Stones Into Schools

by Greg Mortenson

  Unfortunately, this failed to carry much weight with Sarfraz, who was incensed when he heard the news that our role in rebuilding the Gundi Piran school had gone unrecognized. After apologizing to me for five minutes on the phone, he laid into Shaukat Ali with a vengeance, offering several colorful options for what sort of punishment would be most fitting.

  “Sarfraz, Sarfraz—please relax,” I pleaded. “None of this matters. The kids have their school, and in the end, that’s all that counts. Why don’t you and I try to find something else to get mad about?”

  And sure enough, we did.

  One of the survivors of the collapse of the Gundi Piran school was an eleven-year-old girl in the fifth grade named Ghosia Mughal, who, as it happened, was filling a teapot with water from the outdoor water spigot when the earthquake struck. Ghosia’s escape carried with it a cruel twist. The 108 victims at Gundi Paran included her mother, Kosar Parveen, who taught Urdu and Arabic to the eighth grade. The roster of those who perished also included two of Ghosia’s sisters, Saba and Rosia, along with many of her closest friends.

  Ghosia’s family’s home on the mountainside above the school was also destroyed, so a distant uncle took in the surviving members of the household, who included Ghosia, her older sister, her younger brother, and her father, Sabir, who had been paralyzed by a stroke ten years earlier. Since October 2005, they had been living in a metal shed next to the uncle’s house, which was located on a hillside at the edge of Patika. In summer, the interior temperature of the shed would climb to 120 degrees; during winter, a bucket of water would freeze solid overnight.

  Ghosia came to our attention several months after the royal visit to Gundi Piran, and she quickly emerged as one of the first test cases in a new initiative that my staff and I had devised in response to an interesting problem.

  Providing girls with a basic education that includes literacy and math skills is, of course, fundamental to what we do—and the benefits of that basic education package, in Pakistan and Afghanistan alike, are indisputable. But starting around 2003, when the first generation of CAI-educated girls began graduating, we found ourselves confronting the blunt fact that in the remote and impoverished villages where we do the bulk of our work, a girl with a grade-school education faces extremely limited opportunities in terms of what she can do with her skills. Her schooling will eventually correlate with improved health standards and lower birth rates in her village, which will enhance her community’s quality of life. And her education will, of course, also serve as a springboard for her own children’s education. But unless that girl can land a job outside her home, it is unlikely that her skills will translate into a substantial boost in her family’s income—and in the isolated villages of rural Pakistan and Afghanistan, these opportunities are almost non-existent. Women cannot work as shopkeepers because in conservative Islamic culture, interaction with men outside their family is forbidden; and for similar reasons, they cannot move to a city to find a job. Aside from becoming a teacher, there are almost no jobs available for rural women outside the home.

  This, we discovered, has several consequences. First, it gives rise to a cycle of students becoming teachers who educate their own students to become teachers, and so on. Second, the first wave of educated women to emerge in a community have no role models or support network whatsoever to help them pursue higher education and eventually move into the workforce as doctors, lawyers, engineers, and a range of other professions through which women can, if they wish, build wealth and attain greater control of their lives. In short, we began to realize that not only the institutions we built, but also the people passing through them, would require intensive follow-up, broad support, and long-term commitment in order to eventually become self-sustaining. For poor people in poor countries, very little simply falls into place.

  As we observed these issues emerging, we began asking ourselves how we might break this cycle and widen the options of the girls who were graduating from our schools. The answer we came up with was to start a program in which we identified the best students and financed their advanced studies beyond the high-school level. The idea was that these scholarship girls would serve as trailblazers who would open the doors for those who followed. We would channel a portion of our resources into this cadre of elite girls, and they would serve as a vanguard for others. Slowly but surely, we would prepare our young graduates for careers of all sorts.

  That, at least, was the theory. In practice, it turned out to be quite a bit more complicated.

  When we first started wrestling with this idea, we soon realized that any scholarship program would be complicated by the problem of providing security and supervision for girls who were studying away from their homes. This is a paramount concern for almost all rural families, who are deeply anxious about the liberalizing, westernizing effects of living in a big city. To address this, we would need to provide conditions under which the girls could live and study under the eyes of trusted female chaperones and be guarded 24-7 by an armed man at the door. We also needed the spiritual blessings of local mullahs.

  With this in mind, in early 2007 we began funding the construction of our first girls’ hostel. In Skardu, Haji Ghulam Parvi, the former accountant from Radio Pakistan who had quit his job to become our Baltistan manager, oversaw the construction of a large building designed to house five dozen of the brightest girls from our schools in villages in the surrounding area. These were girls who had won scholarships either to supplement their studies with additional work at the local high school or junior college or to help them undertake two-year programs in areas such as maternal health care. That same spring, we started a similar program for eight girls in the Charpurson Valley and began sending them to Gilgit for their studies, where they were supervised by Saidullah Baig, our Hunza manager.

  Around the same time, we also turned our attention to Azad Kashmir, where the scholarship program would have to be set up in tandem with our school-building efforts. Our first task was research. I wanted to know how many potential scholarship students were out there in the Neelum Valley; how many of these girls were in our schools; and what sorts of challenges these students faced with respect to their families. To answer these questions, I turned to Genevieve Chabot, an energetic woman from Bozeman. It turned out that Genevieve was completing her Ed.D. in education at Montana State University. I proposed that we place her in charge of launching our Azad Kashmir scholarship program. Her first mission would be to canvass the Neelum Valley in order to search out the most promising young girls for scholarship consideration. And this is how she came to meet Ghosia Mughal.

  In the spring of 2007, on her first visit to Pakistan to begin assembling her dossier of nominees, Genevieve paid a visit to the Gundi Piran school, where several students urged her to speak with a twelve-year-old girl sitting in the front row of her class. Ghosia was by now in the seventh grade and had scored the highest marks in her class. Despite the fact that her family had no money aside from her stricken father’s meager twelve-dollar-per-month pension, she was brimming with confidence and ambition, and she had set her sights on attending medical school in Islamabad and returning to Patika as a doctor. Saida Shabir confirmed that Ghosia was the school’s “top student.” Based on Genevieve’s report, I decided that she should be one of the first CAI scholarship recipients in the Neelum Valley.

  There was only one problem: Her father, who had initially agreed to give permission for her to accept the award, had now changed his mind and withdrawn his consent.

  This, it turns out, is not an uncommon response to the prospect of a young girl receiving funding for higher education. After expressing their delight at the chance to pursue an advanced degree, many of our scholarship candidates will then go on to explain that a grandfather or grandmother or aunt is from the “old times” and does not support them.

  “They will have to pass away,” we often hear, “before I am permitted to continue any further in school.”

  Another major obstacle
involves local community leaders and religious authorities who, for a variety of reasons, have their own set of objections. As a result, we tend to see many tears during these interviews. It can be painful and deeply frustrating to watch as the ambitions of a talented girl are thwarted or unnecessarily delayed. In this manner, Nasreen Baig, the green-eyed woman from the Charpurson, was forced to wait a full ten years before she was allowed to take up her maternal-health-care scholarship in Rawalpindi. Similarly, Jahan Ali, the granddaughter of Korphe’s headman and my mentor, Haji Ali, faced strident objections from her father, Twaha, who was more interested in fetching a high bride-price for his daughter than in seeing Jahan go to our hostel in Skardu for advanced training in public health. (Twaha later relented, and Jahan is now studying at the Government Degree College in Skardu.)

  The true reasons behind these objections can often be difficult to ferret out, and when they eventually reveal themselves, they sometimes have a powerful logic. Such proved to be the case with Ghosia.

  When Genevieve, Sarfraz, and Saidullah Baig paid their initial visit to the family, Ghosia’s father, Sabir, and both of her uncles were skeptical, and a number of issues were raised. They were concerned that Ghosia was too young. They were worried that it was unfair to give her a scholarship while ignoring the desires of her older siblings. And they didn’t want to see her leave home. After several follow-up visits, however, another issue emerged. As the youngest surviving daughter, it turned out that Ghosia was her father’s primary caregiver. Without her services, he would be completely incapacitated.

  Sabir’s fears were entirely understandable, and when they finally became clear, we decided to tackle the problem in two directions at once. First, we proposed that paying for a nurse who could attend to her father should be part of Ghosia’s scholarship. And second, we invoked the most powerful argument we have at our disposal, which I sometimes think of as the “carpe diem appeal.” In this case, it was delivered by Saidullah Baig.

  “In the life of a person,” Saidullah reminded Ghosia’s father one evening, “there may come along the one opportunity that must be taken. When this opportunity arrives, you cannot let your concerns about yourself be a burden to your daughter, whom you love and for whom you want the best. We will try to help everyone in your family, but you must recognize that this is Ghosia’s opportunity. Many people in our country never get this opportunity at all. Ghosia may never get another one. If you allow it to pass by without seizing it, you may not have another chance.”

  Saidullah was too modest to mention as part of his argument that years earlier and at considerable personal sacrifice, he had put his own wife through both high school and college, one of the few men in northern Pakistan ever to have done such a thing—and that as a result of this commitment, she now has an excellent job in a private school in Gilgit. Nevertheless, Saidullah’s exhortation had a powerful effect on Ghosia’s father.

  “Yes,” he nodded after deliberating for several minutes. “We will do whatever is best for my daughter.”

  Since that conversation, Sabir has continued to waver. We are very hopeful that with time and patience, he will eventually see the wisdom of allowing Ghosia to accept her scholarship and give his consent. In the meantime, however, we found ourselves confronting another situation in which it has been almost impossible to remain optimistic.

  During the same period when we were negotiating with Ghosia’s family, I received word about a man named Dr. Mohammad Hassan, a relatively prosperous dentist who lived in a village called Bhedi, high up in the Neelum Valley, and who was hoping we might consider giving his daughter Siddre a scholarship. Although we usually try to target the poorest families, who need our help the most, I passed this man’s contact information along to Genevieve and suggested she might want to follow up. In addition to the fact that Dr. Hassan had provided some valuable assistance by steering us in the direction of other qualified scholarship applicants, he was an important man with influence in his part of the Neelum Valley—someone with whom we would do well to maintain friendly relations.

  So one evening, Genevieve, Sarfraz, and Mohammed Nazir drove up the mountainside in Bhedi to meet with Dr. Hassan and the other members of his family, who besides Siddre included his wife, his four other daughters and two sons, and a son-in-law named Miraftab, who was visiting that evening from Muzaffarabad. Siddre proved to be a bright and articulate young woman who was finishing the twelfth grade at the Gundi Piran school and whose ambition was to attend college, become a doctor, and then return to Bhedi to put her skills to use. After her mother greeted the three guests in the common room, the women of the household ushered Genevieve into the kitchen, leaving Sarfraz and Nazir to talk with Dr. Hassan and Miraftab about Siddre’s future.

  Sitting on the concrete floor in the firelit kitchen, Genevieve learned that the women of the family were absolutely giddy about the prospect of Siddre pursuing her medical degree, but her brother-in-law, Miraftab, stood in opposition. Inside the common room, Sarfraz and Nazir quickly came to the same conclusion. Dr. Hassan was halfheartedly concerned that this American NGO wanted to convert his daughter to Christianity, but Sarfraz was successful in explaining that the CAI was a secular organization and had no interest in religious conversion. Miraftab, however, objected fiercely to the idea of a scholarship for his sister-in-law, and when the men had finished their discussion in the living room, he moved into the kitchen, took up a post on a bench with the women sitting on the floor below him, and directed his remarks to Genevieve in English.

  Why, he wanted to know, did she think she could come into this culture from the West and propose to send “our girls” off to school? What did she think had given her the right to even dare to suggest a scholarship for a girl?

  Miraftab then went on to ask what Siddre could possibly do with her education that would be of benefit to her family and to the people in Bhedi. And finally he got around to the heart of the matter. What the CAI really needed to be offering to this family—the only kind of sponsorship that made any sense and that would have actual value—was a scholarship not for Siddre, but for him.

  The CAI staff spent that night with Dr. Hassan’s family, and Genevieve slept in the same room with the daughters, who were weeping and distraught over Miraftab’s behavior. The following morning, Siddre reiterated her dream of attending medical school. (Like so many of the girls we interview in these situations, she used the word for “dream” in Urdu—khawab.) Before they bid farewell and left, however, Miraftab made it clear that his position had not changed, thereby ensuring that Siddre’s khawab would never be realized.

  Driving down the mountainside that morning, Sarfraz turned to Genevieve and asked what she thought of Miraftab. She replied that he didn’t seem to understand how important the education of just one girl could be for the entire village. Sarfraz and Nazir both agreed and went on to vent their frustration over the manner in which a son-in-law had been permitted to sabotage a talented young woman’s chance of pursuing higher education.

  It is always difficult to witness the end of a girl’s khawab, but it’s especially hard to swallow when such a thing has been undermined by a male member of her own family who has failed to overcome his envy and resentment over the opportunity she is being presented with. In many ways, Sarfraz, Genevieve, and Nazir agreed, building schools was proving to be easier than dealing with the obstacles thrown up by the extended families of our scholarship candidates.

  Later, Genevieve wrote up a report that concluded that although Siddre would have made an excellent scholarship candidate, Miraftab had rendered the situation impossible. After reading what she had written, I reluctantly agreed that as long as Dr. Hassan was willing to permit his son-in-law to have a veto over his daughter’s future, we would not be able to fund her medical-school expenses.

  That is where matters have stood—and will continue to stand—until Miraftab changes his mind. If and when he relents, Siddre’s scholarship will be waiting for her.

  In the me
antime, however, I was about to confront some new and unexpected challenges of my own back in the United States.

  In February 2007, the just-published softcover edition of Three Cups of Tea surged onto the New York Times paperback nonfiction best-seller list. Driven by a grassroots interest from local bookstores, women’s book clubs, and community organizations all across America, the book as of this writing has spent more than 140 weeks on that list, forty-three of them in the number one position.

  This exposure and publicity, week after week and month after month, seemed to offer an unparalleled chance to spread the word about the importance of girls’ education in Pakistan and Afghanistan while raising money for new schools. So on behalf of the thousands of young girls who were still waiting to attend classes, I set out to turn the CAI into a promotion-and-fund-raising machine.

  With word spreading about the story behind Three Cups of Tea, the invitations started pouring in. As the campaign accelerated, several experts on marketing and promotion strongly advised me to concentrate mainly on addressing adults, for the obvious reason that they were the ones who would be purchasing copies of the book and donating money to the CAI. This strategy struck me as shortsighted and narrow. Plus, I simply prefer hanging out with kids. So I did my best to combine “official” events—the lectures and the book signings with adults in the evenings—with more informal appearances with children in the mornings and afternoons, many of them at libraries and schools.

  As the bookings were made, my schedule quickly ballooned to the point where it was out of control. Back in 2005, I had traveled to eight different cities to give presentations on the work that we do in the western Himalayas. During 2007, I made a total of 107 appearances in eighty-one American cities. The results were impressive: Between 2005 and 2007, the CAI’s gross intake tripled. The emotional and physical toll, however, was enormous. In January of 2007 alone, I made eighteen appearances in fourteen cities at venues ranging from the Harvard Travellers Club in Boston and the Rochester Public Library to the Blue Heron Coffeehouse in Winona, Minnesota. In April, there were fifteen events in thirteen cities. By September, my calendar called for speeches in Rosemont, Illinois; Charlotte, North Carolina; Helena, Montana; Bainbridge Island, Washington; and eighteen other places, all of which merged into a muddled blur in my mind.