Stones Into Schools

by Greg Mortenson

  When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it’s amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children.

  Farzana was a beautiful ninth grader with deep brown eyes and dense black eyebrows who lived in the village of Nouseri. Her story bore the same dimensions of tragedy and loss that had marked the lives of all the surviving children of Nouseri, where more than a third of the community’s 1,500-odd residents had been killed and only a handful of homes were still standing.

  Farzana’s mother, Jamila Khattoon, and her twelve year-old brother, Nabil, had been killed inside their house when the roof collapsed. Two miles down the road lay the ruins of the local girls’ school where Farzana’s thirteen-year-old sister, Sidra, was one of forty-seven students killed. Aside from Farzana herself, the surviving members of her family included her father, Nur Hussein, a veteran of the Pakistani army, and her three-year-old sister, Kurat.

  The weeks following the earthquake left little time for grieving. Nouseri’s water system had been completely destroyed, which meant that every day, Farzana and the other women of the village were obliged to hike two miles and descend three thousand feet to the river and climb back up carrying fifty-pound jugs filled with water. Meanwhile, Nur Hussein had to leave the village each morning for a six-hour round-trip hike to the nearest Pakistani army camp, where he collected the family’s daily allotment of flour, plus some cooking oil, salt, and tea.

  When Sarfraz and I made it to Nouseri, the surviving students were supposed to be studying their lessons in one of the tent schools that Sarfraz had set up on an earlier visit. Attendance at this school, however, was extremely spotty. The kids were around—we could see them moving about the village—but most of them were avoiding the school and did not even seem to want to come near it. No one could tell us why, until one day when I was sitting on the floor of the tent school with the teacher and the handful of kids who were willing to attend class, including Farzana.

  Before I left Bozeman, my wife, who is a psychotherapist and often works with traumatized women, had advised me to encourage the children who had survived the earthquake to talk, draw, write, or even sing about their experience—anything that might enable them to get their feelings out in the open would start the healing process, she said. So during a lull in the class, I cleared my throat and posed a question.

  “Would anyone like to talk about the earthquake today?”

  There was dead silence. Several of the children glared. One of the girls ran out of the tent, sat down by the door, and started to cry, wiping her eyes with her dupatta (head scarf).

  Well, now you’ve really gone and done it, Greg, I thought to myself.

  Then a quiet, low voice came from the back corner of the tent. It was Farzana, whose little sister, Kurat, was clinging to her back.

  “Let me tell you for all of us,” she began.

  There was a long pause and some reshuffling. The girl who had been sitting outside in tears padded softly back into the tent.

  “Bismillah ir-Rahman Rakham ir-Rahim,” Farzana spoke. “In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Beneficent.”

  “This is very difficult for all of us,” she continued. “The day of the Qayamat is like a black night that we want to forget, so please forgive us for being so sad.”

  In painstaking detail, she went on to describe the quake itself—pausing often to keep herself from breaking down, allowing time for her fellow students to insert a murmured comment.

  “We were just starting school when a strange roar came up the valley, like a lion, and then there was a quiet few seconds, which was followed by a violent ruffling, like an old man shaking the base of a young apricot tree as hard as he could. Then after a minute, it was quiet again. And then there was a ripple in the whole mountain—like a wave on the water.”

  Everyone nodded.

  At that point, explained Farzana, the buildings started to collapse. The walls disintegrated first, then the roofs came down in an explosive shower of concrete and wood. As the buildings shattered, clouds of dust rose from the debris and the sky turned dark. Then the screaming began, and over the screams you could hear the shouts of the parents who were running down the hill from the village to find their children. Within minutes, the clatter of picks and shovels arose as the men started attacking the rubble. There were fewer screams now—it was mostly moans and crying. And the air was still thick with dust.

  Farzana’s description of the events of that morning was very vivid and exceptionally detailed, and something about not only the precision of her words but also the manner in which her thoughts and emotions seemed to play across her face as she spoke led me to wonder if she might be able to clear up the confusion surrounding the school’s attendance problem.

  When she was finished, I asked her why so few kids were coming to class.

  “Because there are no desks in the tents,” she said matter-of-factly.

  This was interesting, but also odd. In this part of the world, many homes lack chairs and people are much more comfortable sitting on the floor. In many of our schools across Pakistan and Afghanistan, it is not unusual for an entire class to sit cross-legged on the floor while the teacher stands. The lack of desks seemed like a strange reason not to go to school.

  “Why are desks so important?” I asked.

  “They make children feel safe,” she explained. “And with desks, the tents feel more like a real school.”

  This seemed to make sense, and I nodded, but she wasn’t finished.

  “But even if the classes are held outside, you should have desks outside, too,” she said. “Only then will the children come to class.”

  This seemed rather mysterious, but something about Farzana’s earnest directness made me want to trust her. So the next day Sarfraz and I began rummaging around a pile of rubble in the remains of the girls’ school and scavenged the shattered remains of several dozen desks. That afternoon, we rounded up a few men and paid them to start refurbishing. Word of this activity spread quickly, and within an hour or two of our installing the desks in the tent, dozens of kids were filing into class.

  What Farzana had understood was that in the minds of the children, desks provided concrete evidence that at least within the confines of their classroom, a degree of order, stability, and normalcy had returned to their lives. In a traumatized world where everything had been turned upside down and the ground itself had given way, a desk offered certitude. It was something you could trust.

  That marked the beginning of “Operation School Desk.”

  Armed with Farzana’s insight, we started retrieving the remains of broken furniture from every possible source, and over the next week, our team of amateur carpenters knocked together about eight hundred desks for every tent school in the area. But it didn’t end there. Other organizations in Balakot and Muzaffarabad got wind of Farzana’s insight, and soon schools up and down the Neelum Valley were filling up with desks. From that time forward, desks became a requirement for all of the tent schools we established in Azad Kashmir.

  In terms of solving the staggering crisis besetting Azad Kashmir, this desk business barely merited notice. It did, however, represent a small step forward during a moment when almost nothing seemed to be going well. And more important, perhaps, it was something that had been initiated by the children themselves.

  As I was about to discover, however, it wasn’t simply the children of Kashmir who had something to say to us.

  In the middle of January, I was forced once again to say farewell to Sarfraz and return home to Montana. I was loath to leave the earthquake zone, but the run-up to the publication of Three Cups of Tea was in full swing, and this would offer a chance to raise some much-needed funds for our work in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

  Back in Bozeman, as I struggled to immerse myself in the endless rounds of phone calls and e-mails, all I could really think about were the survivors whom I’d left behind in Azad Kashmi
r. I found myself dwelling on the disparity between the urgent work that needed doing over there and what struck me as the rather mundane office tasks that I was performing in the United States. Within a week of getting home, I was depressed, disengaged, and already plotting how to return to Pakistan.

  That’s where things stood one evening in late January as I was reading a bedtime story to Khyber, who was five years old at the time. He was happy I was home, and that made me happy, too. Moreover, reading to him and Amira had always been one of Tara’s and my favorite things to do. But as I read the words to Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, tracing each sentence with my finger, my mind was preoccupied with issues on the opposite end of the planet.

  What time was it in Kashmir, and where was Sarfraz right now, and when would he be calling? How many teachers were on our payroll in the Neelum Valley at the moment, and did I need to wire funds to Islamabad in order to cover their salaries for this month?

  Oh my goodness!

  My reverie was derailed by the realization that my son had stopped listening to my voice and begun to enunciate the words on the page for himself. He was not reciting these words from memory. Khyber was reading for the first time in his life.

  When you are a parent, the instant your child first begins to read is a moment of the purest magic. It doesn’t matter whether you happen to live in Kashmir or Montana or Tanzania or Manhattan—witnessing the fire of literacy ignite in the mind of a child is something transcendent. To me, it felt exactly like releasing the string on a helium-filled balloon and watching it ascend into the sky all by itself.

  But there was another feeling, too. Mixed with the intoxicating sense of buoyancy was an awareness of the many other mile-stones in the lives of my children that I had irrevocably missed. Their first steps. Their first spoken words. Their first bike rides. Their first day of school.

  These developments, which are the delight of so many parents, had all unfolded while I was at work on the far side of the world, attending to the needs and the dreams of other people’s children. And yet right now, I was permitted to be lying next to my own son for this one precious moment. The piercing combination of joy and loss was too much to bear, and the tears began rolling down my face.

  This was deeply puzzling to Khyber, who had no way of grasping the enormity of this moment for his father.

  “Daddy, what’s the matter? Are you okay?” he asked, comforting me with a pat on the shoulder.

  “Yes, Khyber, I’m okay, and I’m so proud of you today,” I responded. “You know how to read!”

  Khyber then called out to Tara, who was in another room with Amira, and they dashed into the bedroom and tumbled onto the bed with us. For the next hour we stayed up past the children’s bedtime, snuggled together as a family while Khyber continued to read, with some help from his big sister. Tara and I proudly celebrated the precious time together.

  That evening offered one of the most succinct encapsulations of the blessings and the burdens that come out of the work I do to promote literacy and education for young readers in central Asia. It also helped sustain me through the challenges that were to unfold in the weeks ahead.

  By February, Sarfraz had come to the conclusion that regardless of how eager we might be to use some of our earthquake-relief money to begin converting our tent schools into permanent structures, circumstances required that we wait. Back in December, we had been able to catch a few flights on the Chinooks, and from above it was easy to see how radically the landscape had been changed. Alluvial fans had been altered, drainage channels had changed, and hillsides that had taken centuries to terrace into arable fields had been eliminated. Thanks to those changes, entire villages would need to relocate, which meant that no one could be sure exactly where hundreds of thousands of people would ultimately end up.

  Given this uncertainty, Sarfraz counseled, it was too early to start putting up actual buildings. Instead, he declared, what we needed to concentrate on was figuring out how to provide clean, dependable water sources. In the communities where we were working this was a top priority because, among other reasons, a good source of water is a prerequisite for a school.

  In the villages of Baltistan, most of the water systems relied on glacial melt. In the villages of Azad Kashmir, however, there was an almost total reliance on springs, many of which had now been permanently plugged or rerouted. Taking everything into account, Sarfraz thought it was necessary for us to put in small water-collection tanks and delivery pipes for five villages, including Nouseri. With my approval, he paid modest sums to two water engineers to design these systems. He also managed to finagle quite a bit of free PVC piping from the Public Works Department in Rawalpindi, including twenty thousand feet for Nouseri alone.

  So far, so good. Who could possibly be opposed to such a project? As it turned out, a Pakistani subcontractor who was working for an American contractor who, in turn, was receiving funding from the USAID objected on the grounds that the Central Asia Institute did not have an official permit to distribute water in Azad Kashmir.

  You are an education NGO, he argued, whereas I have prepaid contracts to distribute hundreds of thousands of plastic bottles of mineral water, by truck and by helicopter, from warehouses in Muzaffarabad to the villages of Azad Kashmir.

  When Sarfraz reported this to me, I initially thought he was kidding. By any yardstick one might care to use, the prohibitively expensive bottled-water delivery contract was a ridiculous boondoggle. Nevertheless, we were forced to spend several weeks wrangling with various government ministries in Azad Kashmir before the mess was sorted out and we were granted retroactive approval for the water-delivery systems that Sarfraz, exasperated by the unnecessary red tape, had already begun constructing.

  At home in Montana, these and many other challenges formed the grist for my family’s dinner-table conversations throughout February and March. Sarfraz’s phone updates and the photos that he e-mailed provided Khyber and Amira with a sense of the challenges we were up against, and I was pleased by the interest that my son and daughter appeared to take in these matters. Then one evening, Amira posed a question that seemed to leapfrog over the tangled talk of PVC piping and the politics of sweetheart government deals for American contractors.

  “Hey, Dad,” she asked, “what kinds of games do the children in your Kashmir schools play?”

  Amid the devastation and the despair of the earthquake zone, I didn’t recall seeing much in the way of games. But then again, it was possible that Sarfraz and I had been so focused on the mechanics of getting our water-delivery systems and our tent schools up and running that we simply hadn’t been paying attention.

  “Um . . . I’m not sure,” I replied. “I honestly have no idea.”

  “Well,” declared Amira, “you should get those kids some jump ropes.”

  Then she threw me a sharp look, as if a switch had just been flipped in her mind.

  “Dad, you don’t have any playgrounds at all in your schools, do you?”

  “No,” I admitted. Playgrounds had not exactly been at the top of the priority list for Sarfraz and me.

  “You really need to put them in,” she declared. “All children need to play, especially ones that are suffering and hurting like the kids in Pakistan.”

  In truth, some of our schools did feature dirt fields where the kids were able to play soccer. But we had no real playgrounds with swings and slides and seesaws. How had we not thought about this earlier?

  The next day, Amira phoned two of my friends, Jeff McMillan and Keith Hamburg, at Gold’s Gym in Bozeman and told them that she needed their help in rounding up jump ropes. Word spread quickly, and before we knew it, Amira had more than two thousand jump ropes in our living room. We shipped them off to Suleman in Islamabad, and later that spring—along with an additional seven thousand jump ropes that we purchased in Rawalpindi—they were distributed throughout our tent schools and beyond.

  The kids responded in a manner that mirrored their reaction to Far
zana’s desks. The play and exercise brought joy and delight to them, and their enthusiasm spread like wildfire into the depressed communities. Before long, we were fielding requests to supplement the jump ropes with cricket bats and soccer balls. And like Farzana’s desks, Amira’s jump ropes provoked a revision of the Central Asia Institute’s operations policy.

  Since the spring of 2006, we’ve incorporated playgrounds into most of our new schools, and we have also been working to retrofit a few of our existing schools with swings, seesaws, and slides. Our loyal donors love this idea and have been more than happy to chip in. The playgrounds have also won fans in some unexpected quarters. In the summer of 2009, for example, a group of elders who sympathized with the Taliban paid a visit to one of our schools in Afghanistan with a request to tour the facility. As they walked into the compound and put down their weapons, the leader of this delegation, a man named Haji Mohammad Ibrahim, spotted the playground and broke into a big smile. For the next half hour, he and his companions gleefully sampled the swings, the slide, and the seesaw. When they finally quit playing, Haji Mohammad Ibrahim announced that they did not need to see the inside of the school.

  “But don’t you want to take a look at the classrooms?” asked the principal.

  “No, we have seen enough,” replied Haji Mohammad Ibrahim. “We would like to formally request you to come to our village in order to start building schools. But if you do, they absolutely must have playgrounds.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Sarfraz’s Promise

  Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY, The Sun Also Rises

  Two sisters in UNHCR earthquake refugee camp, Pakistan

  While we continued moving forward with our tent-school projects in the upper Neelum Valley, down in Patika the teachers at the Gundi Piran Girls’ School were dealing with their own set of challenges. On November 1, the school had reopened for business in the tents that Shaukat Ali had requisitioned from the Pakistani army. On the first day of class, only seven girls made an appearance, along with a handful of teachers. One of those teachers was Saima Khan, who continued to show up every day despite the fact that she was still recovering from a severe leg fracture.