a high school in Massachusetts.
I returned to my campus in Quetta Balochistan, to prepare the leadership to take over from me. I called the board meeting and explained my family situation—the first time that I ever shared a need for my personal life. I was pleasantly surprised to see a supportive response from all in IDSP for which I was very grateful. “You deserve to take time for your loved ones,” they said. It was a very touching feeling and my inner self was instantly at peace. Something slowed down for me. Suddenly my space was in my own control.
I started the financial audit of the organization, arranged the leadership, and after a month of intense reorganization, I returned to Karachi, my native home. Jami and children had already left for USA, and one week later I too was in Massachusetts. It was great to be with Jami and the children. I could see the soft look in Jami’s eyes for me. When he held me at Logan Airport, I could feel the message in his hug. “The ice,” I thought to myself, “has finally started to melt.”
Want more stories of transformational change on the world’s most pressing problems? Sign up for Skoll Foundation’s monthly newsletter.
