Her slate grey eyes shyly peeping from beneath a veil at her hushed audience, 29-year-old Belqees limps slowly into the mud-brick hovel and eases herself to the floor. "I had polio when I was a child. Don't let this happen to your sons and daughters," the schoolteacher quietly tells the suspicious parents, gesturing at her partly paralysed leg beneath a pair of traditional, pyjama-style trousers. The family in Chaman, the wild west-style border crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan, are scared of the clear liquid she carries in a tiny bottle.
They think it was made by the Americans to sterilise their children.
But Belqees's words have stirred them. They mutter amongst themselves, and finally agree to give the vaccine to the swarm of barefoot, dirt-smeared youngsters who swarm around the house.
Belqees is one of a growing army of women in Pakistan who are on the frontline of the final battle against polio, which at its peak paralysed or killed up to a million people a year worldwide, most of them children.
Pakistan is one of only six countries in the world where the disease remains endemic. The others are neighbouring Afghanistan and India, plus Egypt, Niger and Nigeria in Africa.
Health organisations led by the United Nations aim to wash the waterborne virus down the drain of history by the end of the year, much like smallpox was eradicated in the 1980s. It no longer exists in the industrialised world.
Elsewhere, however, polio is proving tougher to eradicate, due to a combination of scientific factors and cultural problems.
In Nigeria, for example, a group of Islamic clerics last year launched a movement against the immunisations, causing an outbreak that has spread to other African countries where the disease had previously been wiped out.
One state in northern Nigeria said this week it would jail any parents who refused to have their children vaccinated.
Pakistan faces a similar issue with refusals by the conservative and illiterate elements of its 150 million population. But the sheer determination of the country's long-suffering women is helping to overcome it.
"Women are essential to what we're doing," says Jeff Bates, the polio project officer in Pakistan for UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund.
"Without female participation we simply would not have the capacity to reach enough children for the level of immunity to stop polio."
The World Health Organisation (WHO) and UNICEF last week held the latest of their eight-times-yearly national immunisation drives in Pakistan, when 180,000 vaccinators fanned out from the parched south-western deserts to the snowy northern peaks.
During each three-day period of intense activity some 30 million children aged under five receive the vaccine. Each child needs up to six jabs to be fully immunised. Similar drives are held in the other afflicted countries, as well as those which have eradicated polio but which are at risk of backsliding.
In 2003 there were 103 documented cases of polio in Pakistan but last year the number dropped to 53, and so far this year there have been only five.
But in the country's more conservative regions, male immunisation teams still find it difficult to get access to houses where women are confined for most of the day with the children while their husbands go out to work.
The mothers will either not let them in or will only speak to them from behind a curtain, meaning the teams cannot count the children in the house and ensure they are all immunised.
Other women will not listen to men when they try to allay their fears about the vaccine.
With its teeming population of ultra-conservative Pakistanis and Afghan refugees, Chaman and the surrounding district of Qilla Abdullah has long been a so-called "hot spot" for refusals.
But it has also spawned a new way of recruiting and involving more women - one that is now the model for the rest of Pakistan and which could even help change the Islamic republic's entrenched attitudes about gender and social issues.
The idea is simple, according to Farida Javed, a WHO advocacy officer who dreamed it up in 2003. They pick five key women in every local council area, for example, a school teacher, a religious leader's wife, a councillor, a health worker and a midwife.
Each of them then finds another five women who is able to reach out to the community and recruit more female vaccinators.
The results in Qilla Abdullah were dramatic, Javed says. All-female teams have risen from 15 percent to 80 percent and refusals have dropped markedly.
"And it is making women more free, it's getting them out of their houses. Slowly, slowly we are seeing a change, although it may take three, four, five years," she adds.
Outside a shack in Chaman that doubles as an immunisation centre, Razia, a 25-year-old local social campaign worker, takes a break from the heat. "Some of our girls get beaten, even by other women. It happened to me today, because they didn't want the vaccine for their children," she says, but adds that the response is largely positive.
Many vaccinators are children themselves. Wearing black veils over colourful tunics and trousers, 15-year-old Saima and Shamsa go door to door in Chaman's slums with a coolbox full of vaccine.
"I do it because I want to help my community. Once or twice I have had trouble from men but people are mostly very aware about polio," says Saima.
The teams have also enlisted the help of religious leaders, or mullahs. "We had 1,400 people at one meeting who were all against the polio vaccine because of the female involvement. It took us five hours but we won them over," says Ata Ur Rehman, a cleric and doctor at a hospital in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province around 100 kilometres (60 miles) from Chaman.
Behind it all is one goal: to ensure no more children will suffer like three-year-old Muhammad Naeem and his two-year-old cousin Atiqullah.
At the mudwalled compound where the boys' families live with four others, a doctor shows Naeem's leg, withered from the polio. Then a young relative brings in two-year-old Atiqullah, who was struck with partial polio paralysis of the legs 18 months after his cousin, because his family refused to immunise him too.
"We regret it very much. Now we are vaccinating all the children," says Naeem's 40-year-old father Mohammed Nabi.
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