The women are frightened. They are furious. They are hot and filthy, hungry and sick with worry for their children. And underneath all that, there is another emotion, one they cannot acknowledge, can barely permit themselves to feel.
They are just the smallest bit gleeful.
Nearly a million Pakistani women have had to flee their homes in the past eight months – most in the past few weeks – as the government intensifies a military operation against Islamist militants it says threaten the state. The women fled the verdant Swat valley, and now they are also trickling out of the tribal territory of Waziristan.
They have gone to relatives, to strangers, and many of them to camps like this one – home for decades to displaced Afghans, it has hastily been repurposed to house internally displaced Pakistanis, with hundreds of dust-caked canvas tents pitched in cheerless rows on baked dirt in vast treeless fields.
The women arrive here with their families, running from Taliban aggression or aerial and ground attacks from the Pakistani military – or both. They have come most of the way on foot – a journey of several days – and brought nothing but a change of clothes, perhaps a few pots and pans.
Such a dislocation is inevitably traumatizing for any refugee population. But for these women, of the Pashtun ethnic group it is a particular shock: they spend their lives in rigorous purdah , living nearly all their days within the walls of their family compound, rarely venturing beyond them, always accompanied by husband or father or son when they do, and sheathed in a vast, enveloping chador or burka.
“We never left home [before],” Nasibu Bakht, 35, plump and freckled, said frankly. “This is very strange.”
She sat in the entryway of her tent: although it was well over 50 degrees inside, rather than 45 outside, she could not go out. But she could sit in the shade just inside the flap, and watch the bustle of the camp – the new arrivals, the water-tankers, the enumerators, the spread of rumours about food or cash being distributed. And strangers. A great many strangers.
“We're seeing a lot of new things here,” she said, pulling her hijab taught around her face as she said it, eyes wide with curiosity above the thick burgundy cotton.
The change is profound.
“These were the powerless women,” mused Mosarrat Qadeem, a Pashtun woman of a different kind, a well-educated and proud feminist. “They are still powerless now – but maybe this can be a blessing in disguise.”
Ms. Qadeem heads a women's organization called Paiman. It is normally a development group, but in recent weeks Ms. Qadeem has rapidly retooled Paiman to care for the displaced – the kind of change happening all over northwestern Pakistan as communities rush to respond to the needs of the two million people, for whom the weak central government is largely unable to provide care.
Ms. Qadeem's organization first sent trucks to pick up those who were fleeing on foot from the fighting – and transported 10,000 in the first few days – but it quickly realized they had nowhere to go and scrounged for resources to open a small camp, now housing 6,000 people outside the town of Mardan.
She was quick to see the implications of displacement for women who lived under pashtunwali – the code of honour, the unwritten laws that govern the ethnic group that spans the Pakistani-Afghan border; she is herself the daughter of a traditional Pashtun leader.
“ Pashtunwali revolves around the body of women – the honour resides there,” she said; control of women's bodies and behaviour is central. “If someone [outside the family] sees a female relative, it's a dishonour.”
