A Dream of Service

In 1984, at the age of five, a young girl named, Nasreen, started attending one of the first 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’s death and father’s remarriage brought her studies to an abrupt halt.

Despite her heavy workload and harassment at home, Nasreen studied relentlessly. Her hard work earned her the equivalent of a high school degree at the age of fifteen, and an annual scholarship from the Central Asia Institute, that would enable her to fulfill her dream of obtaining her rural medical assistant degree.

By this point, Nasreen was engaged, and her mother-in-law strenuously resisted the idea of being deprived of Nasreen’s labor at home. The council of elders who decided all matters of local importance, upheld the mother-in-law’s objections, and forbade Nasreen from accepting the scholarship.

For the next ten years, Nasreen toiled at home and in her family’s fields, gave birth to three babies, suffered two miscarriages, all without any medical attendance. During her brief moments of respite, she kept her heath-care dream alive by seeking out and caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying within her community.

In the summer of 2007, the leadership of the council changed, and they decided to set aside their opposition to Nasreen’s pursuing her vocation. Today, Nasreen Baig is continuing her schooling in order to obtain her OB-GYN nursing degree, and hopes to begin providing medical care that the Wakhan region, one of the most isolated and forbidding places on earth so desperately needs.

Nasreen harbors no bitterness. “Allah taught me the lesson of patience while also giving me the tools to truly understand what it means to live in poverty,” she says. “I do not regret the wait.”

A Cinderella Story? Yes, but a different kind of dream, and a different kind of heroine.

From Greg Mortenson’s “Stones into Schools”