In some ways, these tidbits of information may be useful—if nothing else, they convey a general sense of what we’ve been up to and what others think of our work. On a personal level, however, this approach tends to miss the point. If there is a metric by which I measure the achievements of the Central Asia Institute, it is not the amount of donations we receive each year, or the number of people who have read Three Cups of Tea, or even the number of schools we have built. In fact, it really has nothing to do with math and everything to do with the girls whose lives have been changed through education. In the end, the thing I care most about—the flame that burns at the center of my work, the heat around which I cup my hands—are their stories.
And by God’s grace, what marvelous stories these women can tell.
Take the case of Jahan Ali, whose grandfather, Haji Ali, was Korphe’s nurmadhar (village chief) and who became my most important mentor. On the first day I met Jahan in September of 1993, she extracted a promise from me that if she graduated, we would send her off to a maternal health-care program—an IOU that she triumphantly collected on nine years later. After finishing grad school in Korphe, she went on to enroll in advanced studies in public policy administration. Meanwhile, back home, Jahan’s father has been trying to marry her off—she is currently twenty-three years old, and her bride-price, thanks to her education, has now shot from five to fifty adult rams. Jahan, however, declares that she first intends to become a community leader and a member of Pakistan’s parliament. “I am not going to get married until I achieve my goal,” she recently told me. “Inshallah (God willing), someday I will become a super-lady.”
Then there is the story of Shakila Khan, who graduated with the first class at our school in Hushe, a village in a valley to the south of Korphe that sits in the shadow of Masherbrum, one of the highest mountains on earth. Currently in her third year at Fatima Memorial Hospital in Lahore and scoring in the nineties, Shakila is slated to become the first locally educated female physician ever to emerge from Baltistan’s population of 300,000 people. She is currently twenty-two years old and intends to return to the Hushe Valley to work among her people. “My main two goals,” she says, “are that I do not want women to die in childbirth or babies to die in their first year.”
Finally, consider Aziza Hussain, who grew up in the Hunza Valley, not far from the point where the Karhuram Highway crosses into China. After graduating from Gulmit Federal Government Girls’ High School in 1997 and completing a two-year maternal health-care program on a CAI scholarship, Aziza, too, insisted on returning home to ply her skills within her own community—a place where as many as twenty women perished each year during childbirth. Since Aziza came back in 2000, not a single woman in the area has died giving birth.
Thirteen years after we completed our first school in Korphe, the maiden generation of Central Asia Institute women have graduated and are preparing to launch their careers. These women are now making “first ascents” far more dramatic and impressive than the achievements of western climbers, such as myself, who have been coming into these mountains ever since Aleister Crowley, the British poet, spy, and yogic devotee, made the first attempt to climb K2 in 1902.
Already, these daughters have climbed so much higher than we mountaineers ever dared to dream.
Serious and worthy efforts to promote schooling for girls are currently taking place all over the world, from Guatemala and Egypt to Bangladesh and Uganda. The unusual twist that the Central Asia Institute applies to this enterprise, however, is encapsulated in the title of Three Cups of Tea, which refers to a Balti saying that Haji Ali invoked during one of my first visits to his village. “The first cup of tea you share with us, you are a stranger,” he intoned. “The second cup, you are a friend. But with the third cup, you become family—and for our families we are willing to do anything, even die.”
Of the many lessons that that old man imparted to me, this was perhaps the greatest. It underscores the paramount importance of taking the time to build relationships, while simultaneously affirming the basic truth that in order to get things done in this part of the world, it is essential to listen with humility to what others have to say. The solution to every problem, Haji Ali firmly believed, begins with drinking tea. And so it has proven.
After my first encounter with Haji Ali in 1993, I returned to the United States, raised twelve thousand dollars, and then went back a year later to Pakistan, where I purchased a massive load of cement, lumber, and other supplies in the city of Rawalpindi. This material was piled onto a Bedford truck and ferried up the Karakoram Highway to the town of Skardu, a trip that took three days. There it was transferred to jeeps and driven to the end of the road, eighteen miles from Korphe—where I arrived with the expectation of being greeted like a hero. Instead, I was informed (after drinking several cups of tea with Haji Ali) that before we could start construction on the school, we had to build a bridge. The reason? It would be impossible to ferry the construction materials over the roaring Braldu inside the only device spanning the river, a rickety wooden basket suspended beneath a 350-foot cable.
Perhaps I should have thought of this earlier; in any case, the unexpected turn of events seemed like a disaster. It forced me to retreat back to the United States, where I had to convince my main benefactor, Dr. Jean Hoerni, to contribute even more money, which was then used to purchase even more construction materials and transport these supplies to the edge of the Braldu, where the residents of Korphe built a 282-foot-long suspension bridge over the river. In the end, the whole exercise set the project back nearly two years.
At the time, I found this detour and its delays utterly maddening. Only years later did I begin to appreciate the enormous symbolic significance of the fact that before building a school, it was imperative to build a bridge. The school, of course, would house all of the hopes that are raised by the promise of education. But the bridge represented something more elemental: the relationships upon which those hopes would be sustained over time—and without which any promise would amount to little more than empty words.
Korphe’s schoolhouse was finished in December 1996, and since then each and every school we have built has been preceded by a bridge. Not necessarily a physical structure, but a span of emotional links that are forged over many years and many shared cups of tea.
This philosophy means that some of our projects can grind along at a pace that mirrors the ponderous movement of the Karakoram glaciers. For example, in Chunda, a conservative rural village in Baltistan, it took eight years for us to convince the local mullah, an immensely cautious and pious man, to permit a single girl to attend school. Today, however, more than three hundred girls study in Chunda—and we take great pride in the fact that they do so with the full support of the very same mullah who once stood in their way. His change of heart affirms the notion that good relationships often demand titanic patience.
Like Nasreen Baig, the green-eyed nurse from the Charpurson, we do not regret the wait. As any wise village elder will tell you, anything truly important is worth doing very, very slowly.
The book that you are holding in your hands picks up where Three Cups of Tea left off in 2003 and is partly a chronicle of how that process has continued to unfold in Pakistan during the last several years. Mostly, however, this new book traces our efforts to take our work into a whole new region, the remote northeastern corner of Afghanistan. It is a place that has proved even more challenging than Pakistan, and the saga of what my staff sometimes calls our “Afghan adventure” is framed loosely in the context of a single school.
If Three Cups of Tea lays out the narrative of our first school—the seed with which we started our planting—then this is the tale of the most remote of all our projects, the flower in the farthest corner of the garden. No project has ever taken us so long or required such complex logistics as the little school we built next to the old Kirghiz burial grounds in the heart of the Afghan Pamir’s Bam-I-Dunya, the “Rooftop of the World.” And next to Korp
he itself, no school is closer to my heart, because, in ways both large and small, it was the most miraculous. It arose out of a promise made in 1999 during an unlikely meeting that seemed lifted from the pages of a novel set in the thirteenth century, when the horsemen of Genghis Khan roamed the steppes of central Asia. And it drew us into the land of the Afghans, the only place that has ever threatened to usurp the affection and the love I harbor for Pakistan.
Part of what has made this school such a surprise is that so many other urgent projects were demanding our attention during the ten years it took to make good on our promise. The fact that we refused to let it go, even amid an earthquake in Kashmir in 2005 and other challenges that are recounted in the pages that follow, is a testament less to me than to the vision and the persistence of the Central Asia Institute’s staff, and in particular to a group of twelve men whom I affectionately call the Dirty Dozen. If there are any heroes here, it is they; and for the most part this book is their story, because without these men, none of it would have happened. If the daughters who flock to our schools represent the fire we’ve lit, then these men are the fuel that sustains the flames. They have guided, pushed, and inspired me in more ways than I can recount, and their commitment and sacrifices run so deep that whatever we achieve will ultimately belong not to me but to them. Without their example and their resourcefulness, I would still be nothing more than a dirtbag mountaineer subsisting on ramen noodles and living in the back of his car.
As you’ll see, the story of the little gem of a school that we built in the most remote corner of central Asia is a roundabout tale—a thread that like the twisting roads we ply in our battered Land Cruiser through the passes of the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush can sometimes get lost amid the unexpected detours and the landslide of complications that cascade down upon anyone who ventures into that harsh and wondrous part of the world. But these digressions and dead ends may also provide something that readers of Three Cups of Tea have been requesting from me for years. What they’ve wanted, more than anything else, is a window into the day-to-day mechanics and rhythms of the Central Asia Institute. A sense of what it feels like to lay the physical and emotional foundation for girls’ education, book by book and brick by brick, in the middle of Taliban country. If nothing else, this new work should fulfill that request.
I should also note that the first part of this story will cover some ground that may already be familiar to readers of Three Cups of Tea. I thought this was necessary and important because several of these early events began to shape themselves into a meaningful pattern only over time. Back when they took place, I did not understand the full significance of these experiences and lessons they imparted, nor did I realize where they fit into the larger story that it is my privilege to tell here.
In short, it was only after having moved forward a considerable distance that I was fully able to comprehend where we had been—a phenomenon that would not have surprised Haji Ali, who, to my sadness, passed away in 2001. Haji Ali never learned to read or write, and over the course of seven decades he left his home village only once, to perform a pilgrimage to Mecca. Nevertheless, he understood that hope resides in the future, while perspective and wisdom are almost always found by looking to the past.
Sometimes, it seems like everything I’ve ever learned traces back to that irascible old man I first met in the barley fields of Korphe.
GREG MORTENSON
Baharak, Afghanistan
August 2009
PART I
The Promise
Prologue
The education and empowerment of women
throughout the world cannot fail to result in a more caring,
tolerant, just and peaceful life for all.
—AUNG SAN SUU KYI
Greg Mortenson in the Wakhan
The Irshad Pass is one of three great gaps leading north through the Hindu Kush into the most forgotten corner of Afghanistan. Along the crest of this pass the ground is free of snow for only four months each year, and the air is so thin that the traders who employ this route have been known to slice open the nostrils of their donkeys to help them breathe. Beyond the Pakistani high point, the track makes a long, talus-littered descent, at the bottom of which is a massive ravine that forces the trail to perform a sharp dogleg. This means that anyone waiting at the southern entrance to the Irshad cannot see who is coming through the pass until the very last minute—and that is how I came to miss the moment when the squadron of Kirghiz horsemen made their entrance into Pakistan in October of 1999.
It was the keen-eyed Sarfraz Khan—the hunter of the ibex, the ex-commando with the crippled hand—who spotted them first, just as they rounded the corner, from half a mile away. The second he caught sight of them, he leaped up from the blanket on which we were sitting, dashed over to our jeep, flung open the door, and started laying his fist into the horn.
“They are coming, they are coming!” he clamored in Wakhi, unable to contain his excitement. “Wazdey, Wazdey! Well done!”
I was about to take another swallow of the nemek choi (salt tea) that we had been sipping all morning to ward off the wind and the sleet, but my hand halted when the cup was halfway to my lips, then returned the cup to the ground and gently placed it there while I watched the horsemen advance.
It was not a spectacle one could witness in an offhand manner.
There were fourteen riders, coming fast through a scrim of cold rain, and even from the distance of nearly a thousand yards, the timeworn music of their cavalry—the hollow clomping of the hoofbeats and the metallic clanking of steel in the horses’ mouths—cleaved the alpine air. We could hear, too, the muffled creak of wet leather under strain, and a faint patter as thick clods of dirt thrown up by the horses’ hooves arced above the riders’ heads and rained onto the ground behind them.
The man in the lead was clad in a weather-beaten duster, black leather boots that rose to his knees, and corduroy pants that were dark and shiny with the smear of mutton grease. A battered British Lee Enfield rifle flopped along his back, his waist was belted with a strap of leather so wide that it spanned his belly, and on his head he wore a Soviet-era pile cap whose earflaps galloped with the movement of his horse. The men who followed him carried AK-47s and an abundance of other weapons, and their cartridge belts were slung heavily across their shoulders and chests. Their horses, like his, were short legged and shaggy and iridescent with sweat.
They thundered toward us in a headlong rush until, at the last possible second, they pulled to an abrupt halt and leaped in unison from their saddles with a catlike grace that seemed both cavalier and precise. It was the kind of careless perfection that only men who have spent their entire lives on horseback can achieve.
The leader, I could see now, was a young man with an ill-trimmed mustache and a flat, coppery, wind-burnished face. He was thin and ragged and hardened, and this combination of features made him seem to step directly from a stream of time that flowed unbroken from the forty or fifty generations of his nomadic forbears, who were among the greatest horsemen the world has ever known. Standing there in the mud, he reached into his coat pocket, removed a wad of moist green chewing tobacco, and greeted us with the customary As-Salaam Alaaikum . Then he remarked, softly and with great courtesy, that he and his men had been riding for six days without stopping.
They had been dispatched, it turned out, as emissaries from Commandhan Abdul Rashid Khan, the leader of the last group of Kirghiz left in the High Pamir. In the impoverished land from which these men had ridden, conditions were now so harsh that each winter their families and their herds of camels, sheep, and yaks seesawed on the threshold of starvation. Yet of all the things that Abdul Rashid’s people lacked, what he desired most was the chance for their children to learn to read and write—and therein lay the errand that had drawn this horseman and his retinue over the Irshad Pass.
For the past several years, the horseman explained, strange stories had been filtering into the High Pamir from the souther
n side the Hindu Kush, tales of a mysterious American mountain climber who was said to be setting up schools in the most remote valleys of northern Pakistan, the places the government didn’t seem to care about and where the foreign NGOs refused to venture. There were rumors, too, that in addition to educating the boys, the institutions this man was raising up would also open their doors to any girl who yearned for literacy.
When word had reached Abdul Rashid Khan that the American school builder was scheduled to pay a visit to the Charpurson Valley, he had sent out a platoon of his strongest riders and his swiftest horses to find this man and ask if he would consider coming into Afghanistan to build schools for the sons and the daughters of the Kirghiz.
Few things happen quickly in the hinterlands of the western Himalayas, but there was a special urgency to this man’s mission. The first storm of the winter of 1999 was already descending upon the Hindu Kush, and if these horsemen failed to return before the snows blocked the crest of the Irshad, they risked being cut off from their homes and families until the following spring. Preferably right now, but no later than the following morning, they would need to race north over the pass with my answer.