Stones Into School (12 page)

A dua is a prayer invoked as a blessing or thanks to Allah, and in the case of Abdul Rashid Khan's invocation, it was partly an expression of gratitude over the miracle that we had finally met and partly an expression of his hope that the humiliating and fruitless quest on which he had embarked might actually result in something positive.

“All I really want for my people is a school so that we can provide education for our children,” he said. “To achieve that, I am willing to give up all of my wealth--all of my sheep, all of my camels, all of my yaks--everything I have, if only Allah will grant this one request.”

“But you have nothing to worry about,” I said. “I have already promised your son that we will build you a school.”

“If that is truly the case,” he replied, “then let us start now--this very minute!”

Ooba (yes), I told Abdul Rashid Khan, but first I have to call someone. I stepped into the cool evening outside, turned on my sat phone, and punched the number for Karen McCown, one of our directors, who lives in the Bay Area. Seeking permission from our board to fund a particular school is not the way we normally do things at the CAI. But I was excited and overwhelmed, and so was everyone else, and the emotions of the moment took over.

“Karen,” I blurted, “do you remember the Kirghiz tribesmen who rode across the border and found me in Zuudkhan in October of 1999? Well, I am finally here with Abdul Rashid Khan, and he is in desperate straits, and we have to start the school for him and his people.”

My excitement was apparently contagious, even over the phone.

“Go ahead, Greg,” Karen declared. “I'll check with the board and get retroactive approval, but let's get this show on the road!”

When I returned to the dining room and announced that we had the funding for the school, Abdul Rashid Khan declared that he wanted to draw up a formal agreement right then and there. As the leader of the Kirghiz, it was his duty to provide a guarantee that his people would donate the land and the labor in order to ensure that this project would go forward.

Wohid Khan summoned a guard to give me a spiral notebook and a pen, and I drew up a standard CAI contract, the document that codifies our arrangement with any new community. I then handed the paper to Niaz Ali and he transcribed it into Kirghiz with a vintage fountain pen. It was only eight sentences long, and in English it read as follows:

Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim

In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Beneficial

With the witness of Commandhan Wohid Khan, Abdul Rashid Khan, Mullah Mohammed, and Greg Mortenson

Whereas, the Kirghiz people of the Wakhan have no school, teacher, or education

And Whereas, the Afghanistan government has not provided us schools as promised

The Kirghiz people, under the leadership of Abdul Rashid Khan, hereby sign this agreement to build a four-room school at Bozai Gumbaz, Wakhan, with the assistance of registered charity NGO Central Asia Institute.

Central Asia Institute will provide building materials, skilled labor, school supplies, and help with teachers' salary and training

Abdul Rashid Khan agrees to provide free land, subsidized manual labor, and support for teachers.

The exact terms of the budget and agreement will be worked out after a jirga is convened in Bozoi Gumbaz.

Abdul Rashid Khan

Wohid Khan

Greg Mortenson

Mullah Mohammed

Then Abdul Rashid Khan did something that I had never seen. He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a tiny brown leather satchel. Inside was a very old wooden stamp with the official seal of the Khan of the Kirghiz of the Little Pamir. On this seal was emblazoned a pair of Marco Polo sheep horns, twisted in a spiral. He also had an ink dipper, and with this he carefully blotted ink onto the stamp, which I noticed had a tiny crack running down the middle, then placed this mark upon the contract. When he was through, he took a red candle, dribbled a small circle of wax at the bottom of the stamped seal, and with ponderous gravity, pressed his thumbprint into the wax.

When this formality was complete, Niaz Ali launched into a lengthy prayer that apparently included half of Kirghiz history and that petitioned, among many other things, that

Allah the Compassionate, Allah the Merciful, Allah the Beneficent, might watch over Wohid Khan, whose food had brought these humble servants of Islam together for this miraculous meeting . . . and the men of the eastern Badakshan border security force, who were protecting us on this most dangerous night . . . and, yes, even President Hamid Karzai, who may not have kept his promise but who bore the weight of a shattered nation on his shoulders, which surely is a greater burden than any man ever should be called upon to bear . . . and this school-building American mountaineer, who is attempting to honor the first word of the Holy Koran, Ikra (“to read”) by lighting a lamp for the illiterate daughters of Islam . . . and this American's strange band of employees--first of all, bless the Sunnis among them, of course, but the Shiites, too; and yes, even this crazy Ismaili from Pakistan with the broken hand named Sarfraz Khan . . . may Allah shower his blessings upon them all . . .

Praise be to God . . .

There is no God but God . . .

And Muhammad is His Prophet . . .

La Ilaha Illa-Allah . . .

This went on for quite some time. When it was finally over, everyone clapped. Abdul Rashid Khan and I embraced. And then Wohid Khan solemnly declared that if it became necessary, he would personally travel to Kabul to ensure that no corrupt bureaucrat or misguided government official dared to interfere with the construction of this school for the Kirghiz of the Little Pamir.

Thus ended one of the most memorable encounters I have experienced during the twelve years since I failed to climb K2 and wound up stumbling into the village of Korphe. It was remarkable on its own terms, to be sure--but it was rendered even more astonishing, it now seems to me, by virtue of the events that were about to unfold.

At about ten o'clock the following morning, Mullah Mohammed and I bade farewell to our Kirghiz friends and left Baharak, heading west for Faizabad. It was now Friday the thirteenth, and as we made our way through town we could see that a large group of men had gathered around the Najmuddin Khan Wosiq mosque, which was located just off the bazaar. They looked angry, and many of them were carrying hoes, shovels, and sticks.

We kept driving, reached Faizabad about three hours later, and immediately checked into the Marco Polo Club, a former Soviet guesthouse on an island in the middle of the roaring Amu Darya River that currently functions as a decrepit hotel. By now, the Newsweek story about the desecration of the Koran had filtered into every corner of the Muslim world, and enraged imams from Morocco to Islamabad were preparing to launch fiery sermons on the subject during Friday prayers, which typically begin around 1:30 P.M. Fearing that things might get out of hand, the employees of almost every foreign NGO in eastern Badakshan appeared to be evacuating Faizabad, either by getting a seat on the one UN flight at the airport or by heading south on the road to Kabul in their Land Cruisers.

My thinking in these matters has always been different. When things get tense, I'd rather be with local people than with foreigners, even if the foreigners have guns. So I stayed put at the Marco Polo.

That evening, a group of aid workers who were fleeing from Baharak to Kabul stopped in Faizabad and brought word that a pair of conservative mullahs had given especially inflammatory speeches that afternoon at the Baharak mosque in which they had declared that the insult to the Koran that had taken place at Guantanamo Bay was an unpardonable offense that needed to be met with violence. In response, several hundred men had swarmed out of the mosque into the streets of Baharak and headed southeast toward a street that houses the offices of nearly every foreign aid agency in town.

During the next several hours of rioting, each of these offices was ransacked. The windows were smashed, the doors broken down. While every piece of furniture and equipment inside was destroyed, the vehicles parked outside them were pummeled with sledgehammers and crowbars, then set on fire. In the process, four local residents who had been employed by these organizations were murdered and the entire bazaar was smashed to pieces. Wohid Khan and the Border Security Force were eventually able to restore order and quell the violence, but only after shooting down two rioters, wounding at least a dozen more, and arresting more than fifty.

When word of these events reached me in Faizabad, my heart sank. Under most circumstances, I remain optimistic that things will work out for us in Asia, but on that evening, I was convinced that our new school just outside Baharak, which is less than a mile from the street where the NGO offices were attacked, had been gutted and destroyed. If that had indeed happened, it would be a setback for our entire Wakhan initiative, one from which we might not recover. Years of work and patient negotiation might spiral down the drain, along with our newly lit hopes of finally making good on our promise to Abdul Rashid Khan and his people in the Pamirs. In short, if this new school in the backyard of our strongest supporter in the entire province--Sadhar Khan himself--had been sacked by the mob, we could be out of business in the Wakhan.

I had no confirmation that this had actually taken place, of course, but my fears were getting the best of me. Not helping my frame of mind was Mullah Mohammed, who at some point that Friday had bolted from the Marco Polo and gone into hiding, apparently concluding that he'd be safer without me. I wasn't angry--who could blame him? But his actions seemed to underscore the extent to which everything was spinning out of control.

Two days later, Mullah Mohammed reappeared at the Marco Polo Club, apologizing profusely for having abandoned me. I wanted to ask him why he had violated the most sacrosanct of tribal codes and deserted me, but I noticed he was still terrified, literally trembling, and I reassured him we both were quite fine--but I added that we needed to line up some transportation and head for Baharak, where by now the rioting had subsided, in order to find out what had happened to our school. He quickly found a minivan for hire, and we were off.

As we drove into the outskirts of Faizabad, I began to see piles of burned wood, twisted rebar, and other remnants of the rioting piled at the north end of town. Near the main mosque, a firebombed Land Cruiser still smoldered and was missing its big antenna. Nervous men and curiosity seekers lingered on all sides of the locked-down bazaar stalls. A few local chai stands were doing a brisk business, with men congregating around them to sort out fact from fiction among the rumors that were flying through town.

Beyond Faizabad itself, there was no evidence of rioting or destruction on the sides of the roads. The farmers were in their fields weeding and rerouting irrigation channels; the small shops along the road were mostly open for business. For lunch we stopped at a local tandoori shop to get warm chai and fresh naan, hot out of a clay oven. The baker there complained that most of the vehicles that day were in a hurry to get out of the area and raced by his stand without stopping. He was amused when we told him where we were headed.

“You two are fools to be headed for Baharak today,” he declared. “You should be going the other way.”

Just before the entrance to Baharak, the road sweeps over a plateau and offers a stunning view of the town with the distant Hindu Kush in the south. As we topped the rise, we failed to spot anything unusual--but upon crossing the final bridge into Baharak and entering the main bazaar where the mosque and the government offices are located, it seemed as if we were passing into a war zone. Rubber tires still smoldered in the streets, which were covered with sticks, bricks, and stones.

In the middle of the bazaar, where the NGO offices began, there were gutted Land Cruisers, smashed computers, and broken glass everywhere. The mob's fury had clearly been directed at these buildings, which housed the Aga Khan Development Network, FOCUS, East West Foundation, Afghan Aid, and other NGOs. Their offices lay in ruins, and even the safes and desks had been smashed to pieces.

As we made our way down past the south end of the bazaar toward Yardar, I was braced for the worst. But when we pulled up in front of the boundary wall of the new school, I could hardly believe my eyes. No windows were broken. The door was intact. The fresh coat of lime green paint that the building had received only a week earlier was as bright as a newly minted dime.

“Allah Akbar,” mumbled Mullah Mohammed, and cracked a smile.

As we stood surveying the building, Sadhar Khan's son Waris walked up and explained that during the peak of the riots, a faction of the mob that was attacking the bazaar had stormed down the road in the direction of the school. Before reaching the boundary wall, however, they had been met by a group of elders who had donated the land for the school, organized the laborers who had built it, and participated in the laying of the corner-stone. These elders, or pirs, informed the rioters that the Central Asia Institute school belonged not to a foreign aid organization but to the community itself. It was their school, they were proud of it, and they demanded that it be left alone. And with that, the rioters dispersed.

Not a stone had been hurled, Waris told me.

Later, after all the damage had finally been tabulated, the cost of the Baharak riots was assessed at more than two million dollars. The CAI school was one of the few buildings associated with an international aid organization that was left standing, and the reason for this, I am convinced, was that our school wasn't really “international” at all. It was--and remains--“local” in every way that counts.

The outcome seemed to vindicate our three-cups-of-tea approach while simultaneously filling me with a sense of tremendous relief and pride--emotions that might well have gotten the best of me, had the journey home not served up a rude reminder of how much work remained to be done in this part of the world.

Waris was kind enough to offer Mullah Mohammed and me a ride back to Faizabad, where we were scheduled to catch a UN flight to Kabul. We were about an hour west of Baharak just outside the village of Simdara when I looked to my right and saw an old earthen hut twenty yards from the side of the road that appeared to be filled with children. At least that's what I thought I saw, but I couldn't be sure.