University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Filomena Critelli (left) and Bina Ahmed flank Victoria Bhajhan, director of the Dastak Charitable Trust, a women's shelter in Pakistan.

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• “It was an eye-opener for me to see how privileged I am to live where I have fundamental rights.”

  Bina Ahmed

  MSW student

By JUDSON MEAD

Published: September 9, 2009

Filomena Critelli, an assistant professor in the School of Social Work, is interested in policy and transnational social work issues. One of her research projects is a study of methods women in Pakistan are using to improve their status, especially with respect to the social tolerance of domestic violence.

Her research has been funded by grants from the school’s Les Brun Research Endowment Fund Pilot Program and from UB’s Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy to support travel to the city of Lahore, Pakistan, where she is observing the work of AGHS Legal Aid, a practice specializing in women’s rights, and the Dastak Charitable Trust, a women’s shelter established by the principals of the legal aid group.

She is interviewing lawyers, social workers and residents of the shelter in order to build an ethnographic picture of their work.

Bina Ahmed is an Urdu-speaking MSW student from Toronto who was born in Pakistan but raised in Saudi Arabia before her family moved to Canada 12 years ago. She’s interested in international social work.

Someone told Ahmed she should meet Critelli. And two weeks after she did, Ahmed was getting ready to travel with Critelli to Lahore, where her family still has property and she has cousins to visit. It would be her first trip to Pakistan since she was a child.

For Critelli, Ahmed’s appearance was a boon. On her first trip to Lahore, she’d had to depend on bilingual Pakistanis to translate when she was interviewing non-English speakers. In Ahmed, she had a fluent translator who also could be a research colleague, someone sensitive to nuance in both question and answer, and able to extend and elaborate on lines of inquiry.

Ahmed crammed for the trip, studying guidelines for doing research in other cultures and getting up to speed on Critelli’s project. She also briefed herself on general issues of cultural competency, which might seem unnecessary for someone raised in a Pakistani household in an expatriate Pakistani community, but the trip proved otherwise.

Critelli and Ahmed spent a month in Lahore during UB’s 2008-09 winter break. When she landed, Ahmed experienced culture shock. The street scene was completely different from Toronto’s or Buffalo’s. Among the things that unsettled her was that she was the object of “hooting” by men when she went out without covering her head.

She also had a hard time getting comfortable with the vehement, even intimidating, style of arguing she encountered when she and her cousins talked about women’s rights. She was surprised at how different her worldview is from that of many people she met, despite having been raised with what she calls “Pakistani values.”

“It was an eye-opener for me to see how privileged I am to live where I have fundamental rights,” she says.

The subject of Critelli’s research presented the two with other cultural challenges. They could be enthusiastic about the success story of a village woman who had escaped to the women’s shelter after running away from her family to marry for love and who was now attending college and working for the legal aid firm; and then be brought up short by the woman’s deep and enduring pain and guilt about betraying her family. Critelli says that listening to the women’s stories, she’d realize how much her assumptions were bounded by a Western perspective.

One day at the legal aid firm, she and Ahmed witnessed a woman being hustled to safety out a back way when her estranged family was gathering in front of the building.

AGHS Legal Aid was founded in 1986 by sisters Asma Jahangir and Hina Jalani, two of the most prominent women in Pakistan who, in 1980, had been the first women in the nation to open a law firm. Their legal practice specializes in divorce and other women’s legal matters; the legal aid organization, headed by well-known activist Shahtaj Qizilbash, offers paralegal education for women.

Now, back in Buffalo, Ahmed is translating and transcribing tapes of more than 20 lengthy interviews she and Critelli conducted—at the rate of 10 hours of labor for every hour of tape. When that work is done, she will go through the transcripts to look for common themes. Eventually, Critelli will compare what they collected with the hypotheses she brought to this phase of her work.

For Ahmed, the experience reinforced her interest in working internationally to help marginalized populations. For Critelli, it was another chapter in her education—one that she will pass along—about how many different right answers there may be to fundamental questions about women’s rights.