Zahra Sheikh, 33, is a role model for women, who want to prove themselves in a male-dominated world.
Her success story from a village girl to a bank officer has made her a local hero.
Born in a peasant family in a village near Mirpur Sakro, in Thatta, Zahra was destined to work in the fields, as had thousands of other girls and women of the area. But her parents had different plans for their daughter. They wanted her to study.
Nobody in that part of rural Sindh could have imagined that a little girl would walk several miles under the blistering sun to go to school. She was the only girl in the Ahmed Khan Baloch Secondary School. More firsts were yet to come.
“It is still not common for a girl to sit alone among boys in a classroom,” Zahra recalled. “But that was the only way for me to study and there were no exceptions for me as a girl. I was punished just like a boy,” she added with a wry smile.
The journey to school was not just a dirt-ridden long walk. Villagers did not like a girl going to school and give ideas to their daughters to follow her footsteps. There were threats made to the family but she heeded none and marched on to Makli-Thatta Boys College.
She chose a Boys’ College and did not enroll in the Girls’ College because of the poor state of affairs there. “I wanted to have the best education,” she says in her defence. Shaikh earned her BSc degree from the boys’ college and became the first girl to graduate in the Thatta Badin region.
That was the time a BBC producer spotted and documented the life of the girl, who was going against tradition to receive a formal education. This documentary brought her into the limelight where she then became a familiar face to the area’s political figures.
Forgoing the dream of becoming a teacher, she joined a public bank, which boasts about being the first for women, run by women, the First Women Bank. It was a decision, she says she regrets.
“I have not been promoted in the past fourteen years,” she lamented. Her disheveled demeanor resembles nothing with the fair girl in blue uniform from the school text book picture that
describes her story. Internews |
