Because most of the girls were still in mourning and all of them had lost their textbooks, notebooks, even pencils and pens, Shaukat Ali began the first classes by reading to them from poetry and religious texts. “Reading, literature, and spirituality are good for the soul,” he told them. “So we will start with these studies.”
As the weeks rolled by, word spread that the school had reopened, and girls slowly began trickling back. By the middle of December, there were 145 students—a remarkable number, given that only 195 of them had survived the earthquake.
They spent the winter of 2006 huddled in the tents without electricity or running water, trying to keep warm with blankets and several boxes of clothing donated by a nearby Red Cross compound. Some of the students wore black leather aviator jackets or blue blazers from American businessmen; others wrapped themselves in silk scarves or high-tech Nordic ski gear. One girl in the fifth grade wound up with a bright bubble-gum pink coat that would have done justice to the wardrobe of a Miley Cyrus groupie.
Adding to the physical hardship was a general anxiety over the upcoming exams, which would serve as a prerequisite for entry to the region’s upper-division schools. After the trauma of the earthquake and the many weeks of missed classes, teachers and students alike began to worry that many of the girls might fail. During the evenings, scores of them stayed beyond normal school hours to get caught up.
In March, they held the exams. When the results arrived, it turned out that 82 percent of the girls had passed.
Saida Shabir considered the performance truly remarkable, given the odds that her teachers and students were up against. At the same time, though, the results—which would have been acceptable under normal circumstances—seemed to underscore the enormity of the problems that Gundi Piran continued to confront. Six months after the earthquake, the school still lacked a building, basic services, and teaching supplies—and given the doleful state of reconstruction in Azad Kashmir, it was doubtful that any of these issues would be redressed anytime soon. Despite the progress they had made, the future looked bleak.
What Ms. Shabir had no way of knowing at the time, however, was that help was on its way—although the emissary who had been dispatched by fate with the mission of untangling her troubles had quite a distance to travel, and he was about to confront some major obstacles of his own along the way.
Despite the nearly impossible demands associated with managing the tent-school projects in Azad Kashmir, Sarfraz was still also responsible for ramrodding our initiative in the Wakhan Corridor. By May 2006, his duties in Afghanistan and Pakistan had expanded to the point of absurdity. He was now managing eighteen tent schools and five water-delivery systems within Azad Kashmir’s earthquake zone while simultaneously supervising the construction of seven new schools in the Wakhan.
In addition to the challenges of keeping all of this on track at the same time, there was the fact that these thirty projects were spread between two different countries and separated by the densest, most rugged concentrations of high peaks on earth. Each two-hundred-mile trip from Azad Kashmir to the Wakhan required him to cross four separate mountain ranges—the Pir Panjal, the Karakoram, the Hindu Kush, and the Pamirs. Moreover, the logistical hassles Sarfraz faced inside the Wakhan were every bit as demanding as those of working inside the earthquake zone. One of his biggest headaches, for example, stemmed from our discovery that after nearly thirty years of war in Afghanistan, there was an insufficient number of skilled masons and carpenters inside the Wakhan.
The solution to this particular problem, Sarfraz decided, was to import teams of skilled craftsmen from Pakistan who could build the first schools inside the Corridor while training their Afghan counterparts. So he began escorting parties of up to twenty construction workers at a time over the Irshad Pass and inserting them directly into the Wakhan. None of these workers had visas or passports, but Sarfraz was able to negotiate special permission from Wohid Khan’s Border Security Force. Each trip took three days. The masons and carpenters would start off at 4:30 A.M. and trudge for fourteen hours before stopping for the night. They carried almost no food because the tools in their backpacks weighed more than eighty pounds.
Once the masons were set up on a job site, Sarfraz would whip back over the pass on his horse, jump into his Land Cruiser, and make a beeline down the Karakoram Highway for Azad Kashmir. After a week or two of madly dashing around the Neelum Valley, the Land Cruiser would again race north along the Karakoram Highway to the Charpurson Valley. There Sarfraz would transfer to his horse and scuttle back over the Irshad to monitor the masons’ progress, order up new supplies of cement and rebar, and settle accounts with Mullah Mohammed, our ex-Taliban bookkeeper, balancing the debit side of the ledgers with the bricks of cash that Sarfraz had stuffed into his saddlebags. (He often hauled tens of thousands of dollars at a time, wrapping the money in his dirty clothes and hiding it under cartons of the K2 cigarettes that he incessantly chain-smoked as part of what he called his “high-altitude program.”)
These round-trip journeys over the Hindu Kush could be brutal. Sarfraz rigged a special rope that enabled him to sleep in the saddle, and he set such a relentless pace that on one occasion upon reaching the village of Sarhad on the far side of the pass, his horse, Turuk, dropped to the ground and died. (Upon hearing the news of Turuk’s passing, one of our board members donated four hundred dollars for the purchase of a replacement, a sturdy white pony whom Sarfraz named Kazil, who continues to this day to perform heroically on behalf of education in the Wakhan.)
This was grueling, relentless, burnout-inducing work that involved constant motion, little sleep, and no time off whatsoever. And yet Sarfraz seemed to thrive on all of it. Listening to his progress reports every third or fourth night as I moved across the United States on my own mad dash to raise the money that would pay for what we were doing in Pakistan and Afghanistan, I pictured Sarfraz less as a man with a crippled right hand and more as an unstoppable force of nature: a whirling gyre of pigheaded determination quite unlike anything that had ever blown itself across the hinterlands of the western Himalayas.
That summer, however, he gave me one of the biggest scares of my life.
June marked the high point of the Wakhan’s summer construction season, so Sarfraz was going full steam on all seven of his projects inside the Corridor when, on June 12, I received an emergency phone call from Ted Callahan, a part-time mountain guide who was conducting an extensive study of the Kirghiz nomads of the eastern Wakhan as part of his Ph.D. research in anthropology at Stanford University. Ted, who had hooked up with Sarfraz in the hope of getting an introduction to the Kirghiz, reported that forty-eight hours earlier Sarfraz had begun experiencing sharp pains on the right side of his abdomen. As the pain worsened, Sarfraz had grown weaker and developed a pasty, feverish complexion. It was nighttime, and they were now in Babu Tengi, a village in the central Wakhan, effectively the middle of nowhere. Ted, a certified EMT, feared that Sarfraz was in danger of dying.
Ted and I agreed that the next move involved getting Sarfraz to Qala-e Panj, less than twenty miles west. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a single vehicle in Babu Tengi, so they had no choice but to start walking. Sarfraz was stumbling badly, so Ted and two masons kept him braced from both sides. Meanwhile, I started working the phones from Bozeman to figure out how we could extract our man from the Wakhan. I placed calls to Wohid Khan and to some contacts at the State Department, as well as phoning some friends at the U.S. military headquarters in Bagram, thirty miles north of Kabul.
Two hours later, a decrepit Soviet-era jeep came chugging down the trail—word had spread that Sarfraz was in trouble and needed help. Deep into the night the jeep crept along, skirting the washouts and the crater-size holes that dot the trail between Babu Tengi and Qala-e Panj. Having little suspension and no shock absorbers, the vehicle bounced hard on the horrendous road. Sarfraz had no pain medication except for his jumbo-size bottle of ibuprofen, which was of no use because by now he was unable
to swallow. The pain he endured on that four-hour drive must have been excruciating.
When the jeep ambulance arrived in Qala-e Panj, Sarfraz begged Ted to let him stop. “Just leave me here to die,” he pleaded. “It is not possible for me to go any further.” Ted was determined to push on, however, and asked the driver to keep moving toward the village of Khundud, where he hoped they might find a better vehicle and perhaps some medical assistance at the local dispensary. When they reached Khundud, several men in the village scoured the dispensary and all the local shops, but there was no medicine to be found. At this point, Sarfraz had curled into a fetal position and was nearly unconscious from the pain. Ted decided to let him spend a day recuperating before they proceeded further.
The following day, after another horrific ride in a minivan, they reached the town of Ishkoshem, which sits along the Tajikistan border. Ted rounded up a doctor, who took one look at Sarfraz and advised an immediate helicopter evacuation to Pakistan. Even a delirious Sarfraz, however, understood that a private, cross-border flight between Afghanistan and Pakistan would be extremely difficult to set up on such short notice—and even if it were possible, the chopper would wind up delivering him directly over the Hindu Kush to Chitral, a two-day drive from the hospitals in Peshawar. Perhaps it would be better, Sarfraz suggested, to keep moving west in the hope of reaching Faizabad and its airport.
Unbeknownst to Sarfraz or Ted, our friends at Bagram had by now called to inform me that the U.S. military was ready to dispatch a chopper into Ishkoshem and fly Sarfraz to Kabul. There were some concerns about the weather, however, and before we could set up the rendezvous, a pair of Ford Ranger pickup trucks dispatched by Wohid Khan roared in, scooped up Sarfraz and Ted, and raced off in the direction of Faizabad.
Even while teetering on the edge of catastrophic organ failure, Sarfraz was impossible to keep up with.
When they reached Faizabad, Ted had Sarfraz rushed directly to the hospital, where a doctor told him he had developed a massive septic infection and needed an operation. Sarfraz, who had zero interest in undergoing surgery anywhere inside Afghanistan, told the doctor to pump him full of antibiotics, and the next morning he and Ted caught a Red Cross plane into Kabul. When they arrived, a special flight arranged by our good friend Colonel Ilyas Mirza, a retired Pakistani military aviator who managed Askari Aviation charter service, was waiting to fly him to Islamabad. Within minutes of arriving at the Combined Military Hospital in Rawalpindi, Sarfraz was rushed directly into surgery. His entire extraction had taken four days.
On the operating table, the surgeons discovered an enormous abscess in Sarfraz’s gall bladder and also determined that the infection had spread to his liver. They removed his gall bladder during that first surgery, then put him back under the knife three days later to deal with the liver. Between operations, he was under the continuous supervision of Suleman and Apo, who tag teamed the duties of meeting with his doctors, obtaining his prescriptions, seeing to his bills, making sure he was fed, and keeping me constantly informed.
At some point during his five-day stay in the hospital, Sarfraz casually mentioned to his colleagues that his stomach pains had actually surfaced before his trip into Afghanistan and that the pain had been severe enough that he’d consulted a physician in Gilgit, who had urged him not to leave for the Wakhan before getting an operation. Sarfraz’s response to this news had been to declare that the school projects in Afghanistan were too important to be postponed and that his operation would simply have to wait until he got home.
Suleman and Apo decided it was best to keep silent for several months before sharing this information with me.
When Sarfraz was finally dismissed from the hospital, I told him to rest for a few days in Islamabad and then to head home to Zuudkhan, where he was to be given a special set of protocols designed personally by me. By this point, I had calculated that Sarfraz had been on the move almost continuously since the early spring of 2005, nearly sixteen straight months without a break.
“You are to spend a minimum of one month, but preferably two, sitting in Zuudkhan doing absolutely nothing,” I barked at him over the phone a few days later. “You are permitted to tend to your goats, gently brush Kazil, and look after your wife. Other than that, any form of work or activity is strictly forbidden.”
“Those are your orders, sir?” Sarfraz asked.
“Yes, Sarfraz, those are my orders, and they are not negotiable. Now go home and get some rest!”
“Okay, sir. No problem.”
Several months later, when I finally pieced together the story of what happened next, I learned that Sarfraz had begun plotting his return to the Neelum Valley before he was discharged from the hospital in Rawalpindi. Within forty-eight hours of arriving back in Zuudkhan, he was hunched behind the wheel of his red Land Cruiser, clutching the still-healing incisions in his abdomen, roaring down the Karakoram Highway in the direction of Azad Kashmir.
When he arrived in Muzaffarabad, he was struck by how little progress had been made during the month that had passed since his last visit to the earthquake zone. North of the city, despite all the relief efforts, women still carried water in plastic grocery bags. In the upper reaches of the Neelum, bodies were still being discovered in the wreckage. Bulldozers were everywhere.
Sarfraz spent most of the next four weeks supervising the tent schools and the water-delivery projects in the upper Neelum. Then one day in late July, he noticed that there was a new foot-bridge across the Neelum River to Patika and he decided to do a little exploring. When he got to the Patika bazaar, he heard for the first time about the plight of the Gundi Piran girls’ school and figured it couldn’t hurt to drop by and pay a visit to Saida Shabir.
To his surprise, she was not at all pleased to see him. All spring and summer, Saida had been wrestling with a burgeoning sense of frustration and outrage over the fact that despite the dozens of visits from journalists, relief workers, and concerned government officials, still no one had made the slightest effort to rebuild her ruined school. By the time Sarfraz showed up, the headmistress’s patience was finished.
“What are you doing here and what do you want?” she demanded, pointedly declining to offer him a cup of tea.
Sarfraz politely explained that he would appreciate being given the chance to tour the school.
“You don’t seem to understand,” she replied. “I am the headmistress, and I am asking you to leave now. Go away!”
Sarfraz has an uncanny way of winning people over, and as she proceeded into a barrage of comments about the unwanted guests she had received week after week, he listened without saying a word.
“As-Salaam Alaaikum,” he said when she had finished, invoking the Islamic greeting that is traditionally offered before a conversation begins. “Honorable Madam, my name is Sarfraz Khan. I am a village man, a former teacher, and a representative of the Central Asia Institute, which specializes in helping to promote girls’ education.”
With that, the headmistress reluctantlyagreed to give him ten minutes to tour the school—but she warned him that he did not have permission to take photographs, take notes, or speak to the teachers or the students. After they had walked past the tents and observed the classes, Sabir sat him down on some rocks out of view of the students.
“Okay, now you are here, and I’m sorry we do not even have a chair or carpet for you to sit on,” she sighed. “What exactly do you want?”
“Madam, the Central Asia Institute is not a typical NGO,” he assured her. “It’s true that we do tend to talk an awful lot, but we also build schools.” If she would permit him to take some photographs and assess the damage that had been done, he promised her that he would find the money, return, and build her a new school.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” replied Shabir, still suspicious but ready to be convinced.
In addition to the fact that Sarfraz had absolutely no authorization to be making such a promise, he now found himself confronting another problem. As
a rule, the CAI’s schools are more solidly built than the norm in Pakistan or Afghanistan—although our buildings are constructed cheaply and efficiently, we don’t cut corners when it comes to design, materials, or adherence to code. But even so, nothing we had built so far was capable of withstanding a direct hit from a major quake—and in Azad Kashmir, earthquake-proof construction was clearly going to be a prerequisite for getting kids back into school on a long-term basis.
Having spent the last several months talking to students and their parents up and down the Neelum Valley, Sarfraz and I had both realized that most parents would not permit their children to resume classes inside buildings resembling the ones that had suffered such catastrophic collapse the previous October. If we eventually wanted to move away from temporary tent projects and start putting up permanent schools in these devastated villages, we would have to do something different. And it turned out that several years earlier, Sarfraz had heard a rumor about something that might work.
China’s Xinjiang Province, which shares a border with northern Pakistan, suffers from almost as many earthquakes as Kashmir, and over the years, western Chinese architects and engineers had developed a keen interest in earthquake-proof construction techniques. More than two decades ago, Sarfraz had heard about this during conversations with several of the Chinese engineers who had helped build the Karakoram Highway (which passes just to the east of the Charpurson Valley). More recently, he had heard rumors that the Chinese had been trying to expand their earthquake-proof techniques into Pakistan. If so, might they have something that would work in Kashmir?
Stones Into Schools Page 18