While preparing for my talk
I was reflecting on my life
and trying to figure out
where exactly was that moment when my journey began.
A long time passed by, and I simple couldn't figure out
the beginning or the middle or the end of my story.
I always used to think that my beginning
was one afternoon in my community when my mother had told me
that I had escaped three arranged marriages by the time I was two.
Or one evening when electricity had failed for eight hours in our community,
and my dad sat, surrounded by all of us,
telling us stories of when he was a little kid struggling to go to school
while his father, who was a farmer, wanted him to work in the fields with him.
Or the dark night when I was 16 when three little kids have come to me
and they whispered in my ear that my friend was murdered
in something called "the honor killings."
But then I realized that,
as much as I know that these moments have contributed on my journey,
they have influenced my journey
but they have not been the beginning of it,
but the true beginning of my journey was in front of a mud house
in Upper Sindh of Pakistan,
where my father held the hand of my 14-year old mother
and they decided to walk out of the village
to go to a town where they could send their kids to school.
In a way, I feel like my life
is kind of a result of some wise choices and decisions they've made.
And just like that, another of their decisions
was to keep me and my siblings connected to our roots.
While we were living in a community I fondly remember called [?????],
which means community of the poor,
my dad made sure that we also had a house in our rural homeland.
I come from an indigenous tribe in the mountains of Baluchistan
called Bravi.
Bravi, or Brohi,
means mountain dweller,
and it is also my language.
Thanks to my father's very strict rules about connecting to our customs,
I had to live a beautiful life of songs, cultures, traditions,
stories, mountains,
and a lot of sheep.
But then, living in two extremes
between the traditions of my culture,
of my village, and then education, modern education in my school wasn't easy.
I was aware that I was the only girl who got to have such freedom,
and I was guilty of it.
While going to school in Karachi
and Hyderabad,
a lot of my cousins and childhood friends were getting married off,
some to older men, some in exchange,
some even as second wives.
I got to see the beautiful tradition
and its magic fade in front of me
when I saw that the birth of a girl child
was celebrated with sadness,
when women were told to have patience as their main virtue.
Up until I was 16,
I healed my sadness by crying,
mostly at nights when everyone would sleep,
and I would sob in my pillow,
but until that one night when I found out my friend was killed
in the name of honor.
Honor killings is a custom
where men and women are suspected of having relationships
before or outside of the marriage,
and they're killed by their family for it.
Usually the killer is the brother or father or the uncle in the family.
The U.N. reports there are about 1,000 honor murders every year in Pakistan,
and these are only the reported cases.
A custom that kills did not make any sense to me,
and I knew I had to do something about it this time.
I was not going to cry myself to sleep.
I was going to do something, anything, to stop it.
I was 16. I started writing poetry
and going door to door telling everybody about honor killings
and why it happens, why it should be stopped,
and raising awareness about it until I actually found a much, much better way
to handle this issue.
In those days, we were living in a very small,
one roomed house in Karachi.
Every year, during the monsoon seasons, our house would flood out with water,
rainwater, and sewage,
and my mom and dad would be taking the water out.
In those days, my dad brought home a huge machine, a computer.
It was so big it looked as if it was going to take the half
of the only room we had,
and had so many pieces and wires that needed to be connected.
But it was still the most exciting thing
that has ever happened to me and my sisters.
My older brother Ali got to be in charge of taking care of the computer,
and all of us were given, like, 10 to 15 minutes every day to use it.
Being the older of eight kids,
I got to use it the last,
and that was after I had washed the dishes,
cleaned the house, made dinner with my mom,
and put blankets on the floor for everyone to sleep,
and after that, I would run to the computer,
connect it to the Internet,
and have pure joy and wonder for 15 to 10 minutes.
In those days, I had discovered a website called Joogle.
[Google] (Laughter)
In my frantic wish to do something about this custom,
I made use of Google and discovered Facebook,
a website where people can connect to anyone around the world,
and so, from my very tiny, cement-roofed room in Karachi,
I connected with people in U.K.,
U.S., Australia, and Canada,
and created a campaign
called "WAKE UP Campaign against Honor Killings."
It became enormous in just a few months.
I got a lot of support from all around the world.
Media was connecting to us.
A lot of people were reaching out trying to raise awareness with us.
It became so big that it went from online to the streets of my hometown,
where we would do rallies and strikes trying to change the policies in Pakistan
for women's support.
And while I thought everything was perfect,
my team, who was basically my friends and neighbors at that time,
thought everything was going so well,
that we had no idea a big opposition was coming to us.
My community stood up against us,
saying we were spreading un-Islamic behavior.
We were challenging centuries-old customs in those communities.
I remember my father receiving anonymous letters
saying, "Your daughter is spreading
Western culture in the honorable societies."
Our car was stoned at one point.
One day I went to the office and found our metal signboard
wrinkled and broken as if a lot of people had been hitting it with something heavy.
Things got so bad that I had to hide myself in many ways.
I would put up the windows of the car,
veil my face, not speak while I was in public,
but eventually, situations got worse
when my life was threatened
and I had to leave back to Karachi
and our actions stopped.
Back in Karachi, as an 18-year old,
I thought this was the biggest failure of my entire life.
I was devastated.
As a teenager, I was blaming myself for everything that happened.
And it turns out, when we started reflecting,
we did realize that it was actually me and my team's fault.
There were two big reasons why our campaign had failed big time.
One of those, the first reason,
is we were standing against core values of people.
We were saying no to something that was very important to them,
challenging their code of honor,
and hurting them deeply in the process.
And number two, which was very important for me to learn,
and amazing, and surprising for me to learn,
was that we were not including the true heroes
who should be fighting for themselves.
The women in the villages had no idea we were fighting for them in the streets.
Every time I would go back, I would find my cousins and friends
with scarves on their faces, and I would ask, what happened?
And they'd be like, our husband beat us.
But then we are working in the streets for you.
We are changing the policies.
How is that not impacting their life?
So then we found out something which was very amazing for us.
The policies of a country
do not necessarily always affect the tribal and rural communities.
It was devastating, like, oh, we can't actually do something about this?
And we found out there's a huge gap
when it comes to official policies and the real truth on the ground.
So this time, we were like,
we are going to do something different.
We are going to use strategy,
and we are going to go back and apologize.
Yes, apologize.
We went back to the communities and we said we are very ashamed
of what we did.
We are here to apologize, and in fact, we are here
to make it up to you.
How did we do that?
We are going to promote three of your main cultures.
We know that it's music, language, and embroidery.
Nobody believed us.
Nobody wanted to work with us.
It took a lot of convincing and discussions with these communities
until they agreed that we are going to promote their language
by making a booklet of their stories, fables, and old tales in the tribe,
and we would promote their music by making a CD of the songs
from the tribe, and some drumbeating.
And the third, which was my favorite,
was we would promote their embroidery by making
a center in the village where women would come every day
to make embroidery.
And so it began.
We worked with one village,
and we started our first center.
It was a beautiful day.
We started the center.
Women were coming to make embroidery,
and going through a life-changing process of education,
learning about their rights, what Islam says about their rights,
and enterprise development, how they can create money,
and then how they can create money from money,
how they can fight the customs that have been destroying their lives
from so many centuries,
because in Islam, in reality, women are supposed to be
shoulder to shoulder with men.
Women have so much status
that we have not been hearing,
that they have not been hearing,
and we needed to tell them that they need to know
where their rights are and how to take them by themselves,
because they can do it and we can't.