Ms. Nasim had a miscarriage, but not before she had desperately made a secret call to a New York-based Pakistani television station, seeking help. Someone there gave her the telephone number for Sakhi for South Asian Women, a Manhattan advocacy group that assists immigrant victims of domestic violence. Through Sakhi, which means woman friend in Hindi and several other South Asian languages, Ms. Nasim found the moral support and guidance she needed to flee the family that had imprisoned her, and to make a new life on her own. During her stay at a women's shelter in Harlem, she began to learn English, and now lives in a single-room occupancy hotel and attends Touro College in Manhattan, where she is studying computer science. Every wave of immigration brings with it a new set of needs and spawns a new set of philanthropic institutions.
Many charities serving today's immigrants can trace their roots to the turn of the century.
There's no question it's a new phenomenon,'' she said. In the past, Ms. Lee noted, it usually took two generations for an immigrant community to form its own organizations. She said she could not recall any other issue that had generated as quick a response as domestic violence has prompted among first-generation immigrants. In 1987, the Foundation provided money for another advocacy group, the New York Asian Women's Center, for its work on domestic violence, and since then, it has helped organizations like Sakhi that serve women from Korea, Greece, Arab countries and central Asia. Sakhi was formed by first-generation immigrants, all South Asian women who arrived in the United States for college and graduate studies in the early 1980's, and who eventually pursued careers in law, film and banking.