possessions, including a Koran, were crammed into a black suitcase that was cinched together with baling twine. They also carried a bulging burlap sack whose contents—every stitch of spare clothing they weren’t wearing on their backs—were as jumbled and mixed up as the pieces of Nasreen’s own story.
In 1984, at the age of five, Nasreen started attending one of the first coeducational schools to open up in the north of Pakistan, a region where women were traditionally denied the opportunity to learn reading and writing. Excelling at her classes, she distinguished herself as one of the smartest students in the school until 1992, when her mother unexpectedly died of pneumonia and Nasreen was forced to abandon her studies in order to care for her blind father, Sultan Mehmood, and her four siblings. Eventually her father remarried, and Nasreen’s new stepmother, a woman who believed that girls had no business pursuing education, would taunt Nasreen late at night when she tried to continue her studies by the light of a kerosene lantern. “Women should work instead of reading books,” her stepmother would rail. “Books will poison your mind and you will become a worthless wife and mother!”
Nasreen didn’t see it that way. During her school years, she had acquired a rather bold dream for someone with resources as limited as hers: She had resolved that one day she would become a maternal health-care provider—a profession she had first been exposed to when roving government health-care teams would make their annual rounds through the local villages. She vividly remembers the joy with which she anticipated immunization shots, just so she could interact with the workers in their white cloaks. “My favorite smell was the antiseptic they would use,” she says. “Also, I envied how they would write down all the babies’ names, heights and weights, and immunization details in tidy rows in a spiral notebook.”
Fueled by her dream, Nasreen studied relentlessly, despite her stepmother’s harassment. “After tending to my brothers and sisters and doing all the household work,” she recalls, “I would wait till everyone was asleep, and then late at night I would read.” She persisted in this manner until 1995 when, at the age of fifteen, she received her metric diploma—the equivalent of a high-school degree—becoming one of the first of a handful of women from northern Pakistan’s Hunza region ever to do so. As the brightest student and one of the first female graduates for miles around, she was now poised to make good on her ambition.
In 1999, Nasreen was offered an annual scholarship of $1,200 by our nonprofit Central Asia Institute, a stipend that would pay her tuition, room, and board for a two-year course of study and enable her to obtain her rural medical assistant degree. With these qualifications, Nasreen could then carry her skills north over a treacherous 16,335-foot pass into the Wakhan Corridor—a remote portion of Afghanistan just a few miles north of Zuudkhan where Nasreen’s ancestors originally came from and where more women die each year during childbirth than anywhere else on earth.
By this point, however, Nasreen had been betrothed to a handsome but lazy young man from a nearby village, and her mother-in-law, Bibi Nissa, feared that Nasreen’s scholarship would rob her household of the new daughter-in-law’s labor. Even though there were no other qualified girls in the Charpurson Valley to replace Nasreen as a scholarship candidate, Zuudkhan’s tanzeem—the council of elders who decide all matters of local importance—upheld Bibi Nissa’s objections and forbade Nasreen from accepting her stipend, thereby consigning her to a life of near slavery that remains the destiny of so many promising young women in the remote villages of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
During the ten years that followed this decision, Nasreen toiled twelve- to sixteen-hour days tending goats and sheep in the mountains, tilling her family’s potato fields, hauling water in metal jerricans, and gathering up eighty-pound bags of firewood and moist patties of yak dung—Zuudkhan’s two primary sources of heating fuel during the six-month-long winters. During this time she also gave birth to three babies and suffered two miscarriages, all without the attendance of a maternal health-care worker.
Despite the drudgery and the frustration, Nasreen patiently waited out her decade of servitude. What’s more, during her brief moments of respite, she kept her health-care dream alive by seeking out and caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying within her community. “The lamp in my life refused to be snuffed out,” she says. “God never let the kerosene of