‘Even if I ask them to buy sanitary pads, they will slap me!’

Name: Granaz Baloch

Age: 36 years old

Based in: Nasirabad, Balochistan

Occupation: Independent researcher

‘You’re so small!’ is the first thing I hear when I start our meeting on zoom. Granaz can see me, but her video is turned off – so I can only hear her speak, in a cheerful voice. ‘I don’t like cities, noise and nothing clean’ is what she tells me when I ask her where she is currently based in. Having grown up in Turbat, she would frequently visit her native village, Nasirabad, but now lives there permanently. She believes that living there is important because it inspires other girls from her community to go to university, where she teaches. As one of the first woman from her family, even from her village to have gotten an education and travelled abroad – she left behind her a trail that many other girls are still following.

Her first encounter with gender inequality came in the form of a realization. A realization of not her limited choices but rather the absence of them. ‘I have four brothers. I grew up in the city, got the same education as them but one thing is still not common between us. They have the opportunity to choose someone, regardless of their age but I don’t have this opportunity’ she said. I figured out that she was talking about choosing a life partner and by ‘opportunity’ I assumed that she meant ‘choice’ but that is the dilemma that she tried to convey; both ‘opportunities’ and ‘choices’ are still in scarcity.

‘Every morning on my way to university, I see life in different perspectives. A woman carrying buckets, a young girl with wood, a young boy on the road waiting to get dropped at school. This is why life is not meant to be spent in one bedroom with luxury.’ Granaz said as I etched a picture of her village in my mind. Granaz being a climate activist, talked about how climate change is creating an impact on gender. ‘The temperature is rising but the responsibilities of women are not declining.’ The lives of everyone in her village revolved around the labor of obtaining water and this responsibility has always been a woman’s. Every day at as early as 9 am, women gather with buckets on their head to fetch water from damns which are at least 2 km away. The scarcity of water leads to young girls being killed and raped. ‘But no one is ready to talk about this!’ she exclaimed.

Throughout our conversation, Granaz talked of her village as ‘this place’ and how it was different from ‘other places’ as a means of stretching the land between us thin and wide. She knew people from cities will have a hard time understanding the dynamics of her village, so she conveyed the urgency for climate action in the following words: ‘In other places, how would you feel when you wake up in the morning and do not even have a single glass of water to make coffee? And you have to walk 2 km to get this water, will you be able to bring it?’

Along with being a climate activist, Granaz is also the founder of ‘Udaan’ which is an organization that aims to raise awareness about menstrual hygiene. The idea came to her when teaching at a school she started noticing that every second or third day a girl would request to go home. During their periods, girls were always conscious of getting a blood stain on their dresses, but Granaz pointed out that it was also the pain the kept that home. The lack of clean water, adequate diet and menstrual sanitation all contributed to the low quality of life for these young girls. So Granaz applied and received a grant from UNICEF through which she started raising awareness about menstrual hygiene through art, poems and short stories. As anticipated, it was not just the lack of money, but also the response of people that was hindering Granaz. ‘This is an NGO’s propaganda, I don’t want to misguide my girls’ said a school’s principal when Granaz requested her to arrange a menstrual hygiene session with them. The girls were in high school, among whom most already had had their first period.

‘Now, that more people are talking about menstrual hygiene even in your village, is raising awareness regarding the use of sustainable menstrual product a viable idea?’ I asked Granaz.

She instantly said, ‘Even if I ask them to buy sanitary pads, they will slap me!’ and broke into laughter. She continued to tell me that this was because the state of poverty was such that people don’t even have enough money to feed rice to their children let alone having the courage to even think about spending on menstrual products. It seemed like we had reached a dead end. She was still searching for answers, but knew that education for every girl instead of under-age marriages was the only solution. ‘If she studies and works, she will be able to eat well, stay healthy and afford sanitary pads for herself’ Granaz concluded.

The lack of support from the government is ‘shameful’ she said, and thus most of the work lies in the hands of people now. As a teacher she encourages her students to spend less on their clothes, to carry a water bottle with them. ‘If I start living simply they will start copying me because they love to copy!’ she said jokingly. But affirmed that action beyond classrooms is the need of the day when it comes to promoting climate activism and ending period poverty.

Commenting on the recent cases of violence against women, Granaz made an enlightening remark, she said, ‘People talking about Noor and Sara are living in twitter. Not in real life where people do not have access to mobile phones’, and it left me thinking how the virtual world is in stark contrast with reality. Maybe this is our cue to get off twitter, and look beyond it.

(The display picture is taken by her wonderful student, Dosta Shah)