What a courageous woman, I applaud her brave first step. I hope more stand up to support her; change is hard and often slower than we would like, but progress inevitable where there is a will.
Exercising the constitutional right to vote in Pakistan can sometimes come at a painful price. Fouzia Talib says she has become a social outcast overnight. People are abusing her with such ferocity that she has temporarily left home to seek refuge elsewhere.
This is happening because Fouzia Talib, 29, has just become the first woman in her farming village to go to the ballot box since Pakistan was created with the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. For nearly seven decades, women in her community have been barred from voting by locals, who believe that electing representatives is a task that should be left to men.
Accompanied by a heavy presence of police and paramilitary soldiers, she nervously ventured into a polling booth, set up inside a girls' school, to vote in a municipal election on Thursday. She was the only woman from her village to do so all day. This was her "duty to women, and to future generations," she said afterwards.
Fouzia Talib, a mother of two young children, describes herself as a housewife. She says when she first told villagers she was considering voting, they advised her to "shut up and never to talk about it again." She says she is now ostracized by the village — even by her own relatives.
"Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe.” -King T'Challa, Black Panther
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it. ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. ~Winston Churchill
