Fatima Bhutto's Diary

A friend, Aisha, and I have started a project to bring computers to community centres and schools. The idea started with an Afghan refugee school we visited; the principal told us that even though they barely had desks, they were desperate for computers. Some digging later, we found that a second-hand computer, with a two-year warranty, plus installation, costs about £40. We’ve now given 13 computers to five schools. Wonderful friends in England have sent us money for the computers, and businesses and friends in Karachi are also helping us out. Today we go to see a web designer to get a website done. We still need a name for our project. Aisha and I think of exciting names that no one else seems to like, all preferring straight-to-the-point names like Computers for Community.

I get home from the website meeting to find that my author copies of Songs of Blood and Sword have arrived from England. My hands tremble while my mother and grandmother, visiting from Lebanon, scoop up books and start hugging me. I go to my room later and curl up with the book. I’ve read it a million times already, but I read it again and cannot stop my hands from shaking.

I’m flying to New York, where I lived for four years as a college student, to speak at The Daily Beast’s Women in the World summit. As the Pakistan correspondent for The Daily Beast, I’m especially excited about the summit, even though I calculate I will be spending more time flying to and from New York than on the ground in my old city. This is literally a drive-by visit.

The first day of the summit starts with a panel on Afghanistan and Pakistan. I’m sharing the stage with some extraordinary women. Andeisha Farid runs seven orphanages in Afghanistan, after growing up in refugee camps across Pakistan as a child. Suraya Pakzad, who runs shelters for abused women, is equally fascinating and gutsy and tells the audience that ‘You can’t just remember Afghan women when you want to talk about gender
equality, we have to be at the table all the time!’ I speak on women prisoners in Pakistan and the Hudood Ordinances, the most violent anti-women laws we have in the country, which prescribe death for a woman who commits adultery or engages in pre-marital sex. After the talk (during which I seem to have depressed everyone in the audience), we head to dinner where I am next to Tina Brown, who runs The Daily Beast and is a great supporter of
women’s causes, and Diane von Furstenberg, who is one of the patrons of the summit. There is lasagne for dinner. It might be too late to declare that I am a vegan. The last event of the evening is the wonderful play, Seven – written by seven different playwrights about seven different women activists – which is chilling and moving. It doesn’t hurt that Meryl Streep and Shohreh Aghdashloo are on stage, either. At the end of the play, the actresses are joined by the amazing women who inspired the play, Hafsat Abiola from Nigeria, Annabella De Leon from Guatemala and Inez McCormack from Ireland. I am about to collapse from jet lag at this point, so I drag myself up to my room and fall fast asleep.

However, I’m awakened just hours later – jet lag is cruel – by the blaring lights of the city, which make me think it’s morning when it’s only 4am. I grumble but am wide awake. The second day of the summit – which I will have to cut short, as I have to rush back home and endure another exhausting 18-hour flight – starts with a discussion panel on rape as a weapon of war. Leymah Gbowee (you must watch Pray the Devil Back to Hell), who is a peace activist from Liberia and has accomplished wide gains for peace during Liberia’s civil war, is forceful and brave. There are many other inspiring speakers throughout the morning: Sunitha Krishnan who works rescuing trafficked women and girls in India, Kiran Bedi, another Indian trailblazer who carried out prison reforms through daily yoga and meditation practice, and Anchee Min who reads from her latest novel Pearl of China and then breaks out into Chinese opera towards the end of her talk. There is a whole host of very powerful women also at the summit, including Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright (neither of whom talk about the war on terror or the plight of women living under US occupation, which infuriates me and makes me feel so saddened, sitting in the audience as a Pakistani whose country is being bombed by American predator drones on a weekly basis), but they pale in comparison with these women whose names I am learning for the first time.

Queen Rania is the last speaker I hear before having to run through New York’s heavy rain to catch a cab to JFK. Queen Rania is not only monstrously beautiful but she’s also compelling and well-versed in the issues facing women in the Middle East and developing world.

Back home in Karachi, I feel like a zombie. I don’t know how people do transatlantic flights all the time: I feel like I’m sleep-walking all day long. I finish a story I’ve been working on for a magazine on Afghan refugees in Karachi and start planning Songs of Blood and Sword’s book launch here. Once I get over my jet lag, of course.

Songs of Blood and Sword by Fatima Bhutto is published by Jonathan Cape, price £20.

Source: http://www.lady.co.uk/drupal-6.14/?q=node/91332