Working Mother, 2001

By VEENU SINGH

This article originally ran on the Sustainable Development Networking Programme website on May 20, 2001.

Safia Khalil Rizvi is 36, Single, mother, biotechnologist and founder of a non-profit literacy outfit.

Her name leapt out of the pile of nominations.  “All the judges had you on their top-three list,” the editor of the Working Woman magazine, Lisa Benenson, told Safia Khalil Rizvi.  So it had to be her, the Working Mother of the Year 2001. Rizvi is 36, Single, a mother, a biotechnologist and founder of a global computer literacy non-profit outfit.

Is that the kind of résumé you need to grab the prestigious American award? Some winners may have made do with less or more but for Rizvi, a Pakistani now settled in Philadelphia, USA, it did the trick.  In her acceptance speech last month, she said: "I feel compelled to share this award with other single mothers — immigrant mothers in particular, south Asian mothers and working mothers."

She is the first non-American native to get this award; it’s not, thus, a small honour.  And, it was certainly not easy qualifying for it, though, as the editor told her, she won it easily.  For the fifth child of a patriarchal Muslim family of Karachi, the journey was long and arduous, one broken marriage thrown in.

Safia’s family relocated to Pakistan from Uttar Pradesh in 1955.  She was born eight years later.  Though her family did not look kindly upon its woman going to school or college, they made an exception for her.  In college, she easily impressed her teachers who told her she should study more, perhaps in an American university.

The more she thought about it, the more she liked the idea.  But she also worried about her family’s reaction: it was one thing to go to the local college and quite another to go to another country.  But she applied, secretly.  University of Oklahoma accepted her application and threw in a full assistantship to make it easier for her financially.  Now she told her family.
Her brothers, Safia recalls, were appalled.  But, fortunately for her, she found an ally in her mother.  The family relented, but demanded she should go there a married woman and not single. Safia agreed and a match was shortly arranged. But things weren’t going to be easy for her.

The marriage had to be called off.  She was back to square one.  But help arrived in the form of an uncle, Zoe Ansari, a professor at Bombay University.  And she was off, studied chemistry and joined a pharmaceutical company.  Today, she is with the bioinformatics department of GlaxoSmithKline, working on ways to use the recently mapped human genome to treat cancer.
In between she met and married a countryman, from whom she got her surname Rizvi.  They are separated now.  “It was a difficult marriage,” she says.  Her daughter Sheherzad Maham Rizvi, from this marriage is with her and, Safia says, wants to become a doctor and the first woman president of the United States of America.

The young girl surely knows how to dream and with a mother like Safia who dared to dream once, she is in able hands.  Safia, meanwhile, is dreaming another dream: to make economically disadvantaged women and children compute literate through her non-profit organisation eLIT-Empowerment through learning and Information Technology.  It plans to start projects in Kukutpally (near Hyderabad in India) and Karachi in the next two months.

That’s one success story the subcontinent will not forget in a hurry.
 
Source: Hindustan Times

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