Titan of the Kalash
By
Jonathan Foreman
12:01AM
BST 28 Jul 2007
The last enclave of pagan tribespeople
in remotest Pakistan
might already have fallen to the combined ravages of modernity and militant
Islam were it not for a redoubtable, eccentric Englishwoman. By Jonathan
Foreman. Photographs by Mark Read
The
journey to Birir in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan takes you along a
terrifying jeep track of 11 hairpin miles. It winds so sharply and narrowly
that you can't see more than 100 yards ahead; only extremely skilful drivers
can handle the challenge of its crumbling steepness, and every year many people
are killed as Jeeps overloaded with timber or passengers or both slide off the
edge.
Birir
and its two neighbouring valleys nestle below the soaring white walls of the Hindu Kush range, the last strongholds of the Kalash -
the 'wearers of black'. The Kalash are the surviving Kafirs of Kafiristan, the
'land of the infidels' made famous by Rudyard Kipling (and then the film
director John Huston) in The Man Who Would Be King. For centuries, Kafiristan
stretched across Afghanistan
and Pakistan;
today all that remains is a hill tribe of 3,500 - the only pagans to be found
for thousands of miles in any direction.
Many
of the Kalash claim descent from the armies of Alexander the Great, and indeed
their faces do look strikingly similar to those you would encounter in Croatia or Montenegro. They make wine, revere
animals and believe in mountaintop fairies. To observe their lives is to be
transported far from today's North-West Frontier, with its increasingly
militant, misogynistic brand of Islam, to a world that Homer's contemporaries
might have recognised.
Polytheists
who divide the world into male and female realms, the Kalash claim they were
once a literate culture but their books were burnt long ago by savage tribes.
Their religion harks back to ancient fertility cults. Some among them practise
an annual rite known as 'budalak', when a teenage boy is selected to go alone
into the high forests for almost a year. When he returns on a feast day, he may
sleep with any and as many Kalash women as he chooses.
The
Kalash have long been so isolated that they are believed by nearby peoples to
hibernate like animals. But the rugged remoteness that once protected them is
disappearing fast as better roads are built, and Muslim homesteaders from
Punjab and elsewhere in Pakistan
outnumber the Kalash. The settlers have brought with them mosques, missionaries
and a money economy that has landed in deep debt families more familiar with
the barter system. It is a familiar story.
With
exposure to the electric world of mobile phones, videos and satellite
television, the Kalash young yearn for the glamour of life beyond their
valleys; and today the Kalash culture is under threat from militant Islam,
rapid deforestation, technology and a lethal combination of gullibility and
greed among the Kalash themselves. Indeed, it would probably be gone already,
were it not for the efforts of an eccentric 69-year-old Englishwoman known
locally as 'Bibi Doe'.
For
two decades Bibi Doe has raised money for inoculations, fresh-water pipes and
bridges. She has driven sick people to the hospital in Chitral and distant Peshawar, where her
little NGO paid the bills. It was she who built the first latrines here and
brought the first stoves - with help from the British High Commission - so that
the women would no longer suffer eye and lung diseases from open fires inside
the houses. She opened dispensaries where locals can get aspirin and
antibiotics that stop the children dying from fever.
It
is hard to believe that anyone could make the journey from Peshawar to Chitral so often - but last
October alone Bibi Doe did it 12 times. She regularly puts up with dangers and
physical discomforts that would fell a woman half her age. In 1990, for instance,
she almost drowned when her Land Cruiser was hit by a flash flood while
crossing a river. (She never now wears a seatbelt.)
For
Bibi Doe, death threats are a fact of life. She has battled corrupt officials,
the frontier timber mafia, Kalash distillers of lethal moonshine liquor,
bigoted mullahs, pimps, jihadist militants, insensitive tourists, unscrupulous
entrepreneurs, giant aid agencies, foreign academics and do-gooders she
considers exploitative. 'If you ever read that I've died in accident,' she said
as we loaded up her Land Cruiser before leaving for Birir, 'you'd better come
back and investigate what really happened.'
Bibi
Doe is named after her favourite Kalash dog - an orphaned pup she adopted in
1986 after its mother was taken by a wolf. The children of the valleys heard
her shouting, 'Bibi Doe! Bibi Doe!' as she tramped up and down the trails with
a backpack full of medicines. It became their name for her, and then everyone's
name for her. When she raised money for the repair of a 1927 suspension bridge
across the Chitral river, on which the commerce of the valleys depends, she
ensured that a plaque on the bridge read, 'Repaired 2006 by Bibi Doe'.
Before
she was adopted by a Kalash family in Birir in 1981, Bibi Doe was known as
Maureen Lines. Born in north London to a
middle-class family, Lines has over the years been a tourist official in Greece, a taxi driver, a waitress, a domestic in
Beirut, a
petrol pump attendant and a writer of Gothic novels. She has also written
several books about her travels in Afghanistan and the North-West
Frontier. Certainly, she never planned to become an aid worker. 'Never in my
wildest dreams did I think I'd be involved in development.'
We
were in her little room in Birir, the fire blazing and a gas lamp hissing in the
background. She explained that her first memories are of huddling in a Morrison
shelter as bombs of the Blitz rained down. An only child (her father worked in
radar), her companions growing up were dogs, books and fantasy. She left school
at 16 and went to study shorthand and speech at Harrow Tech with hopes of
becoming an actress or a journalist. Both dreams dissolved when her mother left
her father.
Soon
afterwards, Lines ran away and found a job as a waitress at one of the new
espresso bars in central London.
She then headed to Paris,
to sell the Herald Tribune like Jean Seberg in A bout de souffle. In 1961 she
emigrated to America.
'It was one of those impulses. I've lived my life on impulses. I was standing
at a bus stop in the rain, I'd had a fight with my lover and I was out of work
when I saw a sign advertising for "domestics in America". Six months later I
was on a ship to New York.'
The
job didn't last long and Lines went to work in a coffee shop in Greenwich Village. The beatnik years were in full swing,
and for a decade she worked just to pay for partying and studying. First she
went to the New School
to study journalism and poetry, and then switched to New York University
to do international affairs and Arabic. There, she discovered her love of
travel and of the Muslim and Arab worlds. In 1964 - before the advent of
overland holidays and the hippie trail to India
- she hitchhiked from Istanbul to Damascus. 'Everyone said
I was a fool and that I'd be murdered or raped. But I never had a problem as a
woman,' she said.
Lines
had moved back to England
when her travels took her to Pakistan
and the Kalash valleys for the first time in 1980. It was the end of a voyage
taking in Cairo, Khartoum
and Bahrain.
She and Pakistan
got on well immediately. 'Within 24 hours I was on the radio giving my
impressions of the country,' she said with a laugh. 'It's been like that ever
since.'
Her
first contact with a Kalash woman came when Lines was trying to find a route
across a fast-flowing stream. A tall, dignified woman - wearing a veil, which
was unusual - showed her a place to cross. On her way across the smooth stones,
Lines slipped. To her surprise the woman was right behind her and caught her
arm. As she did so, her veil slipped and Lines saw that her face was disfigured
by a mass of 'pink and black scabs'. A few days later Lines went into Chitral
and bought some medicines and took them back to treat the woman.
A
year later, she returned to the valleys and managed to secure a permit to stay
for a month. It was then that she met Tak-Dira, who adopted Lines and became
her 'Kalash mother'. It was during this second stay that Lines resolved to go
back to America
to gain a medical qualification so she could help the Kalash.
Back
in New York
she trained as a paramedic, though illness delayed her return to the valleys
for four years. Once established, she became a kind of barefoot doctor in
hiking boots walking from one village to another, a backpack full of medicine,
a dog or two at her side. 'I did 10 to 12 miles a day. I had a ball.' Whenever
she could, she 'would literally hijack passing doctors' for medicines.
In
1990 she started her pit latrine and stove projects. The first money she raised
came from bake sales and the like at her late mother's home in Princes Risborough
in Buckinghamshire. But soon she began to raise money from governments and
embassies. She found herself spending more and more time in Islamabad talking to diplomats and Pakistani
officials, and getting more involved with environmental threats to the Kalash,
such as uncontrolled tourism and deforestation.
Three
years later, she started her Pakistani NGO, the Kalash Environmental Protection
Society (Keps) - and then, in 1995, the British charity that supports it, the
Hindu Kush Conservation Association. She became a citizen of Pakistan after
one of her 'enemies' in officialdom almost managed to get her deported a few
years ago. 'This young man married me and that's how I got my ID card,' she
said. 'He's somewhere in England
now, I don't know where.'
I
had first met Maureen Lines in Chitral in 1994. She had just founded the
'Kalash Guides' to soften the impact of tourism in the valleys. Travellers were
encouraged to use the local guides she had trained rather than outsiders from
the hotels of Chitral. Lines had had enough of seeing 'Jeeps tear up people's
fields' and busloads of tourists surrounding Kalash women as they bathed in the
river. The scheme also meant that Kalash families rather than Punjabi
carpetbaggers gained some economic benefit from tourism, and ensured that
visitors didn't get lost on the mountain trails. I stayed in a guest room of
one of the guides in Birir - a fascinating but cold and flea-ridden experiment
in medieval living. The guide scheme worked until 9/11 and the Afghan war, which
dried up the tourist flood.
Today,
Lines is as remarkable, thoughtful and energetic as when I last saw her. She is
also tough, cantankerous, slightly deaf and marvellous company. Her no-nonsense
approach seems to have neutralised the usual disadvantages of being a woman in
one of the most sexually oppressive places in Asia.
The North-West Frontier of Pakistan
is the most conservative part of a conservative country. In the picturesque
bazaars of Chitral town, you are unlikely ever to see a woman. Here, it is said
that a woman goes out in public twice in her life: once to leave her father's
house for her husband's, the next time to be buried. The contrast with the
Kalash valleys could hardly be greater. The first thing you notice in Birir and
its sister valleys is the sound and sight of women - ubiquitous, assertive and
wearing traditional dress.
There
are no hotels in the citadel villages of Birir so Lines invited me to stay with
her Kalash family in a room next to their one-storey house, set against the hillside,
with its rickety veranda looking down on a grove of trees surrounding a little
cemetery. The flat-roofed houses are made of stone, wood and mud to withstand
the region's earthquakes. Extended families of 20 or more live together in each
house, in a single dark room with an earthen floor.
In
the house of Lines's adoptive family, we huddle against the cold around the
wood-burning metal stove. We are sitting on low stools made of walnut and
animal hide. Lines had brought rice - too expensive for most Kalash - to make a
feast, with cooked vegetables and flat bread and a salad of onions and
tomatoes. We drank the rough homemade red wine, which tastes a bit like vodka
and grape juice. As we ate, Lines chatted in Kalash to Sainusar, Tak-Dira's
daughter, in her midforties, and various other family members; a small bulb
above us emitted a feeble glow. There is some electricity in the valley - from
two small hydro-electric plants. Some of the men went off elsewhere to smoke
hashish, a habit introduced by hippie backpackers. But everyone was in bed soon
after nightfall.
The
next morning, we visited one of Lines's dispensaries in lower Birir. Unlike the
government dispensary further up the valley, it is well stocked. One of the
problems faced by the Kalash, like so many other remote people in the
subcontinent, is that government facilities tend to exist only on paper or to
suffer from extreme absenteeism. For instance, there is a government doctor
assigned to the Kalash valleys, but he is rarely, if ever, there.
Lines's
dispensary is a bare concrete room with a couple of shelves of medications and
a ledger. It is maintained by Hassan and Shah Hussein, two voluble young Muslim
men from a nearby village. One is a Kalash convert, the other is from one of
the families who have moved here from the Punjab and elsewhere in Pakistan.
One
of the strange things about morning in Birir is the amplified sound of the
muezzin's call to prayer. Though the Pakistani federal government 'genuinely
supports freedom of religion', as Lines said, and has long been serious about
protecting the Kalash culture, the provincial government is now controlled by
the Muslim Fundamentalist party, the MMA, which has strong links to the Taliban
across the border, and which disapproves of the infidel presence in their
midst.
According
to Minocher 'Minoo' Bhandara, a Pakistani MP and former minister for
minorities, Muslim families here insist that the families of Kalash brides or
grooms also convert, so they don't have to suffer the humiliation of Kafir in-laws.
'A lot of money is exchanged, I believe,' he said. 'They don't convert for any
religious or ideological reason - there has to be a financial incentive.'
I
spent a further week with Lines in Birir as she visited her various projects in
the three valleys: an irrigation project here, a dispensary there, latrine
projects everywhere. Though it was cold and she hated the way her knees and
back limited her mobility ('I'm worried I won't be able to go up to the high
pastures in the spring,' she grumbled), she was ebullient after a successful
fundraising dinner in Islamabad
and positive meetings with the Kalash Co-ordinating Committee.
Stopping
deforestation by what Lines calls 'the timber mafia' takes up an increasing
amount of her time. There are very few forests left in Pakistan and
there is enough demand to render the antideforestation laws virtually
meaningless. Donkeys and overloaded Jeeps carry heavy loads of sweet-smelling
cedar and deodar out of the valleys every night. As the forests disappear, flash
floods become more and more common. 'The majority of the people' are behind
her, Lines said. 'But the big guys in Birir - corrupt Kalash and corrupt
Muslims - they don't give a damn. They've got enough money accumulated, they
can go some place else after the land has been ruined. The other problem is
corruption in the forest service. We had a good guy here but the bearded ones
[the Taliban] had him transferred and the wood is now pouring out again.'
Two
things ensure that Lines can punch above her weight. She has access to the
Pakistani media and a network of supporters in Pakistan and abroad. Among those
allies is the railways chief Shakil Durrani, who was the district commissioner
in Chitral when Lines first moved to Pakistan,
and then the chief secretary of the whole North-West
Frontier Province. He found the Kalash fascinating and 'wanted to
do my bit to ensure that they remain, not as zoo people but a vibrant living
people'. Like many other sympathetic observers, Durrani believes that the
Kalash are 'their own worst enemies' with their lawsuits, squabbling disunity
and what he calls 'their casual attitude to many things in life, especially
money.' Durrani still does what he can to help and is on the board of Keps. At
one point, he asked Diana, Princess of Wales, to become a patron of the Kalash.
'She agreed in principle to lend her name,' he told me, though she died before
the project came to fruition.
A
couple of days into our stay, all work - though not Lines's - came to a halt.
An old man had died. The funeral would last for three days, during which time
people would walk from all of the valleys to pay their respects. Funerals are
expensive for the Kalash, partly because work ceases, but mostly because the
bereaved family is expected to sacrifice goats and cows to feed the guests. It
is one of the only times that the Kalash eat meat; animals are too valuable to
slaughter except on such occasions.
During
the funeral, a group of Kalash women formed a semicircle around the corpse -
which lay on a bier, covered in gold cloth - and linked arms. They danced
around the body while others chanted. You could tell the women from the
bereaved family because they were the only women with bare heads (a Kalash
woman takes off her headdress only when in mourning). In between the dances,
the male elders told the life story of the deceased in a kind of chant. It was
an extraordinary spectacle.
After
the funeral, I accompanied Lines to Bumburet, the largest and most beautiful of
the Kalash valleys, with snow-clad peaks visible at both top and bottom. But
there are grubby hotels here and shops and NGO offices, and even satellite
dishes on some of the houses. Even with tourism so weak, there are more
foreigners here than in the other valleys. When we stopped for tea and some flat
bread and goat's cheese, I met an Italian anthropology professor dressed in
full shalwar kameez and Chitrali cap, his eyes made up with eyeliner.
Here,
a wealthy Greek NGO is building a huge cedar-wood mansion they have called the
Kalash House, which will include a museum, school and conference centre. I met
Athanasios, the head of the NGO, briefly as he drove out of the valley in his
SUV. He has shaggy hair and dark glasses and looks a bit like a 1970s rock
star. Lines said that the mansion is 'a monument to his egotism'. At one point,
she told me, Athanasios gave what he called a 'scholarship' - in fact a cash
gift of 30,000 rupees - to every Kalash family with a child of school age. 'A
cash gift. It was the most corrupting thing. Many of the families used the
money to buy land.'
She
talked a great deal about the 'corruption' of the Kalash. Sometimes she meant
it in the literal sense. One of the wealthier Kalash families became so by
stealing and selling statues in the valleys. She is greatly concerned by the
replacement of the barter system, and the loss of traditional skills, such as
shoemaking (the women now wear plastic shoes from Chitral that hurt their
feet). Even the education offered here is not entirely a boon, in her opinion.
'Some of the boys speak a few words of English, put on Western clothes and
think "Man, I'm cool". They have enough education not to want to work
in the fields but not enough to get a job in the world outside.' Education has
also undermined the gerontocratic social system of the valleys: young people
with a smattering of literacy despise their illiterate parents and long to join
the exciting outside world.
Not
everyone agrees with Lines that the Kalash culture should be protected from the
outside world with its technology and subversive pop culture. Minoo Bhandara,
one of Lines's longtime supporters, is adamant that she is wrong about
development in the valleys. As he told me in his office in Islamabad, 'She doesn't want hotels. She
wants tough roads so people tough it out. She doesn't want too many tourists to
contaminate the Kalash. But they are like other ordinary folks: if you ask them
what they want most in the world they would say, "a cell phone and a
television". The rest of the world has them, why not them?'
But
Lines believes that sanitation and education should come before electricity and
improved roads. 'They need some knowledge and awareness first. I saw the same
thing in Pathan culture when I first came to Pakistan,' she said. 'I was taken
to a small village in the tribal areas and they had a refrigerator in the
sitting-room but no sanitation, no drinking water, no toilet. They did have
electricity.'
Lines
is horrified by the money that has been wasted by big aid agencies here. I got
some sense of that on the way back to Chitral. We passed several lengths of
huge ugly piping, part of a failed water project by the Aga Khan charity AKRSP.
It cost nine million rupees (£75,000), but was never finished. Another AKRSP
project involved building a road, but 'they put it on the wrong side of the
river and it washed away. I've seen so much money wasted here, money which
could have helped the people in so many good ways.'
When
Lines started her UK
charity, a lawyer friend told her to read a biography of Dian Fossey, the
murdered American ethologist. 'He told me, "If what you do is not
successful you will have no problem, but if you achieve things your life will
be miserable." It's an observation that has come true.' Despite her
successes - there is hope that Unesco will declare the valleys a heritage site
- Lines fears that Kalash culture may disappear entirely within a decade.
Prince
Siraj Ulmulk, the owner of the Hindu
Kush Heights,
a hotel overlooking the Chitral river valley, told me, 'We're so lucky someone
like Maureen is giving her time to us. We could never understand why someone
would leave a lovely place like England
to do this. It's a hell of a lot of work for one person to take on. I just hope
she keeps on doing what she's doing.'
'I
carry on because of the women,' Lines said. 'People ask, "What made you
give up your life to do this?" What is it I've given up? I'm doing exactly
what I want to do and the whole way of life here has given me so much. I've had
a very rich life.'
Further
information: hindukushconservation.com The journey to Birir takes you along one
of the most terrifying jeep tracks imaginable. Its 18 hairpin kilometres from
the main road to Chitral take an hour and a half, even in good weather. It
winds so sharply and narrowly that you can't see more than a hundred yards
ahead; only extremely skilful and sober drivers can handle the challenge of its
crumbling steepness, and every year many people are killed as jeeps overloaded
with timber or passengers or both slide off the edge.
When
you finally emerge from the granite canyon into the valley, as it opens to
reveal houses, temples and fields clinging to the hillsides, it is an
experience not unlike coming upon a fabulous long-hidden ruin in an Indiana
Jones epic. The air is clear, filled with the scent of newly cut cedar. The
rivers sparkle.
The
greenery of the fields, meadows and orchards seems impossibly fresh.
Bihir
and its two neighbouring valleys, in this craggy corner of Pakistan's North
West Frontier province, nestled below the soaring white walls of the Hindu Kush
range, are the last hold-outs of a living ancient culture. They are the
remaining strongholds of the Kalasha - the 'wearers of black'.
The
Kalasha are the surviving Kafirs of Kafiristan, the legendary 'land of the
infidels' made famous by Rudyard Kipling (and then film director John Huston in
The Man Who Would Be King. For centuries, Kafiristan stretched across both Afghanistan and Pakistan; today all that remains is
a hill tribe of merely 3,500 souls, the only pagans to be found for thousands
of miles in any direction.
Many
of the Kalasha claim descent from the armies of Alexander the Great and indeed,
their faces look strikingly similar to those you would encounter in Split or Montenegro.
They make wine, revere animals, and believe in mountaintop fairies. To observe
their lives is to be transported far from today's North West Frontier with its
increasingly militant, misogynistic brand of Islam to a world that Homer's
contemporaries might have recognised. Polytheists who divide the world into male
and female realms, the Kalasha claim they were once a literate culture but
their books were burned long ago by savage tribes. Their religion harks back to
ancient fertility cults. Every year, they practice the rite known as 'budalak'.
A teenage boy is selected to go alone into the high forests for almost a year.
When he returns on a feast day, he may sleep with any and as many Kalash women
as he chooses.
They
have long been so isolated and seemed so strange to nearby peoples that they
are believed by many to hibernate like animals. But the rugged remoteness that
once protected this fascinating culture is disappearing fast, as better roads
are built, and Muslim homesteaders from Punjab and elsewhere in Pakistan
outnumber the Kalasha in their once inaccessible valleys. The settlers have
brought with them mosques, missionaries and a money economy that has landed in
deep debt families more familiar with the barter system.
Increasingly
exposed to the electric world of mobile phones, videos and even satellite TV,
the Kalash young yearn for the glamour of life beyond their valleys.
Having
survived for centuries against fearful odds, the Kalash culture, with its links
to long lost civilizations, is today under threat from militant Islam, rapid
deforestation, technology and a lethal combination of gullibility and greed
among the Kalasha themselves. Indeed, it would probably be gone already were it
not for the efforts of an eccentric 69-year old Englishwoman known locally as
'Bibi Doe'.
It
was she who built the first latrines here and brought the first stoves - with
help from the British High Commission - so that the women no longer suffer eye
and lung diseases from open fires inside the houses. She opened dispensaries
where locals can get aspirin and antibiotics that stop the children dying from
fever.
For
two decades she has raised money for inoculations, fresh water pipes and even
bridges. She has driven sick people to the hospital in Chitral or even distant Peshawar, where her
little NGO paid the bills.
Other
foreign helpers and NGOs who have come to the Kalash valleys may give away more
money, but when there is a real problem - floods washing away the fields and
houses, local boys who have fallen into bad company and been arrested in the
big city - the people come to Bibi Doe for help. And she always gives it. At
one point she went all the way to Kabul
to rescue a local boy who had volunteered for Jihad and been captured by coalition
soldiers.
It
is hard to believe that that a 69-year-old woman with arthritic knees and a bad
back could make the journey from her home in Peshawar to Chitral so often - 12
times last October alone - ferrying carloads of medicines up to the valleys and
bringing sick people down to the hospital. But Bibi Doe regularly puts up with
dangers and physical discomforts that would fell a woman half her age. In 1990
she almost drowned when her Land Cruiser was hit by a flash flood while
crossing a river. It's why she never wears a seat belt.
For
Bibi Doe, death threats are a fact of life. Over A quarter-century, she has
battled corrupt officials, the frontier timber mafia, Kalash distillers of
lethal moonshine liquor, bigoted mullahs, pimps, jihadist militants, insensitive
tourists, unscrupulous entrepreneurs, giant aid agencies, foreign academics and
do-gooders she considers exploitative.
If
you ever read that I've died in accident,' she says as we load up her Land
Cruiser before leaving for Birir, 'you'd better come back and investigate what
really happened.'
She
is named after her favourite Kalash dog - an orphaned pup she adopted in 1986
after its mother was taken by a wolf. The children of the valleys heard her
shouting out, 'Bibi Doe! Bibi Doe!'
as
she tramped up and down the trails with a backpack full of medicines. It became
their name for her, and then everyone's name for her, even her own local
adoptive family. When she raised money for the repair of a 1927 suspension
bridge across the Chitral river, on which the commerce of the valleys depends,
she ensured that plaque on the bridge read: 'Repaired 2006 by Bibi Doe'.
All
of her projects are small scale enterprises based on requests from the local
people, a careful assessment of their impact on the environment and the
culture, and on her deep knowledge of the valleys. In general, she provides the
materials and expertise in engineering and the recipients are supposed to
provide labour.
She
doesn't want to deepen the dependency culture fostered by some of the NGOs
here. As a result she has won the trust of a Pakistani government that is
suprisingly keen to protect the Kalash.
It
is difficult to get anything finished in the valleys, and almost everyone she
deals with - contractors, government officials, labourers, expects a cut. ('I'm
surrounded by dacoits,' she says.) She is proud to say that she has never
knowingly paid a bribe in all her years here ('I'm always on my guard'). She
also brings to the task an expertise rare in the aid business - years ago, in a
different life, she was a contractor herself. In the 1960s, she achieved minor
celebrity in New York
as the city's first female decorator. 'It was before women's lib and they'd
never heard of a woman painting and plastering,' she says.
Before
she was adopted by a Kalash family in Bihir in 1981, Bibi Doe was known as
Maureen Lines, and her life before she came to live in Bihir was no less
extraordinary than it is today. Born in North London to a middle-class family,
Lines has over the years been a tourist official in Greece,
a taxi driver, a waitress, a domestic in Manhattan
and Beirut, a
petrol pump attendant, and an author of Gothic novels. She has also written
several books about her travels in Afghanistan and the Northwest
Frontier. Certainly, she never planned to become any kind of aid worker. 'Never
in my wildest dreams did I think I'd be involved in development.'
Unlike
similarly redoubtable women travellers in the Muslim world in 19th and early
20th century, she doesn't come from an aristocratic background.
Nor
does she treat travel and living abroad as an opportunity for dressing up 'like
the natives'. She prefers to wear a simple shirt and trousers to a shalwar
kammez and headscarf. She would never wear the traditional Kalash beaded
headdresses and cinched-in black dresses. Her white hair is cut short and neat.
She has worn a burqa, when travelling over the passes to and from Afghanistan in
the company of Mujahedin fighters, but found it 'horrible, dehumanising'.
Talking
to her in her little room in Birir, the fire blazing and a gas lamp hissing in
the background, she explains that her first memories are of huddling in a
Morrison shelter as bombs of the Blitz rained down. An only child (her father
worked in radar) her companions growing up were dogs, books and fantasy. She
left school at 16 and went to study shorthand and speech at Harrow Tech with
hopes of becoming an actress or a journalist. Both dreams dissolved when her
mother left her father. Soon afterwards, Lines ran away and found a job as a
waitress at one of the new espresso bars in central London. She then headed to Paris, to sell the Herald Tribune like Jean
Seberg in Godard's Au Bout du Souffle. In 1961, she emigrated to America. 'It
was one of those impulses. I've lived my life on impulses. I was standing at a
bus-stop in the rain, I'd had a fight with my lover and I was out of work when
I saw a sign in Knightsbridge advertising for "domestics in America".
Six months later I was on a ship to New
York.'
The
underpaid job didn't last long and Lines went to work in a coffee shop in Greenwich Village. It was the early 60s and the beatnik
years were in full spate. For a decade she worked just to pay for partying and
studying.
First
she went to the New School to study journalism and poetry, and then switched
to New York University to do international affairs
and Arabic. There, she discovered her love of travel and of the Muslim and Arab
worlds. In 1964 - before the advent of overland holidays and the hippie trail
to India - she hitchhiked
from Istanbul to Damascus. 'Everyone said I was fool and that
I'd be murdered or raped. But I never had a problem as a woman,' she recalls.
She
had moved back to England
when her travels took her to Pakistan
and the Kalash valleys for the first time. It was the culmination of a voyage
taking in Cairo, Khartoum
and Bahrain.
She and Pakistan
got on well immediately.
'Within
24 hours I was on the radio giving my impressions of the country,' she laughs.
'It's been like that ever since.'
She
remembers her first contact with a Kalash woman. Lines was trying to find a
route across a fast flowing stream when a tall, dignified kalash woman showed
her a place to cross. Unusually the woman was veiled. On her way across the
smooth stones Lines slipped. To her surprise the woman was right behind her and
caught her arm. The veil slipped and Lines saw that her face was disfigured by
a mass of 'pink and black scabs'. A few days later Lines went into Chitral and
bought some medicines and brought them back to treat the woman.
A
year later, Lines returned to the valleys and managed to secure a permit to
stay for a month. It was then that she met her Tak-Dara, who adopted Lines and
became her 'Kalash mother'. But her visit began awkwardly when she blundered
into the grounds of a Bashali or women's house - where the Kalash women must
live when menstruating or pregnant. Because she left the building without
changing her clothes, a valuable goat had to be sacrificed.] It was during this
second stay that Lines resolved to go back to America and get a medical
qualification so she could help the Kalash.
Back
in New York
she trained as a paramedic, though illness delayed her return to the valleys
for four years. Once established she became a kind of barefoot doctor in hiking
boots walking from one village to another, a backpack full of medicine, a dog
or two at her side. 'I did 10 to 12 miles a day. I had a ball.' Whenever she
could, she 'would literally hijack passing doctors' for medicines.
In
1990, she started her pit latrine and stove projects - both of which grew
naturally out of her medical work. The first money she raised came from bake
sales and the like at her late mother's home in Princes Risborough in
Buckinghamshire. Soon, she began to receive money from governments and
embassies. She found herself spending more and more time in Islamabad talking to diplomats and Pakistani
officials, and getting more involved with environmental threats to the Kalash,
like uncontrolled tourism and deforestation.
Three
years later, she started her Pakistani NGO - the Kalash Environmental
Protection Society - and then, in 1993, the British charity that supports it,
the Hindu Kush Conservation Association. She became a citizen of Pakistan after
her one of her 'enemies' in officialdom almost managed to get her deported a
few years ago. 'This young man married me and that's how I got my ID card, she
says. 'He's somewhere in England,
now, I don't know where. It's a real soap opera.'
I
first met Maureen Lines in Chitral in 1994. She had just founded the 'Kalash
Guides' to soften the impact of tourism in the valleys. Travellers were
encouraged to use the local guides she had trained rather than outsiders from
the hotels of Chitral. Lines had had enough of seeing 'jeeps tear up people's
fields' and busloads of tourists surrounding Kalash women as they bathed in the
river. The scheme also meant that Kalash families rather than Punjabi
carpetbaggers gained some economic benefit from tourism, and ensured that
visitors didn't get lost on the mountain trails. I stayed in a guest room of
one of the guides in Birir - a fascinating but cold and flea ridden experiment
in medieval living. The guide scheme worked until 9/11 and the Afghan war,
which dried up the tourist flood.
Today,
Lines is as remarkable, thoughtful, and --- energetic as when I last saw her -
she is also tough, cantankerous, slightly deaf and marvellous company. Her
no-nonsense approach seems to have neutralised the usual disadvantages of being
a woman in one of the most sexually oppressive places in Asia.
The North West Frontier of Pakistan is the most conservative part of a
conservative country. In the picturesque Bazaars of Chitral town, you are
unlikely ever to see a womaN. Here, an adult female goes out in public twice in
her life: once to leave her father's house for her husband's, the next time to
be buried.
The
contrast with the Kalash valleys could hardly be greater. The first thing you
notice in Birir or its sister valleys is the sound and sight of women -
ubiquitous, assertive and wearing traditional dress.
There
are no hotels in the citadel villages of Birir so Lines invites me to stay with
her Kalash family in a room next to their one story house set against the
hillside, with its rickety veranda looking down on a grove of trees surrounding
a little cemetery.
(Until
very recently the Kalash always put their dead into open coffins above ground;
these days they often bury corpses to prevent grave robbery. All the carved
wooden equestrian figures that once decorated their cemeteries have been stolen
or sold.) The flat roofed Kalash houses are made of stone, wood and mud, and
withstand the region's earthquakes much better than modern concrete buildings.
Extended
families of 20 or more live in the houses, with each married couple and their
children occupying a single dark room with an earthen floor.
In
the house of Lines' adoptive family, we huddle against the cold around the
wood-burning metal stove. We are sitting on low stools made of walnut and
animal hide - the Kalash are one of the few peoples of the subcontinent who
don't sit on the floor. As we eat and Maureen chats away in Kalash to Sainusar,
a woman in her forties, (and the daughter of Lines' blood sister) and various
other family members, a small bulb above us emits a feeble glow. There is some
electricity in the valley - from two small hydroelectric plants - but it is
weak and is one reason why, as Lines explains, the technology craved by the
young cause such problems here: 'There isn't enough current to run both a TV
and light for the rest of the family.'
Lines
has brought rice - too expensive for most Kalash - making for a feast, with
cooked vegetables and flat bread and a salad of onions and tomatoes. We drink
the rough homemade red wine, which tastes a bit like vodka and grape juice, but
it does the trick.
Some
of the men go off elsewhere to smoke hashish, a habit introduced by hippie
backpackers. But everyone is in bed soon after nightfall.
Later
that night as I stumble through the half-frozen mud from the latrine it seems
all the more amazing to me that Lines - who is personally fastidious to the
point of suffering from a mild phobia about dirt - has made her home among
these people, who for all their charm do not value cleanliness highly.
Her
life here is a Spartan one, unlike that of so many aid workers here and around
the world. 'I couldn't live in area like this and live in luxury, even if I
could afford it,' she says. 'If you are going to work for the people you have
to live the same way.'
The
next morning, we visit one of Maureen's dispensaries in lower Birir. Unlike the
government dispensary further up the valley, it is well stocked.
One
of the problems faced by the Kalash valley, like so many other remote places of
the subcontinent, is that government facilities tend to exist only on paper or
to suffer from extreme absenteeism. For instance, there is a government doctor
assigned to the Kalash valleys, but he somehow collects his salary without
having to endure months in a remote place among strange and primitive people.
The
dispensary is just a bare concrete room with a couple of shelves of medications
and a ledger. It is maintained by Hassan and Shah Hussein, two voluble young
Muslim men from a nearby village. One is a Kalash convert, the other is from
one of the families who have moved here from the Punjab and elsewhere in Pakistan.
Maureen has found that Muslims of the valleys are much more likely to turn up
to work. The Kalash for all their charm and humour are apparently not an
entrepreneurial or hardworking people.
One
of the strange things about morning in Birir is the amplified sound of the
muezzin's call to prayer. As Lines says, 'If I'm in the Middle East or even
Peshawar and I hear the Azzam, I like it; if I'm in the Kalash valleys it
grates like chalk on a blackboard.' Indeed Islam sometimes feels like a
colonial presence here, with mosques built in all the Kalash villages. Though
the Pakistani federal government 'genuinely supports freedom of religion', as
Lines says, and has long been serious about protecting the Kalash culture, the
provincial government is now controlled by the Muslim Fundamentalist party, the
MMA, which has strong links to the Taliban across the border. 'The Bearded
Ones', as more secular minded Pakistani's call them, disapprove of the infidel
presence in their midst.
According
to Minoo Bhandara, a Pakistani MP and former minister for minorities, Muslim
families here insist that the families of Kalash brides or grooms also convert,
so they don't have to suffer the humiliation of kafir in-laws.
'A
lot of money is exchanged, I believe,' he explains. "They don't convert
for any religious or ideological reason - there has got to be a financial
incentive.'
Though
the Kalash population has increased from 2,500 ten years ago to 3,500 today,
thanks to improvements in child mortality (a development for which Lines is in
part responsible), the conversion rate means that they remain in danger of
extinction.
I
spend a further week with Lines in Birir as she visits her various projects in
the three valleys: an irrigation project here, a dispensary there, latrine
projects everywhere. Though it's cold and she hates the way her knees and back
limit her mobility ('I'm worried I won't be able to go up to the high pastures
in the Spring,' she grumbles) she is ebullient after a successful fundraising
dinner in Islamabad
and positive meetings with the Kalash Coordinating Committee. The Australians,
Brits and Finns are her best supporters.
Stopping
deforestation by the 'timber mafia' takes up an increasing amount of her time.
There are very few forests left in Pakistan and there's enough demand
to render the anti-deforestation laws virtually meaningless. Donkeys and
overloaded jeeps carry heavy loads of sweet smelling cedar and deodar out of
the valleys every night. As the forests disappear, flash floods become more and
more common. 'The majority of the people' are behind her, Lines says. 'But the
big guys in Birir, corrupt Kalash and corrupt Muslims, they don't give a damn.
They've
got enough money accumulated, they can go some place else after the land has
been ruined. The other problem is corruption in the forest service. We had a
good guy here but the bearded ones had him transferred and the wood is now
pouring out again.'
Two
things ensure that Lines can punch above her weight. She has access to the
Pakistani media and a network of supporters in Pakistan and abroad. Some of them
are unlikely figures, like the police special branch officers who stood by her
when her political enemies tried to get her arrested and deported three years
ago.
Among
those allies is Railways chief Shakil Durrani, who was district commissioner in
Chitral when Maureen first came, and then chief secretary of the whole North West Frontier Province.
He found the Kalash fascinating and 'wanted to do my bit to ensure that they
remain, not as zoo people but a vibrant living people'. Like many other
sympathetic observers, Durrani believes that the Kalash are 'their own worst
enemies' with their lawsuits, squabbling disunity, and what he calls 'their
casual attitude to many things in life, especially money.'
DURRANI
still does what can to help and is on the board of KEPS. At one point, he asked
Diana, Princess of Wales, to become a patron of the Kalasha. 'She agreed in
principle to lend her name,' he says, though she died before the project came
to fruition.
A
couple of days into our stay in Birir, all work - though not Lines' - comes to
a halt. An old man has died. The funeral will last for three days during which
time people will walk from all of the valleys to pay their respects.
Funerals
are expensive for the Kalash - partly because all work ceases but mostly
because the bereaved family is expected to sacrifice goats and cows to feed all
the guests. It's one of the only times that the Kalash eat meat - animals are
too valuable to slaughter except on such occasions. In any case the Kalash have
an almost Buddhist reverence for living things.
Aside
from snakes and scorpions, the one species that the Kalash abhor is the
chicken. Their oral tradition holds that the Kalasha will disappear if chickens
are brought into their valleys. Sad to say, their Muslim neighbours have done
just that.
The
highlight of the funeral comes when a group of Kalash women form a semi circle
around the corpse - which LIES on a bier, covered in gold cloth, for the entire
period of the ceremony - and link arms. Then they dance around the body while
other women chant. You can tell the women from the bereaved family because they
are the only females with bare heads (a Kalash woman only takes off her
headdress when in mourning). In between the dances, the male elders take turns
telling the life story of the deceased in a kind of chant. It is a truly
extraordinary spectacle.
After
the funeral, I accompany Lines to Bumburet. It is the largest and most
beautiful of the Kalash valleys, with snow-clad peaks visible at both top and
bottom. But there are grubby hotels here and shops and NGO offices, and even
satellite dishes on some of the houses. Even with tourism so weak, there are
more foreigners here than in the other valleys. When we stop for tea and some
flat bread and goat's cheese - Lines has hyperglycemia - I meet an Italian
anthropology professor dressed in full shalwar kameez and chitrali cap, his
eyes made-up with eyeliner.
Here,
a wealthy Greek NGO is building a huge cedar wood mansion they have called the
Kalash House which will include a museum, school and conference centre. I meet
Athanasios, head of the Greek NGO briefly as he drives out of the valley in his
SUV. He has shaggy hair and dark glasses and looks a bit like a Seventies' rock
star. Lines says the mansion is a monument to his egotism. At one point, she
tells me, Athanasios gave what he called a 'scholarship', in fact a cash gift
of 30,000 rupees, to every kalash family with a child of school age. 'A cash
gift. It was the most corrupting thing,' she shouts over the noise of the Land
Cruiser as it bounces down the jeep track. 'Many families used the money to buy
land.' Increasingly the Kalasha see all western outsiders as a source of easy
money.
She
talks a great deal about the 'corruption' of the Kalash. Sometimes she means it
in the literal sense. One of the wealthier Kalash families became so by
stealing and selling statues in the valleys. She is greatly concerned by the
replacement of the barter system, and the loss of traditional skills, like
shoemaking (the women now wear plastic shoes from Chittral that hurt their
feet.) Even the education offered here is not entirely a boon in her opinion.
'Some of the boys speak a few words of English, put on western clothes and
think "Man, I'm cool". They have enough education not to want to work
in the fields but not enough to get a job in the world outside. The girls want
easy money and so they become prostitutes.' Education has also undermined the gerontocratic
social system of the valleys: young people with a smattering of literacy
despise their illiterate parents and long to join the exciting world outside.
Not
everyone agrees with Lines that the Kalash culture should be protected from the
outside world with it's technology and subversive pop culture.
Minoo
Bandhara, a Pakistani MP and one of Lines' longtime supporters, is adamant that
she is wrong about development in the valleys, though he too thinks the Greek
mansion in Bumburet is 'horrendous'. As he tells me in his office in Islamabad, 'She doesn't
want hotels. She wants tough roads so people tough it out.
She
doesn't want too many tourists to contaminate the Kalash. But they are like
other ordinary folks: if you ask them what they want most in the world they
would say, "a cell phone and a television". The rest of the world has
it, why not them?'
Unlike
some of the aid agencies here, Lines believes that sanitation and education
should come before electricity and improved roads. 'They need some knowledge
and awareness first. I saw the same thing in Pathan culture when I first came
to Pakistan,'
she says. 'I was taken to a small village in the tribal areas and they had a
refigerator in the sitting room but no sanitation, no drinking water, no
toilet. But they did have electricity.'
Lines
is horrified by the money that has been wasted by big aid agencies here, and by
the corruption that accompanies so many projects. When the Canadian government
was interested in building a school in Bumburet in the 1990s she advised them
to rent a building for the school instead. 'I knew where the money would go,'
she says.
I
get some sense of what she means on the way back to Chitral when we pass
several lengths of huge ugly piping. It is a failed water project by the Agha
Khan charity AKSP. It cost nine million rupees (£75,000), but was never
finished. Another AKSP project involved building a road, but 'they put it on
the wrong side of the river and it washed away. I've seen so much money wasted
here, money which could have helped the people in so many good ways.'
When
Lines first started her UK
charity, a lawyer friend told her to read a biography of Dian Fossey, the
murdered American ethologist. 'He told me: "If what you do is not
successful you will have no problem, but if you achieve things your life will
be miserable." It's an observation that has come true.'
The
frustrations are huge, and growing. Some of the Kalash that Lines trained to be
guides ended up as criminals or exploiting their own people. Despite her
successes - there is hope that Unesco may declare the valleys a heritage site -
Lines fears that Kalash culture may disappear entirely within a decade.
The
owner of the Hindu Kush
Heights, a hotel
overlooking the Chitral river valley, Prince Siraj al Mulk, tells me: 'We're so
lucky someone like Maureen is giving her time to us. We could never understand
why someone would leave a lovely place like England to do this. It's a hell of
a lot of work for one person to take on. I just hope she keeps on doing what
she's doing.'
'I
carry on because of the women,' Lines sighs. 'People ask what made you give up
your life to do this. What is it I've given up? I'm doing exactly what I want
to do and the whole way of life here has given me so much. I've had a very rich
life here.' She looks out over the valley, then steps over the lintel into her
little house where Sinusai is smiling at her and smoothing out dough on the top
of the once shiny stove.
