Daily Times

KARACHI: A 55-year old, Bibi Khalida Nasreen, wearing a stethoscope in her neck and carrying a medical bag, was driving a four-wheeler motorbike. After crossing a graveyard, she entered into a narrow lane, and parked the bike. As she knocked a door, two women came out of the house carrying children under five.

Nasreen is a supervisor of the polio team in Karachi’s Orangi Town and two years ago she was assigned a task of anti-polio vaccination in Mehsud neighborhood, where majority of the residents are from tribal areas and refuse to take polio vaccinations. As most people of the area were not allowing polio workers into their homes, so she introduced a medical bag, and said that she will check women and children and after checking she was vaccinating children silently, almost every polio worker has same bag. This was the area where polio teams were attacked and in April this year, seven policemen guarding polio teams, were killed by the terrorists.

She along with her team worked hard in this neighbourhood where almost every house refused for polio vaccination and today there is not a single refusal in the area.

“Now even people bring their children to us for vaccination,” Khalida told Daily Times.

According to World Health Organisation (WHO), almost every country in the world has completely eradicated polio, except two countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and even Afghanistan is near polio eradication, but in Pakistan, around 13 cases of polio were reported this year. Some religious groups in the country have objection on the polio drops and they hate that the drops sent by the anti-Islamic countries and vaccinating their children will leave them impotent.

Due to the tradition in Pakistan, males cannot interact with women, so the women are chosen to run anti-polio campaigns. These women were running anti-polio campaigns, in recent years, were attacked in different cities of Pakistan and several lady polio workers were killed by terrorists to halt these campaigns. Later, the authorities provided police and paramilitary forces to guard the polio teams and again terrorists attacked and killed the policemen. “This is a fight, like our army is fighting on borders to save our country, so we are fighting here to save our country from polio,” said Nasreen.

Two years ago, when terrorists attacked teams in different parts of metropolis, a lady worker, Naseema of her team was also killed and she took her body for funeral.

“This is our national cause and we are not afraid of these terrorists,”
she said.

These brave ladies, who are real heroines of Pakistan, are fighting on frontline to eradicate polio, need to be recognised internationally by any award like Nobel Prize, but world leader never thought about them.

Mostly women are ridding motorbikes in Karachi, but she has broken that outdated stereotype and she drive a motorbike to visit the area for polio vaccination.

Orangi is a huge colony with several scattered settlements and areas, and to check the polio teams and reach at every door is not possible, so she asked a local mechanic to design a special motorbike with four wheels, so that she can easily visit the entire colony during anti-polio campaign.

In 1987, when newly wedded Nasreen lived in Chistinagar, another colony near Orangi, armed robbers entered into their house and when her husband resisted, they killed him and his younger brother on spot. “I wanted to take revenge of my husband, so I came out of the house and started working on different jobs, to find a possible way to end my anger,”
she said.

She said that initially, she took control of her husband’s carpet waving factory, later become councillor in local government elections, and then she started selling Iranian petrol and even worked as a scrap dealer. “But I wasn’t satisfied,” she added.

One day an official of health department approached her and asked her to help the department by using her influence in the colony to vaccinate the children, who were not willing to allow teams to vaccinate their children, Nasreen said.

Bibi Nasreen heads a team of 12 polio workers who are working hard to zero cases in their area. “I am very much sure that one day we would be able to completely eradicate polio from my country,” she said.