Stones Into School (11 page)

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.”

“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.

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

A
s 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 Guantanamo 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.

It was an extraordinary coincidence. Here in Baharak, Abdul Rashid Khan and I had finally been brought together around a plate of roast lamb, long after midnight on the eve of a full-blown religious riot. But even more remarkable, as I was about to discover, were the events that had drawn this man from his home in the mountains at the far end of the Wakhan. As we tucked into the food laid before us, he told me the story of the arduous journey he had just completed to meet the president of Afghanistan in Kabul, and the reasons why he was now returning, empty-handed and nearly broke, to his people in the High Pamir.

During the mid-1990s, the Afghan forces that had defeated the Soviet army found themselves grappling with the impossible challenge of rebuilding a war-shattered nation without any significant assistance from their former allies abroad, including the United States. In the absence of outside aid, one of the few reliable sources of wealth was opium--a crop that had offered a lucrative source of income to a number of cash-strapped mujahadeen commanders during the Soviet occupation. By the early 1990s, so much heroin was flowing out of the country that Afghanistan rivaled Southeast Asia as the prime source of the world's opium supply. Then in 1994, as one province and city after another fell to the armies of Mullah Omar, many members of Badakshan's beleaguered mujahadeen found themselves turning to drug dealing as their primary means of financing their war against the Taliban, sending enormous quantities north through new overland routes developed by organized crime groups in Russia, who would transport it to Moscow and European cities beyond.

In addition to taxing the growth and export of opium from within their own territory, these mujahadeen had also played a role in selling drugs to peasants in remote villages, especially the Wakhi and Kirghiz of the Wakhan. In village after village, the pattern repeated itself: Within the tight confines of a close-knit household, addiction would spread from an ailing husband or a rebellious teenager to every member of the family, including the women, the elderly, and even toddlers. From there the scourge would spread to members of the extended community, enveloping entire villages. Starting in the late 1990s, Ismaili and Kirghiz communities all across the Corridor began reporting opium addicts in every stratum of society, with estimates as high as a quarter of the entire adult population.

The results were devastating. Families suffering from advanced levels of addiction wound up selling everything they owned to finance their three-times-a-day habit. First to go were their possessions--mainly the goats, sheep, and yaks--followed by their land, and in the most extreme circumstances, even their daughters, who came to be known as opium brides. (It is not uncommon to find entire families sold into servitude.) Those who remained were reduced to a diet of tea and bread, making them vulnerable to sickness and diseases.

By early 2005, things had become so desperate that Abdul Rashid Khan decided to form a delegation of leaders from northeastern Afghanistan and travel to Kabul to lay these grievances before the newly elected president, Hamid Karzai. In addition to making Karzai aware of the problems stemming from heroin addiction, the representatives intended to present evidence that their sector of the country lacked virtually any semblance of a functioning federal government.

For Abdul Rashid Khan, the trip to the capital took an entire month and involved traveling by horse, jeep, and public transport. Upon reaching Kabul in early March, he and Niaz Ali spent several weeks moving around various government ministries in an effort to meet with officials who were responsible for services such as education, transportation, health care, and post offices. During these encounters, they got the same kind of runaround that Sarfraz and I had met with during our own visits. Meanwhile, they set themselves up in a rundown apartment with no heat or electricity and petitioned for an audience with President Karzai. They waited two months before receiving a reply.

When they were finally granted an audience, the president permitted Abdul Rashid Khan to get halfway through his itemization of the problems among his people before cutting him off. “Don't worry,” Karzai interrupted. “I am going to arrange food--I will send you back with food on helicopters. You will not go home without a solution to your problems. We will arrange what documentation is needed for the clinics, and we will get your food.”

With that, the meeting was over.

There was no follow-up from Karzai's office on the matters of food, helicopters, medical services, or anything else. In early May, Abdul Rashid Khan and Niaz Ali realized that the president's promises were not going to be fulfilled and started their journey home to the Wakhan empty-handed--and by road.

By the time Abdul Rashid Khan and I met at Wohid Khan's supper in Baharak, the two Kirghiz leaders had been away from home for more than four months and had squandered much of their personal fortune. Upon reaching the Pamirs, they would be faced with the duty of informing their people that it had all been for naught.

When he had finished relating this tale, Abdul Rashid Khan confirmed that he knew all about my meeting with his son at the entrance to the Irshad Pass and expressed his amazement that we were now, on the heels of his brutally disappointing sojourn in Kabul, finally meeting for the first time. It was a very emotional exchange: He declared that he was deeply honored to meet me; I protested that it was a far greater honor to meet him. Then the duas began to flow from his hands, one after the other, and he and Niaz Ali began a Koranic recitation out of sheer joy.