Helping Other
Women Overcome Barriers
By Susan Frith
It must have been a bad translation
that Safia Rizvi WG’03 came across, as a girl
growing up in Karachi, Pakistan, but the book has
stuck in her mind all these years later.
“It somehow translated to say that in Paris,
the streets are made of glass,” Rizvi recalls,
amusement flickering over her dark eyes.
“I imagined the shiny glass city streets,
and the cars are rolling along on the glass. So
I told my siblings I was going to go to Paris one
day.” They laughed at her travel fantasy.
“From that moment onwards, my siblings had
a teasing name for me: Queen of Paris.”
For Rizvi, raised in a patriarchal Muslim household,
a much smaller perimeter had been drawn: She would
come home from school and cook dinner. She would
let her parents and her two brothers make decisions
on her behalf. And she would marry someone her family
picked out. End of story. Well, not exactly.
The energetic woman who’s telling this story
now over baba ghanoush at the Metropolitan Bakery
near Penn’s campus is a Philadelphia resident,
a scientist, and a single parent who was named 2001
Working Mother of the Year by Working Mother magazine.
She also is founder of Empowerment through Learning
Information Technology (eLIT), a non-profit that
teaches computer skills to socially and economically
disadvantaged women and children. Since eLIT’s
creation five years ago (www.elitonline.org), a
thousand students have passed through its centers
in West Philadelphia, India, and Pakistan.
In addition to improving women’s prospects,
Rizvi hopes the eLIT model can be expanded to counter
the forces that feed terrorism. “No one is
safe until everyone is safe,” she says. “I
think we can use communications technology to bring
peoples of different cultures, nationalities, and
religions closer and really create harmony and understanding.”
With her long dark hair pulled off her heart-shaped
face, her ready laugh, and her often self-effacing
manner, the adult Rizvi doesn’t fit the standard
image of a rebel, and she certainly didn’t
see herself that way growing up.
It was a source of family pride that Rizvi, one
of five girls, was such a good student. (“Math
and science came so naturally,” she says.)
But that wasn’t enough to elevate her to the
first-class status enjoyed by her brothers. “I
never questioned that social order,” she says.
“That was just the way things were.”
She majored in chemistry at the University of Karachi,
ranking number two in her statewide graduating class.
When she went to collect her diploma, one of her
professors told her that an American professor was
there, interviewing students for scholarships to
American graduate schools. “I said, ‘There
is no way on earth my parents are going to let me
go abroad to study alone.’” He begged
her to sit for an interview anyway, wanting to impress
the professor with the university’s top students.
Afterward Rizvi quietly filled out some applications
and mailed them. “I didn’t know what
would happen. I had never lived outside my home.
At that point I don’t think I had ever slept
in a room by myself.” When she started to
receive offers, including one from the University
of Oklahoma, her family’s first reaction was
stunned silence. Then came anger, particularly from
her brothers, who didn’t think it was right
for a single woman to live away from home.
“My family decided I would go study only if
I were married, because then I’m no longer
my family’s responsibility as a single unwed
woman and it would then be my husband’s decision
to let me study or not.”
Two weeks after Rizvi started classes, she got married—over
the telephone. A few hundred guests attended her
wedding back home. “They had a fancy wedding
dinner, the whole nine yards,” she reports
with a wry smile. “Just no bride.” Once
Rizvi’s new husband joined her in Oklahoma,
her fantasies of what marriage would be like quickly
faded. “But I am grateful because something
wonderful and beautiful came out of that marriage—my
daughter.”
After the birth of Maham, who is now 15, Rizvi began
to change. “I started to become anchored and
more of a woman rather than a scared girl who was
just good at school.” Her growing independence
didn’t square with her husband’s views
on how she should act and she didn’t want
her own daughter to grow up with the restrictions
she had known.
The couple separated, and eventually divorced. “I
felt that if I worked hard, I can get my PhD and
provide my daughter a safe, happy, and nurturing
home,” she says. Her decision to raise Maham
on her own was “unthinkable for my upbringing,
[but] I knew no matter how hard I worked that I
could not make my marriage work in a way that was
respectable to me.” Her family didn’t
understand. “My father told me, ‘If
you’re not married to this man, my son-in-law,
you’re not my daughter.’”
As painful and scary as it was to be cut off from
most of her family, Rizvi managed to cultivate her
own “amazing support system” in Oklahoma.
Her friends were graduate students and post-docs
from Ghana, China, Sri Lanka, and Uganda. They were
the parents of a law-school friend. A diverse extended
family, who gathered with her on holidays, and who
babysat while she worked late in the lab.
“My daughter grew up totally color blind,”
Rizvi says. “A black woman with curly hair
was Auntie Gertrude and a white Southern Baptist
couple were Grandma and Grandpa.” The experience
“opened my eyes, and I cannot ignore the fact
that at the base of everything is human relation,
devoid of other superficial strings.”
Though Rizvi didn’t lack for friendship, sleep
was scarce. “I don’t think I’ve
ever worked that hard in my life,” she recalls.
She would work all day while Maham was in daycare,
bring her home, put her to bed, and leave for the
lab—often until 1 or 2 a.m. Rizvi sometimes
traded cooking for babysitting with friends. Other
times, she says, “I would carry Maham with
her bedding and she would sleep in the lab while
I worked on experiments.”
A post-doc brought Rizvi to Penn’s School
of Medicine in 1995. She has stayed in Philadelphia
since then, working for GlaxoSmithKline—first
as a cancer researcher working on human genome data,
and now, with the help of a Wharton MBA, as manager
of the company’s achievement and corporate
excellence group.
One day she happened to attend a talk in New York
by Asma Jahangir, a Pakistani women’s rights
activist. “She was talking about cases of
abuse and how they end up in the justice system
at the mercy of very gender-skewed judicial standards.
I looked at my life and thought, ‘I could
have been one of those women.’ Instead, I
was sitting here with a PhD in chemistry, full custody
of my daughter, and a job I enjoyed. It just turned
something in my head about how privileged my existence
is. I knew the choices I made were alien to millions
of women in my corner and other parts of the world.
I was able to make those choices simply because
of my education and economic independence.”
Rizvi started thinking about how she could use computer
technology to create more opportunities for other
women, and this was the seed from which eLIT grew.
It was slow going at first. Rizvi recalls an information-technology
conference she attended on Capitol Hill at the height
of the dot.com boom, where “no one was willing
to look at this proposal as a viable, socially responsible
investment in any sense.” But she persevered,
gradually gathering a group of eight people she
knew through work or her daughter’s school
and convincing each of them to join her effort.
Pia Neman, eLIT’s treasurer and a neighbor
in Rizvi’s apartment complex, says, “I
didn’t really realize how ambitious of an
idea it was until after I’d gone to a couple
of meetings and she started going around to people
and asking for donations.” (Among the organizations
that donated computers were Penn’s Center
for Community Partnerships, the Wharton Marketing
Group, and Rizvi’s own company.) “I
tease her that nobody ever says No to her,”
Neman says. “She says that’s because
eLIT is such a good idea. But we all know there
are a million good ideas out there, and they don’t
all get that far off the ground. She’s also
very demanding of herself. She’s tremendously
dedicated and energetic.”
As a scientist, Rizvi can’t help but think
of terrorism as the symptom of a bigger disease,
“which is ignorance or intolerance”
fed by poverty and a lack of access to education
and information. “I see no better drug to
treat this disease than education. If you can stop
[the gene] from expressing, you can kill the disease
from its very roots.”
Ultimately she would like to build upon the success
of eLIT to reform madrassas, turning Islamic schools
where hatred toward Westerners is often taught into
technology centers. “Most families who send
their young boys to madrassas do so because they’re
poor and the schools provide food and clothing as
well as a sense of respectability,” Rizvi
says. “From early childhood they learn that
anyone who doesn’t believe in their brand
of Islam is an infidel and it is their duty to eliminate
the world of the infidel. It’s not really
their fault because they’re brainwashed.”
If these students have had any exposure to Western
popular culture, “they think that every man
from the West is a James Bond, and every woman is
walking around in a bikini and seducing men.”
What if these children were instead learning digital
editing, word-processing and other marketable computer
skills, Rizvi wonders. What if they went online
to research what life is actually like in other
countries, get advice from mentors in various professions,
and take part in moderated chat rooms with students
from different cultures? If the clerics who run
these schools didn’t cooperate, technology
centers could be set up at alternative sites to
compete with the madrassas.
Whatever it would cost to create a network of such
schools in places like Afghanistan or Iraq, Rizvi
says, “It would still be only a fraction of
what it takes to bomb countries. These children
can be attracted if we provide food and clothing,
and hope for a future.”
She shared this idea with President Bush a few years
ago when she was invited to the White House with
a group of Pakistani Americans to talk about US
policy in South Asia. The invitation came just months
after September 11, and Rizvi spoke bluntly. “While
we’re dropping bombs and doing all these things
as a way of eliminating terrorism, I believe those
are short-term solutions,” she told the President.
“What those things do is make one place safe
for a short while and make the rest of the world
even more dangerous.”
Rizvi has not heard back from Bush on her proposal,
but she hopes to grow her organization enough to
support one technology center at a time.
Meanwhile, she has other ideas for dousing extremism.
In July she spoke to the Islamic Foundation of Villanova
about how electronic literacy can increase women’s
participation in societies where they face cultural
and religious restrictions.
“It provides women ‘virtual purdah,’
Rizvi says. (Purdah literally means curtain but
is used for different forms of covering of women.)
“If a woman is sitting at home and her parents,
husband, or brother do not allow her to attend a
meeting regarding any kind of social issue, she
has the ability to send her view or interact in
different ways through electronic media. I think
it has a very unique benefit for women”—and
for those societies, by adding other viewpoints
to the mix.
It is partly her own experience as a grad student,
finding fellowship among people so different from
her, that fuels Rizvi’s desire for a world
less divided by national or religious boundaries.
“It’s very idealistic, but I don’t
feel it’s impossible,” she says. “If
18 years back I said I would have a PhD and an MBA,
and I would be doing this, everyone would have thought
I was crazy.” (The Queen of Paris did eventually
make it to Paris, by the way. On a brief visit with
friends who lived there, Rizvi was “very disappointed
there were no streets of glass and no cars running
on glass streets.”)
Her work with eLIT also takes her back to Pakistan
occasionally. “It’s a very different
feeling,” she says. “I left as a kid,
emotionally sheltered and naïve. I didn’t
know the world at all. And now I’m a grown
woman. I think my age, my education, and the work
I’ve done have lent me a credibility that’s
very helpful when I go there now.”
Rizvi’s own parents, who now live in Toronto,
have come around as well. While they still can’t
comprehend “that a woman can live on her own
and be fine,” she says, they “accept
my life’s choices.”
“My father visited the other week,”
Rizvi says. “He was sick. I think it’s
the first time in my entire life I had a heart-to-heart
conversation with my father. We actually discussed
things and I felt my opinions were valued.”
As close as she is to her own daughter, Rizvi happily
accepts the fact that Maham has different dreams
and interests. “I loved subjects like algebra
and chemistry, and she finds history and literature,
and art and acting very interesting. I learn a lot
from her. She’s a great kid.” Rizvi
wants the future to look as bright for other young
women.
One of her favorite stories is of an eLIT graduate
in India who got a job with a multinational firm
because she could use the computer. “This
girl comes back and says, ‘I’m going
to go to college and one day I’m going to
be managing director of that company.’
“I felt so happy when I heard this story,”
says Rizvi. “To me this is empowerment: being
able to feel you can achieve anything you set your
mind to. That is the sort of feeling I wish every
woman could feel. It’s a gift that’s
beyond any words.”
(Courtesy ©2005 The Pennsylvania Gazette)
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