Stones Into School (26 page)

As the Beechcraft took off and roared north toward Badakshan, I reviewed our agenda for this trip in my mind. It had been eight months since my last visit, and during that time Sarfraz had completed nine schools in the Wakhan, with three more projects in the works. This visit would offer a mix of inspection tours, bill-paying sessions, and meetings to discuss new projects. The itinerary called for us to land in Faizabad and head into the Wakhan until we reached the end of the road at Sarhad. From there, Sarfraz would continue proceeding east on horseback until he got to Bozai Gumbaz, where a crew of masons from the Charpurson Valley had begun smashing boulders into the smaller stones from which the foundation of the Kirghiz school would eventually be built. Meanwhile, I was supposed to turn around, make my way back to Kabul, and catch a flight to Britain, where I was scheduled to give a talk to a packed house at London's Asia House and later make an appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival with my children.

That was the official plan. The secret plan, however, was for me to accompany Sarfraz all the way to Bozai Gumbaz and still make it to London and Edinburgh. A ten-day sortie from Kabul to the far end of the Wakhan and back was almost impossible, but I was determined to set foot in the Pamir. More than anything else, I needed to see, with my own eyes, the home of the Kirghiz people who had first drawn us into Afghanistan.

One hour later, the Beechcraft skimmed over the brown hills surrounding Faizabad, slammed onto a steel runway constructed by the Soviet military, and rolled toward a crumbling one-story building. As we coasted to a stop, I glanced out the window and noted that the plane had been surrounded by three green Ford Ranger pickup trucks containing a dozen men armed with Kalashnikovs.

The leader of the gunmen, a man with dense black eyebrows and a precisely razored beard that was just starting to go gray, was none other than Wohid Khan--the head of Badakshan's Border Security Force (BSF) and the man responsible for hosting the midnight supper on the eve of the Baharak riots back in the fall of 2005 where I had first met Abdul Rashid Khan and drawn up the contract for the Kirghiz school at Bozai Gumbaz. Now forty-two years old, Wohid Khan had begun fighting the Soviets at the young age of thirteen, and like many former mujahadeen whose schooling had been cut short by war, he revered education and saw it as the key to repairing the damage of nearly three decades of fighting. He was passionate about female literacy and building schools for girls--and along with his fellow mujahadeen commandhan Sadhar Khan, he had become one of our most important allies in the Wakhan.

Upon receiving word of our arrival, Wohid Khan had raced from Baharak to Faizabad in order to provide Sarfraz and me with the honor of a high-speed escort, a gesture of his friendship. He had also notified the local education authorities, who were eager to see us again. His green pickups--which boasted extended cabs, nine-foot antennae, and an assortment of weaponry including a shoulder-held rocket launcher and a .50-caliber machine gun bolted to the bed of the lead truck--represented a rather dramatic change from the battered minivans and decrepit jeeps to which Sarfraz and I had become accustomed.

We roared out of Faizabad, dragging a cloud of dust behind us. The bed of each truck held three armed soldiers, their faces wrapped with scarves to protect them from the dirt and grit, the barrels of their Kalashnikovs wedged tightly between their knees. The driver of each truck was under standing orders from Wohid Khan to push his rig as fast as the horrendous, unpaved roads would allow--forty-five to fifty miles per hour. Speed was essential because Wohid and his 320 men were responsible for patrolling 840 miles of territory where the Wakhan abuts the edges of Pakistan, Tajikistan, and China--and as the only authority in this area, they often found themselves saddled with responsibilities that extended far beyond the normal duties of border agents. These could include delivering emergency food to starving communities in winter, taking sick villagers to the hospital, fixing broken trucks, retrieving lost camels, resolving local disputes, and a host of other problems. Two weeks earlier, for example, the BSF had been called to respond to a tragedy that represented the first major setback for our Kirghiz school project.

Earlier that spring, after some extensive canvassing, Sarfraz and the local maarif (education director) had managed to locate two Turkic-speaking teachers in Faizabad who were capable of providing instruction to the children of the Kirghiz. They hired both teachers, then arranged transportation for the men and their families from Faizabad to Bozai Gumbaz, where we were planning to set up a temporary tent school until the permanent structure was completed. About halfway into the Wakhan, near the village of Babu Tengi, the pickup that was carrying the two teachers, their wives, and their four children attempted to shoot through a section of runoff late in the afternoon, when glacier melt is at its highest. The truck became stuck in the middle of the swiftly rising Oxus River, forcing everyone to clamber onto the roof as the water swirled around the vehicle. By the evening, they were prone on top of the cab, clinging to the doorframes and screaming for help. As darkness fell, the driver and one of the families were swept away and drowned. The other family spent the rest of the night balanced on the roof of the truck with their legs in the water as the vehicle rocked back and forth. When word of the incident reached the BSF, Wohid Khan and his men rushed to the site of the accident and managed to pull the remaining survivors to safety.

One of Wohid's primary duties was keeping open the Wakhan's sole road, which serves as a crucial artery not only for his own team but also for the flow of flour, salt, cooking oil, and other staples that are hauled into the most remote communities of the Corridor all summer long to enable these isolated settlements to survive the six-month winter when the roads are sealed with snow. Khan's refusal to tolerate unnecessary impediments became evident one afternoon when, upon encountering a truck stopped in the middle of the road that was blocking several vehicles behind it, the commander got out and walked up to the man working on a broken wheel.

“Driver or mechanic?” he asked.

“Driver,” the man replied.

After smashing his fist directly into the man's face, Wohid delivered a reverse swing kick to the driver's solar plexus, knocking him to the ground. Leaning over the man, he told him to finish fixing his axle and never to come back to the Wakhan. Then he got back in the Ranger and we lurched forward and resumed our journey.

We spent the next two days bashing though arroyos, splashing across streams, and blasting through small villages, twisting and wrenching and pounding the trucks as we penetrated further into the most obscure and forgotten corner of Afghanistan. After reaching Baharak and stopping to pay our respects to Sadhar Khan under his walnut tree, we continued heading east. The road threaded through a series of rocky gorges until it reached Zebak, a flat, emerald green valley with a darkly braided delta that bore a vague resemblance to the tundra of northern Scandinavia. From there, the road headed northwest into a barren area of reddish gray rock littered with the wreckage of disintegrated Soviet T-62 tanks. Several miles beyond lay the town of Ishkoshem, which we reached early in the evening of our second day.

Just before the main bazaar, we swerved onto a side road leading to a gravel hilltop and arrived at the crown jewel of our Wakhan program: an unfinished foundation about the size of a football field filled with dirt, stones, and cement--the future home of the Ishkoshem Girls' High School. The completed structure would be two stories tall and would host 1,400 female students. Costing about eighty thousand dollars to build, it was the largest school in the region and the most expensive project the CAI had undertaken to date. It also boasted one of the most magnificent settings for a school anywhere. To the north loomed the Pamirs, a series of rounded, brown, lunar-looking mountains covered with scree. To the south thrust the sharper ridges of the Hindu Kush, armored in ice even in late August. Between them seethed the Oxus, turbulent and churning and laden with a milky gray cargo of glacial sediment.

If Baharak was the gateway to the Wakhan, then this was the front door.

From Ishkoshem, we worked our way into the Wakhan proper, moving from village to village. Since President Hamid Karzai had issued a decree extending the summer harvest-season holiday by an additional week, classes weren't in session. But at every stop where we had a project going there was a meeting with harried foremen complaining of construction delays stemming from the late deliveries of building supplies, laborers falling ill, poor weather, harassment by out-of-town government officials and other NGOs, and a host of other problems. Sarfraz had no sympathy for any of these excuses and pushed his supervisors mercilessly to stay on schedule. At each stop, he also pulled out another brick of cash and doled out the funds necessary to meet the payroll and keep the consignments of cement, rebar, lumber, and other materials flowing in.

As we moved down the road, we were constantly besieged by requests for new projects. Although we have a formal submission process that includes checking in with the local mullah, tanzeem (community committee), shura, and district government officials, many communities prefer to hand their requests directly to us when we visit the region. In Piggush, where our four-room school was not even finished, the principal had realized that she needed another two rooms in order to accommodate the number of female students who wanted to attend classes. Could we increase the construction budget to meet this need? In Khundud, the elders had convened a jirga and decided that the women's center and the girls' school needed a five-foot boundary wall to prevent the women and the female students from being stared at by men in the neighborhood. Was there any additional money to pay for the wall?

There were plenty of other requests, too, needs that had nothing to do with schools. In the tiny village of Wargeant, a two-year-old boy had developed an infection that had caused his testicles to swell to the size of tennis balls. The child had been screaming in pain for several days, and the nearest doctor, back in Ishkoshem, was a three-day walk away. Could we dispatch a pickup truck to get him to a hospital? At the same time, two children in Wargeant had contracted polio over the winter, even though the region had been declared polio free by UNICEF a year earlier. Was there anything to be done, any way we could help?

One of the most painful aspects of these encounters was that Sarfraz and I often found ourselves in the position of being forced to turn down plea after plea--sometimes twenty or thirty times in the course of a single afternoon--because we simply did not have the resources or the time to address them. Early one evening, I was preparing to deliver yet another rejection, this time to a group of women who were submitting a formal request in writing that we consider funding the construction of a ladies' vocational center. Standing before the women, I turned to Sarfraz.

“Your budget for the Wakhan is finished for this year, no?” I asked. We both knew this to be true, but the prescripted exchange would help lay the groundwork for gently and diplomatically turning down the women's appeal.

“Finished,” Sarfraz confirmed while pulling out his phone, which had started ringing. He glanced at the number and immediately handed it over.

It was Tara, calling from Bozeman to keep tabs on me.

“Hi, sweetie!” I said.

“The kids are off to school, I'm headed to work, and I just wanted to check in,” she said. “What are you up to?”

“Well, right now we're in Ishkoshem, and I'm surrounded by about twenty women who want a vocational center, and they've got this really feisty leader, but I'm afraid we're going to have to say no to them because--”

Sarfraz stared at me quizzically as my wife interrupted and I listened obediently.

“All right, I promise,” I replied when she was finished. “Yes, sweetie. Bye, now.”

My next words were directed to the women standing in front of us.

“American wife-boss has announced that we must somehow find the funds for your vocational center,” I reported. “Tonight she is attending her women's book club, and if I refuse this project, all the women in my village will be very angry with me--so we will request extra money from our board of directors. In the meantime, wife-boss says that you may wish to consider using your vocational center to start a book club of your own.”

The women's expressions of delight at hearing this news were cut short by yet another call coming in on the sat phone. This time it was Suleman Minhas, ringing from Rawalpindi to report an “emergency.”

Five minutes earlier, upon answering an incoming call from a number he'd never seen before, Suleman had been asked to hold the line for General Pervez Musharraf's secretary. Stunned, he had pulled his car over, gotten out, and stood by the side of the road with his right hand offering a rigid salute as it was explained that Mr. Greg Mortenson was requested to make himself available on Sunday afternoon for a cup of tea with the president of Pakistan.

This wasn't the kind of invitation that could be ignored, even from the middle of the Wakhan. A month earlier, the government of Pakistan had announced that in recognition of the Central Asia Institute's work during the past fifteen years, I had been selected to receive the Sitara-i-Pakistan, one of the country's highest civilian awards. In addition to being an honor that is rarely bestowed on foreigners, the award would confer special diplomatic and security privileges that would enable us to move around the country far more efficiently than before while simultaneously enhancing the Central Asia Institute's status and reputation. In short, it would make our lives easier and our work more effective--and since the nomination had surely passed across the president's desk for his endorsement at some point during the selection process, turning down a summons to tea would have been both ill considered and rude.

On the other hand, honoring this invitation would involve some challenging logistics. I glanced at the date on my watch to confirm that it was now Thursday evening, and realized I had less than seventy-two hours to get from the Corridor back to Islamabad.