‘I Need You to See How the Girls in Baltistan Live’
The school had dirt floors and no chairs for the kids to sit on, let alone desks to work at. The 20 or so ninth-graders knelt shyly in formation on the carpet. Hana and I stood at the head of the room, two prep-school girls from the Upper East Side sweating in our headscarves and camises. Under pressure from our mothers, both Pakistani natives bent on teaching their teenage daughters to champion the cause of poor girls, we’d grudgingly agreed to spend part of our summer vacation bringing school supplies over to Basha Valley. You won’t find it with a quick swipe on GPS: It’s the farthest-flung region in the mountains of northern Pakistan, a swathe of hamlets and subsistence farms that feels plucked from a prior century.
To get there, we’d flown 7,000 miles from New York City to Karachi, then waited three days for the weather to clear to board a second flight to the top of the world. So iffy are the conditions in northern Pakistan that planes only fly on the clearest days, threading heavy wind shears and white-knuckle updrafts above the Karakorum Mountains. We landed in Skardu – elevation, 8,000 – then awoke the next morning and drove further uphill to Basha Valley, four hours out. On foot for the last mile, we lugged backpacks loaded with notebooks and cameras across footbridges at nose-bleed heights.
At the time, I knew nothing about the girls of Basha Valley. I didn’t know these were the first girls in their villages to get past the third grade in school. That they were the first girls in their families not to be married off by 14 and that to get to this school, they’d walked an hour each way, wading (or sometimes swimming) across frigid washes when the glacial snows melted each spring. All I knew was that they spoke no English – and that I spoke almost no Urdu.
Hana and I struggled to connect with them at first. Even with their teacher doing rough translations, it was hard for us to tell them who we were and why we’d traveled so far. As someone would later tell us, we were the first American girls to travel to the Gilgit-Baltistan District. There were long, awkward pauses till we opened our backpacks and handed out art supplies. Shyly, the girls started doodling and sketching as we loaded batteries into our camera. Then we took a Polaroid and shook it out as the girls looked on, perplexed. When we showed it to them, though, the energy shifted; they giggled and packed together for their group shot.
One of them grabbed the camera and took a picture of her friends; the other kids clamored for their turn. Suddenly, we were all just kids together, putting arms around each other and pulling faces. Hana and I relaxed for the first time since New York, suddenly grasping why our moms had made us come. We were Pakistani-Americans born in New York City who’d been raised in Western privilege. The only thing that separated us from the kids in this room was geography and the luck of birth.
Towards the end of the day, Hana and I excused ourselves and went looking for a bathroom. We were led outside the mud-brick building to a pair of courtyard stalls. Hana opened the first door and froze in place: the stall was a horrorshow. Instead of porcelain fixtures, there was a hole in the ground, where swarms of flies buzzed madly. The walls were smeared with menstrual blood; neither Hana nor I could bear to step inside. We were shocked and outraged for the girls we’d just met. They had no access to basic hygiene.
With that stench in our nostrils, we went back to the hostel and talked to Naureen Fizza, a staffer for the Iqra Fund. Iqra, an NGO founded in 2011 by an American mountain climber named Genevieve Walsh, has built and/or operates sixteen schools in grossly underserved northern Pakistan. Naureen, an Iqra grad and one of the first to finish college, told us that the girls here faced additional hardships beyond poverty and isolation. They either didn’t go to school or were forced to drop out early so they could help their moms work the fields. Most were pregnant by fourteen. And the few girls lucky enough to remain in school would miss days or weeks of class when their periods happened. So poor were their families that menstrual products were out of the question; one sanitary pad cost the equivalent of a full day’s wages. Forced to make do, these girls shared rags with each other and were too ashamed to hang them on a line. As a result, vaginal infections ran rampant in the valley. Recently, a young girl died of an infection, after using a soiled rag she’d found outside.
As the first-born child of Pakistani strivers who’d come to America to seek their fortune, I had a sort of bargain with my parents. If I worked like a demon 10 months a year and kept a strong grade-point at a New York City prep school; did community-service work from the ninth grade on; and spent hours after class honing my groundstrokes to play singles for the varsity tennis team, I could do what I liked come July and August. I could hang with my girlfriends at sleep away camp in Maine, bike to the beach from our house in Long Island, and binge dopey rom-coms on Netflix. The brown-skinned daughter of Karachi-born Muslims, I knew how lucky I was to have those things – and my parents made sure I knew it. My father is the grandson of refugees who fled to Pakistan during partition. He worked his way to Dartmouth and Stanford before entering the world of finance. My mother Kamila also beat the odds, landing in New York’s Gold Coast by way of Karachi, after earning her masters degree in England. The law in our house is: Get all your work done before it’s due. But no one’s ever had to say that to me; I inherited my parents’ drive to succeed.
But in the spring of ‘22, my mother flipped the script. “Success for me is raising a child with empathy,” she declared. “I need you to see how the girls in Baltistan live.” A decade earlier, she’d met an activist from Montana who’d come east in search of donors. Genevieve Walsh, a traveling teacher who’d taught science in southern Africa and South America, had just scraped together $26,000 to open up a school in Baltistan. She’d discovered the region in 2007 on a climbing expedition with her boyfriend. While he and his team attempted Latok I, Walsh traveled the Valley alone for a month, and was stirred by its beauty and poverty. Pakistan, a nuclear and fiscal giant with the fifth-largest census on earth, has 22 million children out of school, the second-worst metric in the world. The crisis is especially dire in the north. The roads are impassable to commercial traffic, power lines have been toppled by avalanches, and the main source of water is the Indus River, which groans under the draw of subsistence farmers raising potatoes at 10,000 feet. When families survive on a diet of yak butter and tea, their childrens’ schooling isn’t their first concern.
But what Walsh found in those hamlets moved her to tears: the mothers of those children wanted more. They wanted all their babies, not just the boys, to have the kinds of options that they didn’t. A school education past the third grade. Jobs for their daughters, and the right to choose their mate, instead of wedding whichever man their father picked. The lives of those mothers were unspeakably hard. They were married off young, saddled with babies, and hidden away under heavy headscarves, forbidden to speak to men who weren’t their husbands.
My parents were so impressed by Walsh and her mission that they hosted a fundraiser for her in 2014. (Walsh remembers meeting me during that trip. It was Halloween, I was 6, and dressed as Katy Perry.) Summoning their friends in the hedge fund sector, my parents raised $200,000 for Iqra, more than doubling its operations budget. “We went from two schools to fourteen basically overnight,” says Walsh, a tall blond with a climber’s ropy arms and a fondness for combat boots. “Those girls we enrolled in 2014, all of them are either in high school now or going to college in Skardu.” Some of them have graduated and come back to their towns as teachers and health-care workers. “In a single generation, they’ve surpassed the boys as far as schooling and earning power,” she says.
Over the years, Walsh’s bond with my parents deepened. Mom joined Iqra’s board, lobbied her network to write checks, and told everyone she knew in the New York diaspora about the girls of Baltistan. Two years ago, I ran into Walsh again on one of her New York trips. She suggested I visit Baltistan some day. But my mother, whose hearing can be very selective, took ‘some day’ to mean ‘next summer.’ For months, she harangued me to skip sleepaway camp and fly to Skardu in June. I hated the idea, and told her so: what teen wants to go to a place without Wifi, let alone running water? But my mom didn’t get this far in life by taking ‘no’ for an answer. You have to do this for yourself, Samara. This is for your good, not ours.
And so, of course I went, dragging my heels, but what I saw and heard there shook my soul. Girls who went to school in converted goat sheds and owned nothing but the clothes on their back wanted to become doctors and lawyers. One of them planned to be a psychiatrist, because her uncle suffered from mental illness and no one in her village could treat him. Behind their giggly shyness, I saw something of myself in those girls: the confidence that comes from hard work.
But back in New York after my 10-day trip, I struggled to think up ways to be of help. In the fall, I built a web page called Pads for Pakistan, hoping to raise money to buy menstrual products and ship them to Skardu. Then I discovered a company called Days for Girls (DFG). An international non-profit, it makes period products and distributes them to girls in underserved regions. The kits are reusable and designed to last years; better still, the liners are made of colored cotton, so they can be washed in a stream and dried on a line without shaming the girls who use them.
Hana and I got in touch with a DFG founder, who agreed to donate several hundred kits. In May of ‘23, there was a DFG event at a school not far from where I live. Thirty girls showed up for a Saturday presentation; Hana and I joined the DFG rep to explain why these products were sorely needed. Then the girls helped Hana and I pack the kits for Baltistan. Shipping them, however, was out of the question; Fedex has no trucks or planes in Skardu. The solution? Carry them over myself, on a second visit to Baltistan this summer.
In the summer of ‘23, my mother and I sat with Walsh at Iqra’s HQ in Skardu. She agreed to join us on one of our day-treks, then directed us to the hostel where her scholarship students lived. They were high-achieving teens who’d been plucked from their villages to attend high schools in Skardu. We sat in a room with 25 girls, perched on little carpets on the floor. I took out a kit and opened it up. They giggled to hear me talk about menstruation. They didn’t quite get what a game-changer these were; that came later, when I opened the floor to questions.
First, though, Sakina introduced herself. She was a Lady Healthcare Worker, funded by the government, who’d joined us to bless the hand-out of the kits. Sakina passed the kits around and explained how they worked in much fuller detail than I could. The girls lit up as they inspected the pads and liners, grasping that they’d never have to miss school again or be sickened by another soiled rag. They peppered us with questions about period pain and how to manage heavy flows. One girl said she’d seen a doctor for her cramps. He’d listened to her sternly, then sent her on her way, saying marriage would solve her problems. The girls in the room burst out laughing.
The next day, we got up and drove three hours from Skardu to Basho village. There were five of us in the Jeep, including Walsh, who’d warned me to belt in tight. Thirty minutes in, we left the paved road and climbed the zigzag rim of the Karakorums. Basho is forty miles up a switchback glacier, and the only way to get there is by bouncing over boulders that a million years of snow-melt haven’t smoothed. Even going slow, we lurched against each other, rocking back and forth like bobbleheads. My back molars hurt from biting down hard, and I fought off panic as I glanced out the window. Our tires were never more than inches from the cliff-drop. Making matters worse, I needed to pee. I searched for a bush to crouch behind. But Basho sits in a hanging valley, 14,000 feet up. There was nothing to do but clench my bladder for the rest of the jolting ride.
Finally, after three hours that felt like 30, we came to a clearing of terraced green. Basho was built at the half-way point to heaven, ringed on all sides by mighty towers. Nanga Parbat is the tallest peak among them; in summer, its crown of ice is so blue, you can’t tell where it stops and the sky begins. The settlers in Basho had the wisdom to plant trees, and wherever I looked, I saw 60-foot pines that curtained the edge of the plains. Meanwhile, someone had alerted the village elders that Walsh and her party were coming. Children by the hundreds lined the road, holding signs and tossing rose petals at our Jeep. The five of us — Walsh and her lieutenant, Ghulam Mohammad; my mother and my grandfather, a retired businessman named Kamran, who’d flown up from Karachi to see this place – were mobbed like rock stars when we got out.
After lunch of fried trout beside a clear stream, we came back for an outdoor assembly. We sat on the porch overlooking the grounds, while the students sat facing us on the grass. Against the Karakorum mountains, in their ice-block grandeur, the schoolgirls shimmered in white camises while the boys grinned shyly in blue tunics. Something in that moment – the majesty of the place; the hope and the pride on those faces – filled me with a feeling I couldn’t name. It was gratitude and joy and inspiration glued together, as if, for just one instant, I could see the future. A future where these girls became doctors and principals, not just nurses and teachers. Where their daughters went to school wherever they liked – Karachi, Islamabad, even New York City. I also saw myself in that future, knowing I’d be back here again. I’d come with more of those kits, and with money I’d earned, post-college, and with money I’d cajoled from friends and family. And one day, I’d come back with a daughter of my own and show her the miracle of these girls.
After a bathroom break and a tour of the school, I was approached by a group of older girls. I followed them to their classroom, which was smartly kitted out with desks, chairs and stationery. But they hadn’t brought me in to discuss the accommodations, they wanted to know about life in America. First, there were questions about my classes, then my career ambitions. They were stunned to hear that I chose my own electives, that I could go where I wanted without a male protector, and that it was me who’d make the decisions in my life, not my mother or father. Though we mostly stuck to schooling, the subtext was freedom. What world did I come from, where women were bosses – and didn’t hand that money to their fathers? What was it like to become anything you wanted, so long as you put in the work? For them, the end of the rainbow was graduating high school, getting hired as an assistant teacher in their hometown, and supporting their extended families with their earnings. But what if there was more – a whole galaxy of more? What else could they start dreaming for themselves?