Stones Into School (29 page)

After everyone had moved under a large tent and taken their seats, several girls dressed in their new school uniforms presented the admiral with a garland of flowers. Another group of girls recited a prayer while holding U.S. and Afghan flags. Then the speeches began, with extensive remarks being offered by the governor, the district officer, the provincial education director, and a number of other dignitaries. Finally, after thirty minutes, Admiral Mullen stepped to the podium.

To translate the admiral's speech from English into Dari, Wakil had selected one of our brightest students, a twelfth-grader named Lima whose father, a retired petroleum engineer, was so poor that he now fed Lima and her fourteen brothers and sisters by selling firewood in Kabul. Lima was fluent in five languages (Dari, Pashto, Urdu, Arabic, and English) and taught part time in one of Wakil's literacy centers. For four years running, she held the top position among the 3,100 girls in her high school.

With Lima translating, the admiral announced that he was bringing good wishes from the American people, and then spoke with eloquence and passion about the vital importance that education held for the future of Afghanistan. “This school is here because of you, the local people, and your commitment and dedication to start education in your community,” he said. “This is a proud moment in which we all celebrate your efforts to build a better future for your country.”

It would be difficult to overstate the symbolic impact of witnessing an eight-room school for girls inaugurated by the admiral who served as the principal military adviser to the president of the United States. For Wakil and Sarfraz, there could have been no more powerful vindication of the work to which they had dedicated their lives. For me, however, perhaps the most moving part of that day came when Wohid Khan was asked to stand up and offer a few remarks.

During the past several years, this veteran mujahadeen had demonstrated his passionate dedication to the cause of promoting education in his homeland in more ways than I could count, from helping to transport building materials to our construction sites in the Wakhan to rescuing one of our teachers and his family from the middle of a river. But Wohid Khan is a man of few words, and until that morning in Pushgur, I had never really heard him articulate his feelings in public.

“In our country, our people have suffered through three decades of war, and as you know many of our fellow mujahadeen have died in these hills and mountains,” he began, speaking in Dari. “We have fought hard and we have paid dearly.”

He looked up toward the surrounding peaks and ridges.

“A wise man from my home once told me that these mountains have seen far too much suffering and killing, and that each rock and every boulder you see represents a mujahadeen who died fighting either the Russians or the Taliban. Then the man went on to say that now that the fighting is finished, it is time to build a new era of peace--and the first step in that process is to take up the stones and start turning them into schools.”

He paused for a moment.

“Having fought for so long under the shadow of war, I believe that the finest service that a mujahadeen can now perform is to build schools and promote literacy. The opportunity to participate in this effort is one of the greatest honors of my lifetime.”

Before stepping from the podium and returning to his seat, the Afghan commander then turned gravely to the American admiral and--one warrior to another, one champion of girls' literacy to another--snapped off a crisp, razorlike salute.

When the speeches were over, Admiral Mullen met privately for about an hour with the excited students inside the school. Upon emerging, he lingered for a few minutes to shake hands and exchange good wishes, before he and his entourage piled back into the helicopters and departed. Then, as the village of Pushgur sat down to a feast that would undoubtedly take its place in the lore of the Panjshir Valley, Wakil, Sarfraz, Wohid, and I started the drive back to Kabul.

We took our time, pausing to pay our respects at the tomb of Shah Ahmed Massoud and making three separate stops so that Wohid, who loves fresh fruit, could purchase some apples, cherries, and mulberries. Later that afternoon, as we rolled southward along the Shomali Plain, our fingers stained with berry juice, Sarfraz lavished Wakil with compliments.

“You are making even more schools here than we are making in the Wakhan,” he exclaimed. “You have achieved much success!”

“It has nothing to do with me,” protested our Pashtun colleague. “This is all the will of Allah.”

When we finally reached the capital, Wakil excused himself and raced off to receive yet another delegation of elders from a distant province who wanted to talk about the possibility of starting up a girls' school. Meanwhile, Sarfraz and I turned our attention to our most pressing piece of unfinished business--getting to Bozai Gumbaz.

The Point of Return

And coming down from the Pamir where the lost
Camels call through the clouds.

--ANDRE MALRAUX, Les Noyers de l'Altenburg

Kirghiz elders meeting at Bozai Gumbaz to plan new school, East Wakhan, Afghanistan

B
ack in the autumn of 2008, as I was rushing west out of the central Wakhan in order to fly to Islamabad and attend my tea-drinking session with President Musharraf, Sarfraz had slowly made his way east on horseback to Bozai Gumbaz. Once there, he had discovered that his crew of quarrymen was making excellent progress on the task of dynamiting large boulders into smaller pieces that could be shaped with chisels and hammers into the stones that would eventually form the walls of the Kirghiz school. But as he stared at the impressive mound of melon-sized rocks that his masons had created on the flat green meadow next to the glassy lake where the Kirghiz were hoping to locate their school, he found himself grappling for the first time with the practical obstacles we would need to surmount in order to make that vision a reality.

Logistical challenges, of course, are nothing new to us, and over the years, we've been forced to overcome some ludicrously daunting problems. For example, the bridge that we had to build over the Braldu River, which would enable us to carry in the supplies to construct our first school in Korphe in 1996, required two dozen men to haul five 284-foot steel cables wound on wooden spools on their shoulders for a distance of eighteen miles. Similarly, one of Sarfraz's earthquake schools in Azad Kashmir required him to assemble a human chain of more than two hundred men in order to pass cement and other materials by hand around places where landslides had destroyed the roads. Yet even by the standards of our most difficult projects, the Kirghiz school was in a class all by itself.

Bozai Gumbaz had more than enough native stone for the purpose of building the foundation and walls, but there were no commercially available supplies of cement, rebar, glass, nails, corrugated roofing, paint, or any of the other items that Sarfraz's construction crew would need to complete the job. All of that material would have to come from the outside, plus the lumber, too. (There are few trees in the Pamirs.)

In theory, of course, these materials could easily have been purchased in Faizabad or Baharak and--despite the usual setbacks stemming from muddy roads, landslides, flash flooding, and mechanical breakdown--we could have arranged to have everything hauled into Sarhad by tractor or truck. But how would we have proceeded from there?

From the place where the Wakhan road ends in Sarhad, the journey to Bozai Gumbaz involves a three-day trek along a narrow trail that clings to the cliffs and whose surface is covered in treacherously shifting talus. Along its forty-mile length, this trail ascends and descends a total of 20,000 feet, nearly twice the vertical relief between Everest base camp and its summit. What's more, these ups and downs all take place at altitudes of between ten thousand and fourteen thousand feet, where the oxygen levels make it impossible for conventional pack animals such as donkeys and mules to carry substantial loads. Finally, there are three major river crossings.

To haul all the supplies in from Sarhat would have required a pack train of at least a hundred yaks or Bactrian camels, far more than the number of animals that were available for hire. For similar reasons, a very large yak train leading out of the Charpurson Valley over the Irshad Pass was equally unworkable. On the other hand, perhaps, maybe a supply convoy could have been assembled in western China and punched into the eastern end of the Wakhan, where the terrain was not nearly as rough. But the Chinese-Afghan border had been sealed for more than sixty years--and thanks to the current political unrest among Xinjiang Province's restive Muslim population, the likelihood of Chinese border officials granting a special laissez-passer was less than zero.

As Sarfraz stood beside the mound of freshly chiseled stones scratching his head, he found himself pondering a question that seemed to encapsulate the absurdity of our work: How do you build a school on the Roof of the World when transporting the construction materials from any direction is virtually impossible?

Even by the standards of his own audacity and innovation, the plan that he came up with was magnificently nuts.

In July, Sarfraz had submitted a budget request for the purchase of a used Kamaz, a type of heavy-duty truck that is manufactured in Tartarstan and has a well-deserved reputation for toughness and reliability (the trucks have racked up a record eight victories in the Dakar Rally and are the preferred means of transport for the Russian army). A Kamaz was one of the few motorized vehicles capable of hauling massive loads along the axle-snapping roadbed of the Wakhan without breaking down every few miles, and Sarfraz had calculated that with the money we would save by no longer paying exorbitant fees to have our building supplies brought into the western Wakhan, the truck would recoup its cost in two years. The CAI board of directors had approved the expenditure, and our battered gray Kamaz--which had been freighting construction material all summer long--now emerged as the key to Sarfraz's strategy for Bozai Gumbaz.

Sometime during the next several days, the truck was scheduled to leave the town of Ishkoshem, lumber over a 300-foot bridge into Tajikistan, and make its way north on the Pamir Highway past the ancient ruby mines of Kuh-i-Lal to the Tajik city of Khorog. There, Sarfraz had arranged for the vehicle to be loaded with forty bags of cement and other building materials before proceeding another long day across the aching monotony of the Pamir plateau to Murghab, a town whose name means “river of birds” in Persian.

Meanwhile, Sarfraz had also ordered a consignment of 190 poplar trees to be cut from the Pamir forests. These logs would be sawed into lumber, and loaded onto the Kamaz when it reached Murgab, at which point the truck--now groaning with its massive load--would continue south for another eighty miles along the valley of the Aksu River, skirting the no-man's-land along the border of western China and the looming hulk of 24,757-foot Muztaghata, the highest peak in the Pamirs.

Eventually the Kamaz would reach a point just above the easternmost end of the Wakhan. There it would cross back into Afghanistan and grind, in its lowest gear, along the remnants of a dirt track that was originally bladed by tanks from the Soviet military and had barely been used since the end of the Soviet occupation. At the point where the track ended, the supplies would be taken off, loaded onto the backs of a herd of waiting yaks and carried the final distance into Bozai Gumbaz, a journey of two days.

Total round-trip distance: just under nine hundred miles.

Time to destination: unknown.

Needless to say, we had never done anything like this before, and setting up the necessary arrangements to enable this unorthodox shipment to move across the heavily restricted Afghanistan-Tajikistan border would have been categorically impossible without the assistance of the man who had emerged as our most formidable ally in the Wakhan.

Several weeks before standing up in front of Admiral Mullen in Pushgur and delivering his “stones into schools” speech, Wohid Khan had approached his counterparts in the Tajik Border Security Force about the possibility of being granted a one-time permit for this special delivery expedition. Despite the fact that Wohid commands deep respect on both sides of the border, the Tajiks were initially reluctant to accede to such an unusual request. (Because southern Tajikistan is plagued by smugglers who traffic heavily in heroin, guns, and even child slaves, its borders are exceptionally sensitive and are placed under extremely tight controls.) The Tajiks' attitude changed, however, when they were presented with a warranty that could not be turned down without giving personal offense: As a guarantee that the conditions of the permit would not be violated, Wohid Khan himself would personally accompany the truck on its entire journey. Doing so would require the Afghan commander to set aside his professional duties for longer than he could really afford. But in the eyes of Khan, there could be no worthier mission for a mujahadeen.

At the moment, there were still a few lingering details yet to be worked out. (The school's windows and doors, which were now being assembled in Ishkoshem, would not be finished before the Kamaz departed for Tajikistan.) Nevertheless, Sarfraz's strategy was clear: Having concluded that access to Bozai Gumbaz from any single direction was impossible, he had decided that the first school to grace the world's rooftop would be assembled by using all four points of the compass simultaneously. The Charpurson masons and carpenters would tromp over the Irshad Pass from the south. The bulk of the cement and lumber would make its way in a daring northern loop through Tajikistan and then be thrust into the far eastern end of the Corridor. And the cash to pay for the final phase of construction, $20,000, would enter the Wakhan from the west in the pockets of my vest and Sarfraz's.

As Sarfraz and I completed our drive back to Kabul from the Panjshir Valley following Admiral Mullen's inauguration of the Pushghur School, we calculated that if we left for Badakshan immediately, we might be able to reach Bozai Gumbaz just before Wohid Khan's yak train arrived, giving us time to conduct a ceremonial jirga with Abdul Rashid Khan and the rest of the Kirghiz community. Construction could begin the following day, and with a bit of luck, the walls would be up and the roof would be nailed down before the first big snowstorm locked the Pamirs down for another winter. There was, however, one problem.

“There are no flights scheduled from Kabul to Faizabad between now and the end of the week,” explained Sarfraz as we arrived back in Kabul.

“So what are our options?” I asked.

“The roads north are very dangerous,” he said. “We must pass through Khundud, and Taliban are attacking. But if you want to reach Bozai Gumbaz on time, we will need to drive all the way.”

“Then let's do it,” I replied. “It will be just like old times.”

We launched our blitz the following morning in a rented Toyota with a driver we knew and trusted named Ahmed. This was the first time I had traveled by road to Badakshan in three years, and I was astonished by the changes. Back in 2003, when I had made my first drive north, the entire landscape had been devastated and scorched by war. The buildings along the highway had been almost totally destroyed, and there were so many land mines buried at the side of the road that it was dangerous even to pull over. Now, however, the countryside was coming back to life. The fields were dotted with villagers tending to their grape vines, orchards, wheat, and barley. It was almost possible to imagine, momentarily, what peace might look like in Afghanistan.

The surface of the highway had been paved, and we made good time. We shot through the Salang Tunnel at 10:00 P.M. and three hours later stopped for tea at Pul-e Khumri, the original home of Abdul, the orphan boy who had repaired our radiator on my first trip north. We asked if there had been any news of him, but nobody knew anything, so we pushed on.

The August night was clear, and the heavens were littered with a spray of stars whose clarity and brilliance I have seen matched only by the skies of Montana. As the hours rolled past and the night deepened, I stared out the window and gave myself over to a floating sense of deja vu that carried me back to countless similar drives up the Karakoram Highway along the Indus River gorges and into Baltistan during the early years of our work. The names of the mountains and the languages spoken in the villages that were flitting past us in the dark now were different. But everything else--the dull taste of the dust filtering through the open window, the metallic pink glow of the lights above the all-night truck stops beside the highway, the rhythm of the road, and the vastness of the landscape--all of these things drove home the notion that my years in Pakistan and my time in Afghanistan were part of a continuous whole, a journey that was still unfolding and whose final aim remained something of a mystery.

As we dropped off the back side of midnight and entered the early hours of the morning, however, I found myself colliding against the limitation of my own stamina. The endless litany of plane flights and fund-raising appearances across the United States, followed by the whirlwind tour of Wakil's literacy centers and the frenzied preparations for the inauguration of the Pushgur school, now seemed to be catching up with me. Sarfraz, I knew, had been working just as hard, if not harder. And yet, despite the fact that he was a few years older than me, he seemed to draw from a well of energy that was deeper than my own.

Somewhere north of the town of Baghlan, the toll of the past several weeks finally washed over me in a wave of weariness so oppressive that it felt as if someone were smothering me with a wet blanket. Like a long-distance runner who has slipped off the top of his game, I realized that I no longer had the ability to keep up with Sarfraz. In terms of determination, stubbornness, and the pigheaded refusal to give up, the two of us were still remarkably well matched. But when it came to sheer resiliency, my friend and colleague had passed me by and disappeared into the distance.

“Maybe we should rest for a little bit,” I suggested as we approached the lights of another fuel station. “Why don't we pull over?”

“No stopping,” ordered Sarfraz. “There have been many Taliban in this area recently. We cannot rest until we are past Khundud.”

We kept driving, passing through Khundud around 1:30 A.M., and it was not until we reached the safety of Talikan, which lay beyond the furthest advances of the insurgency, that Sarfraz finally allowed our driver to pull into a roadside tea stand and each of us collapsed on a charpoy, a short-legged bed whose platform is woven together with coarse rope.

Sarfraz's instincts, it turned out, were as accurate as ever. One month after we passed through Khundud, Taliban insurgents hijacked a pair of tanker trucks, provoking an air strike from NATO fighter jets. The resulting explosion killed more than eighty people, including dozens of civilians. Twenty-four hours after that Stephen Farrell, a journalist working for the New York Times who was reporting on the aftermath of the air strikes, was kidnapped, together with his Afghan interpreter. Four days later, a rescue mission by British commandos resulted in the deaths of a British soldier and the Afghan interpreter, whose name was Mohammad Sultan Munadi.