“Well, let’s see,” I replied. “We share our jackets, our razors, our hairbrush, our soap, our socks, our hats, our shalwar kamiz, our undershirts—”
“How about your underwear?” the reporter interjected. “Do you guys share that?”
“Look, I’m not sure I want to reveal this,” I said, squirming with embarrassment, “but there’s really no sense in lying about it either.” Then I explained that having spent the first fifteen years of my childhood in rural Tanzania—where underwear is not a big priority—I have sort of gone “alpine style” for my entire life.
“And what about you, Sarfraz?” demanded the reporter, who was diligently writing all of this down.
“Alpine style for me, too.”
When we had completed our morning ritual, it was time to pile back into the car, hit the road, and head off toward that day’s destination. Upon arrival, the first item on the agenda called for an inspection of the school—usually surrounded by a scrum of children tugging us by the hands. (One of the greatest joys in my work is spending time with the students and teachers, and at every school, I make it a priority to greet each child, one by one, and encourage them to give me an update on how their studies are progressing.)
At every stop where there was a project, the bricks of cash that we were carrying were brought out and Sarfraz would balance the accounts with Mullah Mohammed, sixty-three, a former Taliban bookkeeper from the village of Khundud who served as our accountant for the entire Wakhan (and who usually traveled with us). Our ledgers were kept according to the old British double-entry system and were laid out by hand, from right to left, in Persian script. Every transaction was recorded down to the penny, and at the end of each accounting session, which could take hours, Sarfraz would “seal” the ledger by drawing a line in ink along the edge of the page so that no additional expenses could be written in later. Then he would solemnly warn Mullah Mohammed that if any errors later emerged, Mullah Mohammed would be shipped off to rejoin the Taliban.
While this business unfolded, I often found myself besieged by people submitting requests for assistance. In Khundud, there might be a man asking for money to set up a grocery store in exchange for providing tutoring services to our students. In the town of Ishkoshem, I might be approached by a pair of local officials seeking funds for a water-delivery system. In the tiny hamlet of Piggush, the school principal might claim to need additional cash to purchase desks and filing cabinets for her teachers. The pleading was always polite, but the needs were endless: more books, more pencils, more uniforms, another classroom. I would get proposal after proposal, and unfortunately, I would have to say no to dozens of them, even though many of the petitioners might have traveled for days on foot or by public transport to present me with their requests.
As the day progressed, Sarfraz and I would also find ourselves passing the sat phone back and forth in order to keep in contact with the rest of the CAI staff who were scattered throughout the Punjab, Baltistan, and eastern Afghanistan. There were hourly chats with Suleman in Islamabad, who served as our communications hub and who would keep me abreast of who among the staff was arguing with whom—an inevitable by-product of an organization staffed with members of half a dozen different tribal and religious backgrounds.
Finally, as evening drew near, we would be invited to gather at the home of a village leader and convene with the local heavyweights for a jirga, or council session. A jirga is a formal gathering of elders sitting in a circle on a carpet, or under a tree, and as a rule the participants are forbidden from adjourning until consensus has been achieved around a decision. As a result, jirgas can go on for hours and often extend through much of the night. They invariably feature long speeches, periods of intense deliberation conducted in absolute silence, and prodigious amounts of tea drinking.
Toward dawn, Sarfraz and I would snatch a brief nap in an empty room in someone’s house or bunk down on the floor of the school. Two or three hours later, it would be time to pack up, pile into our hired vehicle, and race off to the next project. And so it would go, school by school and village by village, until we had worked our way through the places we needed to visit and it was time for me to fly home to Montana and for Sarfraz to head back to the Charpurson Valley.
These trips were long and grueling, and during the course of them my respect and affection for Sarfraz continued to deepen. By the end of that first year, he had impressed me with his intelligence, his diligence, and his work ethic. He was culturally savvy, constantly on the move, and able to switch between charming and harsh as the situation demanded. For our point man in the Wakhan, I do not think there could have been a better choice than Sarfraz Khan.
There was one area, however, in which both he and I were an absolute disaster.
Thanks to Sadhar Khan’s support and protection, we were making fair progress inside the Wakhan itself. Eventually, however, we would need to make contact with the government in Kabul and obtain official permission for our projects. With this in mind, Sarfraz and I set up meetings with a number of government officials during the course of three separate visits to the capital city—and it was in those offices that we achieved a whole new level of no much success.
To be fair to the officials with whom we collided, the country they were attempting to govern had been at war for more than two decades, and virtually every aspect of civil society was in shambles. Nevertheless, the people we tried to work with in Kabul didn’t make it easy for us to help them rebuild their own school system. On the contrary, I’d say. Never have we drunk three cups of tea so many times to so little purpose.
In that part of the world, if an office doesn’t have its own tea, someone has to go for takeout, which can sometimes take up to half an hour. As often as not, we would wait for the tea and only after it had arrived be informed that the individual we needed to see wasn’t in. Once or twice, we announced the name of the official we needed to see and were told “no problem,” invited for tea, eventually served, and then informed that this person wasn’t actually in the office after all, and could we come back tomorrow? To some degree you get used to this in central Asia, but in Kabul such tendencies were more pronounced than usual.
During one of our first meetings, we ran into trouble at the offices of the Interior Ministry, to which we had been shuttled from the Education Ministry. Interior occupied a decrepit multistory building in downtown Kabul, and the guards at the entrance and in the hallways were all armed with AK-47s. We trudged up the stairs to the reception area on the second floor, where I told the young man behind the desk that I had with me letters from the education officials in Badakshan Province stipulating that the Central Asia Institute had received approval to build schools inside the Wakhan Corridor. We had confirmed our appointment in advance by phone, and all we needed were the proper federal certificates.
“You have arrived unannounced,” declared the official after running his finger down the day’s list of appointments and failing to find our names. “And now you are asking us to give you permission to build some schools? Who instructed you to come here?”
“Well, our letters are from the authorities at the village, district, and provincial level,” we explained. “But now we need federal approval, and that’s why we’re here to see you.”
“But why are you proposing to build schools in the Wakhan?” he exclaimed. “We already have hundreds of schools there! Why don’t you instead propose to build some schools in Kabul or Kandahar—for that I would be happy to give you permission.”
“But there is not a single school in the eastern half of the Wakhan Corridor,” I responded.
“That is not true!” he said.
At this point, Sarfraz unfurled a map and began pointing out the places in the Wakhan that needed schools.
“But this is not even part of Afghanistan!” the man cried. “Why are you proposing to build schools in China?”
“The fact of the matter, sir,” said Sarfraz, “is that this is your country.”
&
nbsp; “Well, even if it is Afghanistan,” he continued, “schools are not necessary in this area because no one lives there.”
Within the span of a single five-minute exchange, this official had asserted that the Wakhan was filled with hundreds of schools, that the Wakhan was not part of Afghanistan, and that no one actually lived in the Wakhan.
Needless to say, we left that office empty-handed.
In the following months, our exchanges with members of the various government ministries to which we were dispatched were equally fruitless. That was the norm in Kabul. Out in the countryside, the main concern of the education directors, the commandhans, and the local religious leaders who had already provided us with stamped and signed authorizations was that we continue with our work. And yet, by the beginning of 2005, we had failed even to register as an officially approved NGO working in Afghanistan, much less to receive retroactive permission for the schools that we had already started constructing.
As Sarfraz would say, “paper side” was never our strong suit. On the “project side,” however, we were doing reasonably well. By now, Sarfraz and I had launched five projects in the Wakhan, with another dozen in the works. There was much to be pleased about—yet one concern continued to prod at the back of my mind. There was still the matter of the unfulfilled promise that I had made to the Kirghiz concerning the most remote school of all.
CHAPTER 6
The Seal of the Kirghiz Khan
But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.
—MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
Teacher in Afghanistan
As I have mentioned, the construction of Sadhar Khan’s school had started in 2004. The general contractor was Haji Baba, the mujahadeen who claimed the honor of having taken out a Soviet helicopter in Badakshan with a Stinger missile. Under his supervision, the foundation, walls, roof, and interior framing were completed by winter. When the snow began to melt, his crews raced to complete everything else—the finishing carpentry in the classrooms, the latrines, the kerosene stove heaters, and the boundary wall. By spring, the little white schoolhouse with the lime green trim in the village of Yardar was the pride of the entire valley and was almost ready to open its doors to its first class of 358 students. Just as Sadhar Khan had promised, more than two hundred of them were girls, including two of his own daughters.
In early May, I arrived in Kabul and caught a UN flight into Faizabad, where Sadhar Khan’s oldest son, Waris, met me in his Soviet-era jeep and shuttled me to Baharak, where Sadhar Khan was waiting to take me on a tour of the new school. With only twelve classrooms, it was hardly our biggest or most elaborate project. But even so, I had to admit that it was a real beauty. Its most impressive feature was the intricate stonework, chiseled and carved from the blasted boulders in the mountains. It was clear that Sadhar Khan was enormously pleased and proud, and together we basked in a sense of accomplishment over this, the very first school we had built in Badakshan.
During the coming week, Waris was planning to enlist the help of several men in the surrounding community to build the desks and chairs—a smart move that would avoid the high cost of purchasing the furniture from Kabul and paying the exorbitant shipping costs. In the meantime, my plan was to head into the Wakhan and meet up with Sarfraz so that we could attend the inauguration of our school in the village of Sarhad. If everything went as planned, I’d be able to toast the opening of the projects on either end of our two-pronged “literary pincer movement.”
A day later, traveling with a jeep and driver provided by Sadhar Khan, I arrived in Sarhad. It was a gorgeous morning—the sky was a soft robin’s-egg blue and the shadows of swiftly moving clouds were playing across the lemon yellow contours of the enormous peaks that rise abruptly to the north and south of Sarhad. Sarfraz and I rode to witness the opening day of school by squatting in a wooden trailer pulled by a red tractor. The lurching and bumping was so violent that we had to brace ourselves against the sides of the trailer to avoid being pitched out.
The stone-walled school had been constructed in the shape of a circle, a local design, and it boasted nine classrooms with a sunroof that would permit streaming sunlight to illuminate the interior while providing warmth. Waiting in the courtyard were 220 eager students and their teachers. The girls were clad in traditional crimson tribal dresses with woolen stockings wrapped around their legs, while the boys wore the drab, gray shalwar kamiz that is standard attire in the region.
As often happens at such events, the kids were just beside themselves with anticipation. As Sarfraz and I hopped out of the trailer, they gathered in a line to welcome us. One of the students at the front of the line, a wispy third grader named Aisha, displayed the knock-kneed gait that is a by-product of rickets, an ailment common to the remote interior of the Wakhan, where the diet is deficient in vitamin D. Unlike most of the girls, who shyly greeted me with a traditional kiss to the back of my outstretched hand, Aisha gave me an enormous hug and refused to let go.
The entrance to the school’s interior compound was guarded by a pair of myrtle green metal gates, and the honor of taking the first official steps inside was given to a group of the village’s most respected elders, all of them men. Then one by one, the children gingerly stepped through. Some were clad in rubber boots, others wore sandals, and several were in their bare feet. All of them were closely watched by Tashi Boi, the village chief, who recited the name of each child as he or she walked through the gate and gave a crisp nod of approval.
As I watched the children step into the school courtyard, I couldn’t help but notice that the gray, lunar-looking dust now bore the imprints of a mosaic of footprints, and I was reminded, oddly enough, of the moment when Neil Armstrong had stepped onto the surface of the moon. One small step for a brave young girl, I thought as the knock-kneed Aisha tottered into the courtyard, one giant leap for this community.
Standing beside me was Doug Chabot, the husband of Genevieve, CAI’s international program manager, who has volunteered to help us over the years and who had arrived a few days earlier with Sarfraz. “This is really something to watch,” murmured Doug, turning to me with a look of subdued amazement that suggested that he was beginning to fathom what the promise of education meant to a village like Sarhad. “They are just hungry for this, aren’t they?”
I nodded silently and could not help but think back to the afternoon in 2002 when Afghanistan’s minister of finance had told me that “the last thing the people in the remote areas want is schools.”
The following morning, I bade farewell to Sarfraz and, together with Mullah Mohammed, the CAI’s ex-Taliban bookkeeper, began heading back to Baharak. By this point, word of our arrival had spread throughout the Corridor, and as we bounced along the rutted jeep track, we were unable to travel more than a couple of miles without encountering a cluster of people waiting by the side of the road to flag down our vehicle and invite us inside for a cup of tea so that they could submit a special request.
The message was always the same: We have heard about the maktab (school) that you have just opened in Sarhad, and we know that you plan to build new schools next year in Wargeant, Babu Tengi, and Pikui. What about us? Will you not consider helping our children by building a maktab for them, too? With all the stopping and starting, it took more than forty-eight hours before we made it back to Baharak and somewhere along that stretch of road, the outside world caught up with us.
Several days earlier, Newsweek magazine had published an article that suggested that an American soldier stationed at the U.S. prison in Guantánamo Bay had taken a copy of the Koran and flushed it down a toilet. The editors would soon retract the story, but the damage had already been done, and as word of this alleged desecration reverberated throughout the Muslim world, events quickly began spinning out of control.
In Afghanistan, the first riots took place in Jalalabad on Wednesday, May 11. At about 10:00 P.M. that night, Mullah Mohammed and I arrived in Baharak. After driving to Sadhar Khan??
?s home and being informed that he was not there, we headed into the center of town with the intention of spending the night on the floor of a crowded public “guesthouse.” On the way there, however, I was approached by a guard who worked for Wohid Khan, a former mujahadeen commander and a colleague of Sadhar Khan’s who is in charge of the Border Security Force in eastern Badakshan. After warning us that trouble was brewing in town, the guard urged Mullah Mohammed and me to proceed to a building owned by Wohid Khan, where we could join a group of travelers who were spending the night under his protection.
Happy to comply, we headed over to the two-story apartment building, where a cluster of perhaps twenty Afghans had gathered. By now it was nearly midnight, and just as we were preparing for bed, in strode Wohid Khan. In a typical demonstration of Afghan hospitality, he insisted on feeding everyone dinner. We all filed into another room and sat cross-legged on Persian rugs while platters of roast lamb and Kabuli rice were served.
I found myself sitting next to two dignified but ragged figures with Mongolian features. The gentleman to my immediate left, who was wearing thick eyeglasses and a black robe made of dense cloth, looked to be about seventy years old. He politely introduced himself as Niaz Ali and explained that he was the imam, or spiritual leader, of a group of Kirghiz nomads who lived in the High Pamir, at the far eastern end of the Wakhan.
My pleasure at making Niaz Ali’s acquaintance was quickly overtaken by a sense of astonishment and delight when he introduced me to his companion, who was sitting to my right—a dusty, disheveled elder clad in corduroy breeches and high leather boots who was draped in the exhausted demeanor of a man who had been on the road far longer than he might have wished. This was none other than Abdul Rashid Khan, the very man who had sent his son, Roshan, over the Irshad Pass to find me in the fall of 1999.