Stones Into Schools

by Greg Mortenson

  Wakil’s boyhood memories of Afghanistan ended in December of 1979 when, at the age of seven, he and his entire family were forced to flee from their home following the Russian invasion. For two weeks, Soviet MiG fighters had pummeled their village with bombs, flattening nearly all the houses and killing many of the inhabitants.

  The Karimis traveled by foot, horse, and donkey for four days and nights until they crossed the border into Pakistan on precipitous mountain trails and settled into Jalozai Refugee Camp, about twenty miles southeast of Peshawar. One of the largest of the 150 camps that Pakistan was hastily assembling to house some of the 4.5 million Afghan muhajir (refugees) who would eventually pour into Pakistan following the Soviet occupation, Jalozai was a barren area where seventy thousand people huddled in ramshackle tents and makeshift tarpaulin shelters without running water, electricity, plumbing, transportation, or the ability to feed themselves. The guards were cruel, some of the administrators stole much of the food and supplies for themselves, and entire sections of the camp were controlled by thugs. It was not the sort of place where one would want to spend more than a week, much less several months.

  Although Wakil did not know it then, this would be his home for most of the next twenty-three years.

  A week after settling his wife, his father, his sister, and his six children in the camp, Wakil’s father, Abdul Ghani, did what most of the men of Jalozai were doing at the time. He bade farewell to his family, made his way back to Afghanistan to rejoin the mujahadeen, and disappeared into the fires of the jihad. Wakil’s last memory of Abdul Ghani consists of a hug and a promise that they would see each other in a month. To this day, Wakil has no idea how his father was killed, when it happened, or where he is buried.

  Wakil and his younger brother, Mateen, set out to make the best of the situation. At the direction of their mother, a woman who had never learned to read or write but who revered education, they studied in one of the makeshift classrooms in the camp for half of each day. The other half of the day, they worked to support their mother, grandfather, and four younger siblings. They sold water, they worked in a kiln that baked bricks, and eventually, after they learned English, they started the their own after-hours maktab, the Washington English Language Center, which taught English vocabulary and grammar to some of the camp’s most ambitious language students. Then in the summer of 2002, word reached Wakil that the owner of the Peace Guest House in Kabul was looking for a manager who could speak English. The salary was two hundred dollars a month plus gratuities. Intrigued, he made his way alone back to Afghanistan, interviewed for the job, and was sitting behind the desk of the guesthouse on the evening that I arrived.

  When Wakil learned that I was hoping to set up girls’ schools in his country, he approved in the strongest possible terms. “Oh, Afghanistan is the perfect place for your work,” he exclaimed, “and girls’ education is a must!” He also confided that he happened to know the ideal spot where we should begin: a little village thirty miles southwest of Kabul called Lalander, where the school had been destroyed by the Soviets and where—incidentally—Wakil’s family happened to be from.

  When I explained that we specialized in building schools in exceptionally remote areas, he listened politely, nodded, and proceeded to stay “on message” with the kind of unwavering discipline and blatant disregard of the facts that Karl Rove would admire. Over the next eighteen months, as Sarfraz and I flitted back and forth through the Peace Guest House on our way to and from the Wakhan, Wakil presented himself as a Pashtun version of an exceptionally gifted used car salesman. He never stopped smiling, he never raised his voice, and he never once abandoned his conviction that if he kept pressing, gently and earnestly, he would eventually persuade us to adopt Lalander as a “special exception” to our end-of-the-road policy.

  Eventually, Wakil augmented his relentless persistence with a subtler and more devious strategy that involved arousing our sympathy by invoking an elaborate catalog of Lalander’s miseries and misfortunes. Each time we arrived at the Peace Guest House, Sarfraz and I were treated to a litany of Lalander’s liabilities that included the poor state of the road, the miserable quality of the water, the straitened circumstances of the inhabitants, and the level of apathy lavished upon the village by the Afghan government.

  After more than a year of this, Wakil finally wore Sarfraz and me down to the point where one of us made the mistake of asking him to elaborate on something he’d said about Lalander—if memory serves, it had to do with the revelation that the Taliban had recently begun using the valley in which the village was located as a conduit for running heroin. Our request for more information provided the opening he’d been waiting for so patiently.

  “Please, let us go and have tea with the shura elders,” he replied, “and you will be able to see for yourselves.”

  How could we possibly say no?

  It takes two hours to drive from Kabul to Lalander, which lies in the heart of the Char Asiab Valley, a river-carved canyon whose walls of bare orange and black rock soar nearly two thousand feet into the sky and whose narrow bottom is quilted with a patchwork of orchards that include peach, apricot, cherry, and mulberry trees. They also grow a lot of garlic around Lalander, so the air is anointed with a scent that is sweet and faintly cloying.

  For all his salesmanship, Wakil had not misrepresented the place or exaggerated its misfortunes. The dirt road was so awful that a good runner could easily have outpaced us during the fifty minutes required to cover the last ten miles. Thanks to the extensive Soviet strafing and bombing, many of the mud-walled buildings in the village looked like decaying Mesopotamian ruins. With the exception of the rusted carcasses of Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers littering the riverbed, it felt as if we had stepped out of the twenty-first century and back into the Middle Ages.

  When we arrived and convened with the elders in a jirga that Wakil had arranged in advance, it also became clear that the place desperately needed a school. The only form of education, it turned out, was informal religious classes taught in a mosque by one of the three local mullahs. One of these mullahs was resistant, but the community’s 160 families and the other two mullahs were keen on building something better.

  It was during this jirga that an unusual idea first occurred to us. Although Lalander looked and felt as remote as many of the places in which we normally work, its proximity to Kabul might make it accessible to the increasing number of journalists, donors, and officials from the Afghan government who were expressing interest in seeing the kind of work we do but could not afford to commit to an arduous six-day journey north to Badakshan and into the Wakhan. Thus, the question arose, might it not make sense for us to build a demonstration school in Lalander that could serve as a showcase for the kind of work we do?

  In early 2004, I ran this query past the CAI board and was given a green light to move forward. Later that spring, with the help of thirty thousand dollars raised by the community of Lafayette, California, with the help of an attorney who was interested in funding a single school, construction started under the enthusiastic supervision of Wakil, who volunteered to act as the project’s unpaid manager. Every Thursday and Friday—his days off at the Peace Guest House—Wakil made the drive from Kabul to the jobsite in order to monitor progress, order up new supplies, and keep things moving forward. And it was during these visits that he struck up a friendship with the boy named Gulmarjan.

  Gulmarjan, who was fourteen years old and lived with his five sisters in Lalander, had never had the chance to attend school and could barely contain his excitement over the prospect of learning to read and write—an opportunity that, as far as Gulmarjan was concerned, could not arrive fast enough. As the weeks slipped past, his agitation burgeoned to the point where he was convinced that the pace of construction was not up to acceptable standards and, in an effort to prod things along, made a special point of badgering Wakil and reminding him how important it was to get things finished quickly. Whenever Wakil was in Kabu
l, Gulmarjan also developed a habit of grazing his goats as close as possible to the construction site so that he could monitor progress as he watched over his animals, then report his observations during Wakil’s next visit. It was during the course of this surveillance, one afternoon in early June, that everyone in the village heard the sharp crack of an explosion from the direction of Gulmarjan’s herd of goats.

  Afghanistan is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world—during the Soviet occupation and the civil war that followed, virtually every corner the country was seeded with land mines—and according to the best estimates, the country still has somewhere between 1.5 and 3 million of these devices buried in its soil. They continue to kill or maim roughly sixty-five civilians each month, and as in so many other aspects of war, the people who bear the brunt of the suffering are children.

  The device that Gulmarjan had stepped on was a Soviet anti-personnel land mine that had been placed in the ground more than twenty years earlier, and when he triggered the detonator, the explosion blew apart the lower half of his torso. When his distraught father reached him, he put the boy on a donkey (no one in Lalander has a car), then transferred him to a bicycle and frantically raced toward the nearest medical center, in Kabul.

  Five hours later and barely a quarter of the way to Kabul, Gulmarjan died in his father’s arms.

  In July 2004, I paid my first visit to Lalander and was impressed by how much progress Wakil’s construction crew had made. The tragedy of Gulmarjan’s death, however, had dampened everyone’s spirits, especially when his father, Faisal Mohammed, dropped by to pay his respects.

  A handsome man in his early forties with a salt-and-pepper beard and aquamarine eyes, Faisal Mohammed wanted to show me where his son was buried. It took less than five minutes to walk from the construction site to the spot where Gulmarjan had set off the land mine. His grave was a simple rectangular cairn of stones piled roughly two feet high, and at the head of the grave was a green metal cylinder—a Soviet-era artillery canister—supporting several wooden poles to which were affixed the green and white flags that flutter above graves all over Afghanistan. Scattered among the surrounding rocks we could spot fragments of metal—jagged pieces of copper and steel—that were parts of the mine that had killed him.

  As Wakil, Sarfraz, and I stood in silence, Faisal cupped his hands in front of his chest and offered up a dua for the boy whose body lay at his feet. For many Muslim men, the birth of a son is life’s greatest event, and thus the death of a son is surely one of the most devastating. But Faisal’s sorrow penetrated to a level that the rest of us found difficult to fathom. In addition to his five daughters, he had also had two other sons—Gulmarjan’s older brothers—and both of these boys were also dead. Faisal Haq, the oldest, had been claimed by diphtheria; and Zia Ullah, the middle boy, had been killed in a car accident. Now the third and last son had been taken, and the agony etched in Faisal Mohammed’s face was beyond anything to which Sarfraz, Wakil, or I could do justice with words.

  As we stood beside the grave and bore the weight of these thoughts, we could hear the sounds of men at work. The rattle of gravel flung from the end of a shovel and the wet slaps of fresh mortar troweled onto stone carried clearly from the jobsite, less than a hundred yards away. Perhaps it was our awareness of the proximity of this labor—and the manner in which the noise of the tools overlapped with the words of Faisal’s dua—that drove home just how closely the birth of our school and the death of this boy had been enjoined. In any case, after a moment or two of silence I turned to Faisal and suggested that, with his permission, we would he honored to construct a concrete memorial pathway linking the school to Gulmarjan’s grave that would serve as a memorial to his son.

  When Faisal nodded his agreement and thanks, Wakil set about making the arrangements.

  The school that Wakil saw through to completion is a real beauty. The green and white, single-story building sits on a slope just before the end of the road, perched above a grove of cherry and apple trees. There are six classrooms, plus a teacher’s office and a playground. Just beyond the north side of the courtyard, a set of twenty steps leads to a concrete path, and at the end of the path is Gulmarjan’s grave. He never had a chance to sit in a classroom and learn from one of the teachers, but we all believe that he is connected—symbolically, to be sure, but also in spirit—to the school he dreamed of one day attending.

  Shortly after this project was completed, three things happened.

  With the approval of her father, Gulmarjan’s energetic sister, Saida, was enrolled in first grade. She has proven to be an exceptional student—her dream is to become the first female doctor in the history of Lalander. And in the eyes of her father—a man who until recently believed that all five of his daughters needed to remain at home—Saida now carries the unfulfilled promise of her three missing brothers in the palm of her hand.

  Meanwhile, Faisal himself decided to go to school. Several months after his son’s death, he enrolled in an eighteen-month training program to qualify as a professional deminer, at the end of which he joined a company called RONCO, which removes land mines all over Afghanistan. The money was good (he earned about five hundred dollars a month, more than four times what he normally made), but the work deprived him of time with his family, so eventually he quit, sold a portion of his land, and voluntarily began cleaning the area around his village of land mines. By September 2009, he had discovered and removed thirty land mines around Lalander and its school.

  And finally, Sarfraz and I decided to hire Wakil as the Central Asia Institute’s Afghanistan director. By accepting this offer, he became the only Pashtun and muhajir member of the Dirty Dozen. Which is how the man from the Jalozai Refugee Camp became the first person I called in connection with Colonel Chris Kolenda’s request for assistance in setting up a school directly across the river from the American firebase in Kunar Province.

  In late 2007, I phoned Wakil and asked if he thought he could safely undertake a weeklong scouting trip to the village of Saw. The safety part of my question was key, because as we both understood, this request could not have come at a more dangerous time.

  Since late 2005, the Taliban insurgency had been steadily escalating as wave after wave of hardened and fanatical foreign fighters from Uzbekistan, Chechnya, western China, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen poured into Afghanistan. Having already spent time in Iraq, a number of these insurgents were well versed in the latest techniques for constructing improvised explosive devices (IEDs), conducting ambushes, and carrying out suicide attacks. The results showed almost immediately. According to the United Kingdom’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office, from 2005 to 2006, the number of Taliban and Al Qaeda suicide bombings shot from twenty-one to 141, and the number of IEDs they detonated soared from 530 to 1,297.

  The rising violence spilled into nonmilitary areas as well. In 2007, according to the UNHCR, the Taliban killed thirty-four aid workers and abducted another seventy-six. They also stepped up their attacks on girls’ education by executing teachers and students as well as burning schools. In 2006, Malim Abdul Habib, the headmaster of Shaik Mathi Baba Girls High School in Zabul Province, was pulled from bed at night, dragged into the courtyard of his home, and shot in front of his family. The following year, Time magazine reported, the Taliban shot dead three female students coming out of a high school in Logar Province. In several school districts around Kandahar, attackers tossed hand grenades through school windows and threw acid into the faces of girls attending classes. In neighboring Helmand Province, a teacher was shot and killed by gunmen on motorbikes, half a dozen girls’ schools were burned to the ground by arsonists, and a high-school principal was beheaded. By 2007, according to The Guardian (U.K.), nearly half of the 748 schools in Afghanistan’s four southern provinces, which were under the most serious assault by Taliban forces, had closed.

  These were the conditions under which, one morning in the autumn of 2007, Wakil said good-bye to his wife, climbed into a battered Toyota
Corolla, and headed east in the direction of Kunar.

  His first stop was Jalalabad, a six-hour drive, where he met up with a friend named Gul Mohammed, who had several relatives in Kunar and planned to accompany Wakil the rest of the way. They spent the night at a hotel in town, and during dinner they quizzed several of the other guests about the situation in Kunar. One of the men Wakil approached, it turned out, worked for a demining crew and had spent quite a bit of time in Kunar. His report was chilling.

  “The situation is okay for locals, but for foreigners and for anyone who is working with the foreigners, it is extremely dangerous,” the man declared. “If you go into Kunar, I do not think you will come back alive.”

  After Wakil and Gul Mohammed retired to their room, Wakil wrestled with the idea of turning around in the morning and returning to Kabul. He had a wife, six children, a mother, and more than a dozen other relatives who were completely dependent on him. How could he justify taking such risks? But then he fell asleep and had a dream.

  In the dream, Wakil was typing at a keyboard in front of a computer screen. Whenever he pressed the Enter key, the screen turned bright green. When he pressed the Backspace key, however, the color of the screen changed to brown.

  Enter—green. Backspace—brown.

  Green. Brown.

  Green. Brown.

  When Wakil awoke the following morning, the dream was vividly etched in his mind, and its meaning was equally clear to him. As soon as he and Gul Mohammed had finished their breakfast, he pushed his chair back from the table and announced, “Okay, it is time to go.”

  “So you are going back to Kabul?” asked Gul Mohammed.

  “No,” replied Wakil, “you and I are going to Kunar.”

  “But I was thinking that you had decided we shouldn’t continue because it’s so dangerous.”

  “I know,” replied Wakil. “But last night I had a dream that told me to keep going.”