Attending school for the first time is somewhat magical for Niaz Begum, one of the survivors of the devastating Oct. 8, 2005, South Asia earthquake. Urdu class is her favorite, the 12-year-old says with dancing green eyes, using the ruffle of a tent door to veil her embarrassment.

While her school is simple - a tent and chalkboard - the smile it brings to the children attending is symbolic of a quiet revolution.

Like Niaz, many girls from this valley near the quake's epicenter used to spend afternoons working the fields, just as their mothers did before them. Cycles of poverty combined with strict religious mores have meant a literacy rate of less than 2 percent for women and girls in this North West Frontier Province.

But now hundreds of girls are attending school for the first time, learning math and science, Urdu and English in tents at the Maira Camp, a relief center where some 20,000 people live. Many parents, when presented with the option, eagerly agreed to send their daughters.

"Whether they send their girls [to school] is largely an economic reason," says Sara Lim, an education adviser for Save the Children USA, which is teaching nearly 2,000 girls throughout the quake zone. She explains that many parents were not sending their girls to school before the earthquake because they needed them to work. But life in the camps has lifted many of those economic restraints.

Another reason they were kept out of the classroom before the quake was the "lack of female teachers," Ms. Lim adds, explaining that parents would not allow them to be educated by male teachers in classrooms where boys were present.

The fault line of October's quake encompasses some of the most conservative areas of largely Sunni Muslim Pakistan, where the rigid observance of purdah, a segregation of the sexes, has deprived many women of education, healthcare, and their own means of livelihood. Thousands of women have now been widowed or maimed by the quake, thousands of girls injured and orphaned, rendering even more acute their challenge of building a new life.

But there is an emerging silver lining. Many relief agencies have begun highlighting the "unexpected dividends" afforded to women and young girls in the wake of the tragedy. The earthquake, they say, has opened up the nearly impenetrable systems of gender segregation that poverty and religion have created.

Across the quake-affected areas, girls like Niaz are seeing their first schools, while their mothers are learning sewing and math skills. Many women are visiting doctors for the first time, learning how to take better care of themselves and their children. But perhaps most important of all is the growing sense of self-reliance among the women, many who will have to cope on their own.

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