Afghan Refugee Women Struggle to Survive in Pakistan

By Paul Jeffrey

Qamer arrived in Quetta, Pakistan in the fall, a widow and penniless, her four small children in tow. She knew no one in this sprawling border city, so she went to the local mosque and asked for help. The religious leaders there sent her to stay with a family deep in a local neighborhood of featureless mud walls and mud houses, filled with fellow refugees from Afghanistan. Qamer joined the ranks of the "invisible refugees" who have fled their war-torn homeland but haven't registered with Pakistani or international authorities because they fear they'll be deported back to a land where violence and anarchy still reign. Even if she could officially register as a refugee, Qamer, who like many Afghans uses just one name, is afraid of being sent to a refugee camp, most of which are controlled by Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. Pashtuns are Pashtu-speaking Sunni Muslims, and the roughly 55-year-old Qamer (she's not sure of her exact age) is a Persian-speaking Shiite Muslim, a member of the Hazara ethnic group, one of the smaller tribes in Afghanistan.

She didn't want to leave her home in the province of Bamyan, but the ruling Taliban, who are mostly Pashtuns, forced the decision on her. "The Taliban occupied our house and killed my husband. They killed him simply because he was a Hazara," she said. "So I left. I didn't know what else to do. I didn't know where to go. But many people from Bamyan were coming here toward Pakistan, so I followed them across the border."

Qamer said she wants to go back. "It's our country. We have to live in our country. But as long as there is fighting, we can't live there."

Quetta Quilt Project

Qamer, an Afghan refugee works on a quilt to help support her family in Quetta, Pakistan. About 400 women are taking part in the project. Credit: Paul Jeffrey / ACT.

While she waits on the thin promise of peace for Afghanistan, Qamer is supporting herself and her children by making quilts for other refugees. She's one of more than 400 refugee women in Quetta earning money as part of an innovative program sponsored by Church World Service (CWS), a member of Action by Churches Together (ACT), an international alliance that also includes the United Methodist Committee on Relief.

The program will produce 25,000 quilts, many sporting colorful designs for children, for distribution to internally displaced families in Afghanistan and refugee families in Pakistan, according to Gulshan Maznani, a CWS emergency coordinator.

The women earn 50 rupees per quilt, about 85 U.S. cents. Each quilt takes a day to make. The women earn more than they could at other jobs, if such jobs were available, and their wages are competitive, at times even higher, than what refugee men can earn in a labor market depressed by too many hands and not enough jobs.

The women's income is more than just a means of survival, however. "By contributing to the family income, the women come to have a greater say in the family decision-making process," said Maznani. "It's much more than quilt-making. It's really about the empowerment of women."

Early every morning, participants in the program line up at the local office of the Shuhada Organization, a nongovernmental Afghan group that coordinates the project with CWS. The women, organized in groups of eight to 10 members each, collect the cloth, thread and four kilos of cotton batting that go into each quilt. While some women work in their own homes, many gather to work collectively, taking the opportunity to share with one another while they beat the cotton flat and carefully stitch it into place between the cloth covers.

The Quetta women have made more than 17,000 quilts in the last two months, as part of a larger CWS project to produce 60,000 quilts in Pakistan for distribution to needy Afghan families. Six thousand quilts were sent to Afghanistan's war-torn Ghazni province in early November, where they were combined in "shelter kits" with tents and food and distributed by Shuhada among internally displaced families in the villages of Jaghori and Behsood.

The families there are ethnic Hazaras who over the years have migrated to the larger cities of Kabul, Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif, driven out of their home valleys by persistent drought, according to Jawad Ali, Shuhada's program manager. When U.S. air strikes started battering those cities in October, the families fled back to their home villages, but there isn't adequate shelter or food to sustain them. And Ali said the area will soon become inaccessible because of winter snows.

CWS has been hurrying to get food into affected areas of Ghazni and succeeded in transporting 1,500 food packages, each with two months of food for a family, into Afghanistan in early November. But the route from Quetta over the border into southern Afghanistan has been closed for two weeks because of fighting and security concerns. The last shipment of CWS food and quilts was part of a truck convoy that became the target of U.S. warplanes on Nov. 17, according to Ali. The CWS truck was one of few vehicles to escape unscathed, he said.

More than 11,000 quilts are stored in Quetta, ready to be shipped into Afghanistan when the route opens, Maznani said. In the meantime, as Qamer and her neighbors keep producing the quilts, Maznani said CWS was negotiating with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees about using some of the quilts for refugees inside Pakistan.

Education of Afghan Refugee Women

CWS also carries out a variety of programs with women in the Afghan refugee camps near Peshawar. Much of the programming focuses on health education for women. "I learned how to keep my house not just looking clean but really clean. I learned how to get rid of germs, how to properly give birth, and how we can keep our children clean and well," said Naeema, an 18-year-old refugee who came to the Shamshatoo camp two years ago.

The health program includes women who have just arrived in Pakistan. Nafas Gul lived in the camp for two years and then, tired of exile, went back to Afghanistan early this year. She had originally fled her homeland because of the drought. On Nov. 29, she returned to Shamshatoo, this time fleeing the violence. Gul, who is about 50 years old, runs a household in which the adults are all women. A widow herself, she doesn't know what happened to a son who fled to Iran as a refugee five years ago. Two sons-in-law were killed in fighting between the Taliban and their opponents. Her two widowed daughters share her home, along with six grandchildren. Like the quilt-making program in Quetta, the health project helps empower women by educating them about their bodies and how to care for their families. Naeema said education is something that refugees have long needed.

"If I have a daughter some day, I want her to grow up to be a doctor or a pilot, at least to have more education than me," she said. "My father is well educated, and I think children should have more education than their parents. "But under the Taliban, I couldn't study past grade five. That's wrong," she added. "I still want to study, to learn lots of things. But if I can't study anymore, I want an Afghanistan where my daughter will be able to do more with her life than I've been able to do with mine."

An Afghan refugee girl studies in the Rabiabalkhia School in Quetta, Pakistan. The school is run by the Shuhada Organization, an Afghan nongovernmental group supported in part by Church World Service (CWS). The mothers of many of the girls in this school earn money in a quilt-making project sponsored by Shuhada and CWS. Credit: Paul Jeffrey / ACT.

December 5, 2001

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UMCOR 9/11 Update September 2004: UMCOR's response to the aftermath of September 11 continues. We thank are thankful for all of contributions that United Methodists and others have so generously given.