Woman of many firsts in her native country…
|
Tasneem Bandukwala, is a renowned name in Rotary and Jaycees circle. Rotary and Jaycee are two well-organised and well-known voluntary organizations known for their charitable work across the globe. On the eve of International Mothers’ Day, we have highlighted a story on this remarkable lady written by a US-based Rotarian which was published in a US-based newspaper. |
|
Tasneem Bandukwala interrupted a visit to her son who lives in Beaverton, Oregon, to bring special thanks to residents of our area who helped her with the final dollars needed to complete three humanitarian projects in her native Karachi, Pakistan. Tasneem is heralded in her country as the first woman to be invited to become a member of the Jaycees in Pakistan when she was in her 20s and raising three children. |
 |
| Following a rapid advance through the Jaycee ranks in Pakistan, Tasneem became immersed in international causes – many of them initiatives for peace in that region of the globe, particularly with her birth country, India. An infant at the time, she and her family had fled India for Pakistan in 1947. |
| The daily newspaper in Karachi described her as “a confident, feisty person out to make a positive difference in people’s lives.” She has an amazing number of friends, many of whom are in this area where her son once lived and where she developed warm acquaintances with members of the Northshore and Woodinville Rotary clubs. She had scored another first later in her life. She became the first woman Rotarian in her country, served as president of one of the 28 clubs in Karachi and just recently started a new one in Karachi and became its president. |
|
Rotary attendance is important to her, no matter where she might happen to travel. When her son took her on the dinner train on the Eastside in the mid-1990s it stopped at Columbia Winery where she spotted the familiar service club wheel emblem– denoting that a Rotary club met there weekly. She contacted president Larry Leonardson and found that the club was holding an auction instead of a meeting that week. Tasneem, undaunted, attended the auction and quickly became the center of attention, eager to tell this captive audience the needs of her impoverished people back home. |
| Leaders of the two Rotary clubs were swayed by her persuasiveness and dedication and over four years proceeded to work through the bureaucracy of the international service club to arrange for grants totaling nearly $100,000 to help finance eye surgery equipment that could be taken into the rural areas around Karachi, technical equipment for a co-ed vocational school and presently a vocational school for abused and abandoned women who are on their own but lack the skills to make a decent living in an occupation acceptable within the Pakistani culture. |
| Tasneem made history in November of 1987 when she was inducted into the downtown Karachi Rotary Club as the first woman in Pakistan Rotary. It was the same year that Natalie McRoberts became the first woman member of the newly chartered Woodinville Rotary Club. |
|
By 1993 Tasneem became her club’s president and later served as an assistant governor for her district. It was during that tenure that her interest in travel and peace initiatives blended with her passion for getting people together one-on-one to learn that their differences weren’t so great. South Asia saw a lot of Tasneem Bandukwala espousing this cause. |
| She was gravely disappointed on Dec. 25, 2001 when political circumstances led to cancellation of a trip she had spent countless hours and energy to make happen – 150 Rotarians from Pakistan getting together in Jabalpur, India with Rotarians from India, to get acquainted and learn of each others club projects and personal aspirations. The governments closed the borders to travel on that date. She hopes to revive the trip when the time is right. |
| Tasneem admits to having lived a sheltered, but not easy life. Arriving in Karachi with her father and mother in 1947, she attended private schools for girls and only two years of home economics college. When she was nine her father, a government official, died and her mother was left with three daughters to raise. |
| She married at age 17 to Mohammadi Bandukwala, whose family had been in the arms and ammunition business for over a hundred years. The Bandukwalas have two sons and a daughter — all grown, the sons following in her steps with a strong sense of community service, joining Jaycee and Rotary. She described the early years of marriage and her social life as a housewife as “modest”. Then came Jaycees followed by Rotary. |
| Her friendship with Woodinville’s Leonardson extended into the presidency of Max Zellweger, then president of Columbia Winery with an international background, having been born and raised in Switzerland. During visits to spend time with her son, Tasneem attended weekly Rotary meetings at Woodinville and in Kenmore where the Northshore club meets. |
| She was not hesitant to bring social needs of Pakistanis to the attention of club leaders here. As a result, Woodinville and Northshore combined efforts to apply successfully for matching grants. They included: |
| The 30 members of the Karachi-Universal Rotary was anxious to participate in a province-wide blindness prevention program, concentrating on the rural areas. They needed portable operating microscopes to permit doctors to conduct “eye camps” outside Karachi as well as at a clinic in Karachi. The doctors could perform corneal transplantations to end blindness if they only had the devices with which they could successfully complete intra ocular lens implantations. |
| This peaked the interest of not only Zellweger, but Dr. Bob Maynard of the Woodinville club. Dr. Maynard was in semi-retirement as an ophthalmologist and had traveled extensively to Third World countries to perform cataract surgery under field conditions and knew just what his colleagues in Pakistan faced. Woodinville and Northshore each committed $2,500 to the equipment project and secured $5,000 from the Puget Sound region’s Rotary district 5030. The Karachi-Universal Rotarians found $10,000 and all parties then went to Rotary International Foundation for a $20,000 grant. With a total $40,000 in hand, the equipment needed for exams and surgery was secured. |
| Zellweger and Dr. Maynard traveled to Karachi together in February of 2000 to celebrate the achievement and meet Tasneem’s family. Little did they know that Tasneem was not through with the Woodinville club. She had another project and this one couldn’t wait the time it would take to work itself through the Rotary bureaucracy. |
| The two Rotarians returned to Woodinville and convinced then president Denny Holm to support a $2,697 request to match that of Tasneem’s club which happened to be the exact amount needed to meet the then shortfall for for the first phase, $72,000 construction project under way for the Rotary Community Vocational Center in Karachi. The new facility would help youths under 16 years train in crafts, computer technology and introduction to English. |
| During their 2000 visit, Tasneem conveniently informed Zellweger of plans by the Greenland Institute of Technology for Women that it planned to build a school for between 300 and 400 single women down on their luck — actually shunned by the male population and a culture that does little for women victims of social abuses. She suggested another $40,000 matching grant applications which would involve $3,500 each from Woodinville and Northshore clubs. The district organization could only find $3,000 that time around but the Karachi-Indus club provided $10,000 to match the two U.S. clubs and Rotary International came through with $20,000. |
| Today the Greenland Education Association, an NGO (non governmental organization) has taken advantage of this international partnership and used the $40,000 for equipment in its school. The women are enrolled in such practical learning programs as tailoring and dressmaking; domestic electrical appliance repair, commercial cooking, food preservation, computer literacy, literacy, electronics and commercial gardening. |
| After spending a month in Oregon and then some time with her daughter in London, Tasneem will return to Pakistan. Her next project? She’ll be campaigning along the way creating awareness of the social evils committed against women in her country. |
| International Mothers Day is celebrated on May 10 across the world. In some parts, it is also celebrated on May 8. |
Loading ...
Hi there, i just thought i would publish and now let you know your internet sites style is genuinely smudged within the K-Melon browser. Anyhow sustain inside the quite very good function. 412314