“My work now,” Mouzafer said simply, “is to give water to the trees.”
High up at the head of the Hushe Valley, in the shadow of Masherbrum’s hanging glaciers, Mohammed Aslam Khan had been a boy in the time before roads. There was nothing wrong with life in the village of Hushe. It proceeded as it always had. In the summer, boys like Aslam led the sheep and goats to high pastures while the women made yoghurt and cheese. From the highest grazing grounds, the mountain they called Chogo Ri, or “Big Mountain,” known to the wider world as K2, could be seen thrusting into the heavens over Masherbrum’s broad shoulder.
In the fall, Aslam took turns with other village boys driving a team of six panting yak in circles around a pole, so their heavy hooves would thresh the newly harvested wheat. Throughout the long winter, he would huddle as near to the fire as he could creep, competing with his five brothers, three sisters, and the family’s livestock to find the warmest spot on the coldest days.
This was life. It was how every boy in Hushe could expect to spend his days. But Aslam’s father, Golowa Ali, was the nurmadhar of Hushe. Everyone said Aslam was the cleverest child in the family, and his father had other plans for him.
In late spring, when the worst of the weather had retreated, but the Shyok still ran fast with glacial melt, Golowa Ali woke his son up before first light and told him to prepare to leave the village. Aslam couldn’t imagine what he meant. But when he saw that his father had packed luggage for him, wrapping a block of churpa, hard sheep cheese, into a bundle of clothes, he began to cry.
Questioning his father’s will was not allowed, but Aslam challenged the village chief anyway.
“Why do I have to go?” he said, turning to his mother for support. By the light of a guttering oil lamp, Aslam was shocked to see that she, too, was crying.
“You’re going to school,” his father said.
Aslam walked downside with his father for two days. Like every Hushe boy, Aslam had roamed the narrow mountain paths that clung to the bare cliffsides like ivy tendrils to stone walls. But he had never been so far from home. Down here the earth was sandy and free of snow. Behind him, Masherbrum had lost the reassuring bulk that placed it at the center of the known universe. It was only one mountain among many.
When the trail ended at the bank of the Shyok, Golowa Ali hung a leather pouch containing two gold coins around his son’s neck on a cord. “When, Inshallah, you get to the town of Khaplu, you will find a school. Give the Sahib who runs the school these coins to pay for your education.”
“When will I come home?” Aslam asked, trying to control his trembling lips.
“You’ll know when,” his father said. Golowa Ali inflated six goat bladders and lashed them together into a zaks, or raft, the traditional Balti means of fording a river when it ran too deep to cross on foot. “Now hold on tight,” he said.
Aslam couldn’t swim.
“When my father put me in the water I couldn’t control myself and I cried. He was a strong man, and proud, but as I floated away down the Shyok, I saw he had tears in his eyes, too.”
Aslam clung to the zaks as the Shyok sucked him from his father’s sight. He bobbed over rapids, sobbing openly now that no one was watching, shivering in the water’s glacial chill. After a passage of blurred terror that might have taken ten minutes or two hours, Aslam noticed he was moving more slowly as the river widened. He saw some people on the far bank and kicked toward them, too afraid of losing the zaks to use his arms.
“An old man fished me out of the water and wrapped me in a warm yak-hair blanket,” Aslam said. “I was still shivering and crying and he asked me why I had crossed the river, so I told him of my father’s instructions.”
“Don’t be afraid,” the old man counseled Aslam. “You’re a brave boy to come so far from home. One day, you’ll be honored by everyone when you return.” He stuffed two wrinkled rupee notes into Aslam’s hand and accompanied him down the path toward Khaplu, until he could hand him off to another elder.
In this fashion, Aslam and his story traveled down the Lower Hushe Valley. He was passed from hand to hand, and each man who accompanied him made a small contribution toward his education. “People were so kind that I was very encouraged,” Aslam remembers. “And soon I was enrolled in a government school in Khaplu, and studying as hard as I was able.”
Students in bustling Khaplu, the largest settlement Aslam had ever seen, were cosmopolitan by comparison. They teased Aslam about his appearance. “I wore yak-skin shoes and woolen clothes and all the students had fine uniforms,” Aslam says. Teachers, taking pity, pooled their money and purchased a white shirt, maroon sweater, and black trousers for Aslam so he could blend in with the other boys. He wore the uniform every day and cleaned it as well as he could at night. And after his first year of school, when he walked back up the Hushe Valley to visit his family, he made the impression the old man who plucked him out of the Shyok had predicted.
“When I went upside,” Aslam says. “I was clean and wearing my uniform. Everyone was gazing at me and saying I had changed. Everyone honored me. I realized I must live up to this honor.”
In 1976, after Aslam graduated at the top of the Tenth Class in Khaplu, he was offered a post with the government of the Northern Areas. But he decided to return home to Hushe, and after his father’s death, was elected nurmadhar. “I had seen how people live downside and it was my duty to work to improve the quality of life upside in my village,” Aslam says.
Petitioning the government officials who had offered him a job, Aslam helped convince the Northern Areas Administration to bulldoze and blast a dirt road all the way up the valley to Hushe. He also pestered them into funding a small school he built in a drafty farm shed for twenty-five boys, but Aslam had trouble convincing the families of his village to send their sons to study in this poorly equipped building, rather than work in the fields. The men of Hushe waylaid Aslam as he walked, whispering bribes of butter and bags of flour if he’d exempt their sons from school.
As his own children reached school age, Aslam realized he needed help if he hoped to educate all of them. “I have been blessed nine times,” Aslam says. “With five boys and four girls. But my daughter Shakeela is the most clever among them. There was nowhere for her to pursue her studies and she was too young to send away. Although many thousand climbers had passed through my village for many years not one had offered to help our children. I began to hear rumors about a big Angrezi who was building schools that welcomed both boys and girls all over Baltistan, and I decided to seek him out.”
In the spring of 1997, Aslam traveled two days by jeep to Skardu and asked for Mortenson at the Indus Hotel, only to be told he had left for the Upper Braldu Valley and might be gone for weeks. “I left a letter for the Angrezi, inviting him to my village,” Aslam says, “but I never heard from him.” Then one June day in 1998, when he was home in Hushe, Aslam learned from a jeep driver that the Angrezi was only a few villages down the valley, in Khane.
“That spring I had come back to Khane,” Mortenson says, “figuring I’d call zjirga, a big meeting, and get everyone to outvote Janjungpa so I could finally build a school there.” But Janjungpa, not willing to relinquish his fantasy of a climbing school of his own, had contacted the local police, and told them the one thing certain to arouse suspicion about an outsider in this sensitive border region. “He said I was a spy, working for their archenemy,” Mortenson says. “India.”
As Mortenson struggled to placate a policeman demanding that he hand over his passport for inspection, Aslam arrived in a borrowed jeep and introduced himself. “I told him, ‘I am the nurmadhar of Hushe and I’ve been trying to meet you for one year now,’” Aslam remembers. “I said, ‘Please, in evening time, you come to Hushe and attend our tea party.’” Mortenson was coming to consider Khane a cursed village. He no longer wanted a full moon, tottering on the canyon’s rim, to fall and crush it. But he was happy to have an excuse to leave.
An innovator educationall
y and otherwise, Aslam had painted the walls of his house with bold geometric designs in primary colors. To Mortenson, the house had a vaguely African flavor that made him feel instantly at home. On the roof, he sipped paiyu cha deep into the night with his new friend the nurmadhar, hearing the story of Aslam’s odyssey. And by the time the rising sun iced the hanging glaciers of Masherbrum pale pink, like a gargantuan pastry dangling above them at breakfast time, Mortenson had agreed to shift the funds his board had approved for the doomed Khane school upside to this village whose headman had traveled so far downriver to educate himself.
“After seeking him all over Baltistan, I was very surprised when I finally met Dr. Greg,” Aslam says. “I expected to have to plead with an Angrezi Sahib like a little man. But he spoke to me as a brother. I found Greg a very kind, soft-hearted, naturally pleasing man. When I first met him, I actually fell in love with his personality. Every year since we built our school this feeling gets stronger, and finally, that love has spread to all my children and all the families of Hushe.”
The building Aslam and the other men of his village constructed in the summer of 1998, with funds and assistance from Mortenson’s CAI, may be the most beautiful school in northern Pakistan. It is nothing if not a monument to the hope Aslam convinced his village to invest in its children. Mortenson turned the particulars of design over to the nurmadhar, and Aslam’s vision is evident in the scarlet-painted finely turned wooden trim adorning every window, roofline, and doorway. Along the borders of the school’s walled courtyard, sunflowers grow higher than even the oldest students throughout the warmer months. And the inspiring view that greets these students from every classroom—the roof of the world, represented by Masherbrum’s soaring summit ridge—has already helped convince many of Hushe’s children to aim high.
In a house he recently rented for her, near the Government Girl’s High School she attends today in Khaplu, Aslam’s eldest daughter, Shakeela, reflects on the path the Hushe School opened to her the year it first appeared in her village, when she was eight years old. Sitting cross-legged on a rough striped wool carpet next to her distinguished father, Shakeela, poised and pretty at fifteen, smiles confidently out from under a cream-colored shawl festooned with falling leaves as she speaks.
“At first, when I began to attend school, many people in my village told me a girl has no business doing such a thing,” Shakeela says. “They said you will end up working in the field, like all women, so why fill your head with the foolishness found in books? But I knew how much my father valued education, so I tried to shut my mind to the talk and I persisted with my studies.”
“I have tried to encourage all of my children,” Aslam says, nodding toward two of Shakeela’s older brothers, college students who live with her in Khaplu and act as chaperones. “But I saw a special attitude in this girl from an early age.”
Shakeela covers her face with her shawl in embarrassment, then brushes it aside to speak. “I am not such a special student,” she says. “But I was able to pass through school in Hushe with good marks.”
Adjusting to cosmopolitan Khaplu has proven harder. “The environment here is very exceptional,” Shakeela says. “Everything is quick. Everything is available.” She shows her father a recent physics exam, on which she is ashamed to have scored only an 82. “My classes are very difficult here, but I am adjusting,” she says. “In Hushe, I was the most advanced student. Here at least there is always a senior student or teacher available to help when I lose my way.”
With a road in place now to take her all the way downside, Shakeela’s route to higher education in Khaplu wasn’t as physically dangerous as her father’s. But in her own way, she has blazed just as dramatic a trail. “Shakeela is the first girl in all of the Hushe Valley to be granted the privilege of a higher education,” Aslam says proudly. “And now, all the girls of Hushe look up to her.”
Her father’s praise drives Shakeela back, briefly, behind her shawl. “People’s minds in Hushe are beginning to change,” Shakeela says, emerging once again. “Now when I return to my village, I see all the families sending their girls to school. And they tell me, ‘Shakeela, we were mistaken. You were right to read so many books and brave to study so far from home. You’re bringing honor to the village.’”
If she can master difficult new subjects like physics, Shakeela says she wants to go as far as her education can take her—ideally to medical school. “I’d like to become a doctor and go to work wherever I am needed,” she says. “I’ve learned the world is a very large place and so far, I’ve only seen a little of it.”
Shakeela’s academic success is influencing not only the women of Hushe Valley, but her elder brothers as well. Yakub, eighteen, attended university in Lahore for a year, but failed six of his eight classes. Enrolled now in a local college in Khaplu, he is rededicating himself to his studies in hopes of earning a government post. “I have no choice,” Yakub says, sheepishly adjusting a baseball cap bearing a gold star, the kind of mark his sister earned frequently during her years at the Hushe School. “My sister is pushing me. She works hard, so I must, too.”
Studying a sheaf of Shakeela’s recent work, Aslam finds a test on which his daughter has scored a perfect 100—an Urdu exam. He holds the page tenderly, like a nugget of precious ore sifted from the Shyok. “For these blessings, I thank Almighty Allah,” Aslam says, “and Mister Greg Mortenson.”
Across northern Pakistan, thousands of people likewise sang Mortenson’s praises throughout the summer and fall of 1998. Returning to Peshawar, the city that continued to fascinate him, Mortenson toured the refugee camps that strained to feed, shelter, and educate hundreds of thousands, now that the Taliban’s ruthless brand of fundamentalist Islam had conquered most of Afghanistan. Constructing schools under such apocalyptic conditions was clearly out of the question. But at the Shamshatoo Refugee Camp, southwest of Peshawar, he organized eighty teachers, who held classes for four thousand Afghan students, and agreed to see that their salaries were paid as long as the refugees remained in Pakistan.
With eye disease rampant in northern Pakistan, Mortenson arranged for Dr. Geoff Tabin, an American cataract surgeon, to offer free surgery to sixty elderly patients in Skardu and Gilgit. And he sent Dr. Niaz Ali, the only eye doctor in Baltistan, to the renowned Tilanga Eye Hospital in Nepal for specialized training so he could perform the surgeries himself long after Dr. Tabin returned home to America.
After attending a conference of development experts in Bangladesh, Mortenson decided CAI schools should educate students only up through the fifth grade and focus on increasing the enrollment of girls. “Once you educate the boys, they tend to leave the villages and go search for work in the cities,” Mortenson explains. “But the girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they’ve learned. If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygiene and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls.”
Bumping up to each village where CAI operated in his green Land Cruiser, Mortenson held meetings with elders and insisted they sign pledges to increase the enrollment of girls at each school by 10 percent a year if they wanted CAI’s continued support. “If the girls can just get to a fifth-grade level,” Mortenson says, “everything changes.”
The CAI’s board of directors evolved along with its philosophy. George McCown’s wife, Karen, who had founded a charter school in the Bay Area, joined, as did Abdul Jabbar, a Pakistani professor at the City College of San Francisco. The entire board was by now comprised of professional educators.
With a dozen schools now up and running, Julia Bergman, with the help of two teachers from the City College, Joy Durighello and Bob Irwin, organized a teacher-training workshop to be held in Skardu each summer and compiled a permanent resource library for all of CAI’s teachers. In meetings that summer in Skardu, with Ghulam Parvi, the master teachers Bergman brought to Pakistan from America, and all the Pakistani instructors on CAI’s payro
ll, Mortenson hammered out an educational philosophy.
CAI schools would teach the exact same curriculum as any good Pakistani government school. There would be none of the “comparative cultures” classes then so popular in the West, nothing conservative religious leaders could point to as “anti-Islamic” in an effort to shut the schools down. But neither would they let the schools preach the fiery brand of fundamentalist Islam taught in many of the country’s madrassas.
“I don’t want to teach Pakistan’s children to think like Americans,” Mortenson says. “I just want them to have a balanced, nonextremist education. That idea is at the very center of what we do.”
Each successfully completed project added luster to Mortenson’s reputation in northern Pakistan. His picture began to appear over the hearths of homes and on jeep drivers’ dashboards. Bound by Islam’s prohibition against false idols, Pakistanis don’t embrace the endless pantheon of deities plastered across windshields in the Hindu country to the east. But as in India, certain public figures in Pakistan begin to transcend the merely mortal realm.
Cricket hero Imran Khan had become a sort of secular saint. And rippling out from Mortenson’s headquarters in Skardu, over the parched dunes, through the twisting gorges, and up the weatherbound valleys of Baltistan, the legend of a gentle infidel called Dr. Greg was likewise growing.
Chapter 17
Cherry Trees In The Sand
The most dangerous place in the world today, I think you could argue,
is the Indian Subcontinent and the Line of Control in Kashmir.
—President Bill Clinton, before leaving Washington on a diplomatic visit to,
and peacemaking mission between, India and Pakistan
FATIMA BATOOL REMEMBERS the first “whump,” clearly audible from the Indian artillery battery, just twelve kilometers across the mountains. She remembers the first shell whistling gracefully as it fell out of the blameless blue sky, and the way she and her sister Aamina, working together sowing buckwheat, looked at each other just before the first explosion.