This Young Mother Crossed 45 Mountains For Her Family Laura Dean

“We want to work for Balochistan, for our country; to do that we had to leave Pakistan. I hope for a better life for my husband, my children and me. Yes I want to go back to my country, but I want a separate Balochistan,” she said.

This young mother crossed 45 mountains for her family 

Laura Dean

LESBOS, Greece – It was a year and a half ago that Omera’s husband fled Pakistan for Sweden to seek asylum. She remained behind while his claim was pending. In the meantime, Omera says, Pakistani security forces questioned her because of her husband’s political activities.

“One time they took me in the market. They took my phone and told me, ‘tell your husband to come back.’ For a year the children have not been going to school because I’m afraid of what will happen to them.”

Omera is now traveling alone with her two young sons. They are trying to make the journey from Pakistan to Sweden so the family can be reunited. Omera says she wanted to apply for family unification through official channels, but that process was taking too long.

“I am trying to do something good for my children,” she tells GlobalPost in Lesbos, Greece, where she and her sons are in a small tent at a makeshift refugee camp.

“We want to work for Balochistan, for our country; to do that we had to leave Pakistan. I hope for a better life for my husband, my children and me. Yes I want to go back to my country, but I want a separate Balochistan,” she said.

There has been a Balochi separatist movement in the Balochistan province of Pakistan for more than 60 years.

Omera says she is the first Balochi woman to travel this road alone. “I wanted to show that Baloch women are brave, that we can do this.”

“In Balochi culture girls don’t study, girls are not important for them,” she says. Omera was never taught to read in her native language. She tried to teach herself. “My mother said, ‘you don’t need to study’ so I took all the papers and magazines I found.”

In the end the first language she learned to read was English. Omera grew up in the United Arab Emirates. “My neighbors were Indian Christians and at Christmas and at other holiday times I would go to their house and help them,” she said. When she was 13 she asked them to teach her English. “They said, ‘bring paper and a pen and we will teach you.'”

Omera speaks beautiful English now. She also reads and writes Arabic but remains illiterate in her native tongue.
That same year she learned English, her parents took her to Karachi, Pakistan. There she was married to an older cousin who was about 45. She was three years shy of the legal age for women to marry in Pakistan, 16, but her family wrote her age as 18 on the marriage license. Then her parents went back to the Gulf, leaving her alone with him.

“Life was very hard. I didn’t understand what was happening. I was happy and playing, then I discovered I am a woman,” she said. “I’m too small, he’s too old. I didn’t understand what he was doing.”

“I thought, I have to leave, but it was too late. I was pregnant.” She was 14.

At 15 she gave birth to a son. She named him Ikhlas, which means “loyalty.” After five days her husband’s family took him away from her and sent him to live with her husband’s sister in Balochistan. They told her she couldn’t handle raising a child.

Then the family started hitting me, they gave me poison, they said, ‘Go to hell, let her die, because if we divorce her we would have to pay. Her mother and father are not here so let her die.'”

A neighbor advised her to take her case to the Pakistani courts. She was 16. After a long legal battle she got a divorce as well as custody of her child.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/12/15/refugee-migrants-crisis-greece-pakistan-global-post/77341560/