Judging from the writing on the board, we had walked into a Dari class, but the room bore evidence of the women’s determination to expand their education beyond vocabulary and grammar. There were nutrition charts on the back wall stressing the importance of eating vegetables and fruits (which most of them could not afford). There were toothbrushes and bars of soap used to accompany hygiene lessons. Glancing at several notebooks, I was struck by the tiny size of the handwriting. Each participant was writing as tightly as possible in order to save space and make the notebooks last as long as possible.
I began interrogating Najeeba, asking how long each class lasted, how busy her schedule was, what subjects her students were studying, and how she felt about their progress. She offered precise, rapid-fire responses in the same businesslike tone that she undoubtedly used with her students. Then I turned to the class.
“This is so amazing—what you’ve managed to do all by yourselves,” I said. “Each of you is achieving something incredible.” Then I asked if the teacher or the students had any concerns.
As a matter of fact, they did. Since classes like these were conducted in private homes, Najeeba explained, she and the other teachers were worried about insufficient drinking water, sporadic electricity, and inadequate latrines. As for the students, however, they were willing to put up with those inconveniences, but they were eager to start using computers and cell phones.
“And why do you need cell phones so badly?” I asked.
“Because we all talk to one another and exchange information about how to improve what we’re doing,” explained Najeeba. “Plus there are many other important things to discuss.”
“Such as?”
“Well, the upcoming election, for example. Right now we’re all talking to one another about how we’re going to vote.”
Here was something rather extraordinary. In sixteen years of building schools and promoting girls’ education, I had never seen women so on fire. But Najeeba wasn’t finished. She went on to explain that each of her students had family members and friends from other provinces, and when these relatives heard about what was going on in Kabul, they had begun clamoring for information on how to establish literacy centers in their own towns and villages. Listening to Najeeba describe the speed with which the idea of a place like this was leapfrogging from one location to another, I was struck by the notion that there might well be a second Afghan insurgency bubbling away beneath the Taliban’s uprising—a quiet and hidden revolution of female learning and liberation.
“Perhaps you and your colleagues should consider setting up some kind of co-op or NGO,” I said to Najeeba, “an umbrella organization that would assist in the establishment of literacy centers like this not just around Kabul, but also in other parts of the country. Do you think you could get something like that going?”
“Oh, absolutely,” she replied. “It would become big very quickly.”
And so the idea was born. Three weeks later, Wakil would send word that Najeeba and several other teachers had formed an executive committee and agreed on a name for themselves. By October, the Afghan Women’s Co-op, headquartered in Kabul, would already have chapters in five provinces.
“I knew this idea of yours was popular,” I remarked to Wakil later that afternoon, after we had toured several more facilities, “but you didn’t tell me how many there were or how quickly this concept was growing.”
“It’s a bit hard to keep count—in another four months, we’ll probably have three dozen,” he said. “When women take charge, things start to get out of control really fast.”
As impressive as all of this was, Wakil’s responsibilities did not end with the construction of his new schools in Kunar and Nuristan, his plans to expand into Uruzgan, and the rapidly burgeoning literacy centers. The next morning at 3:00 A.M., he and I set off together with Sarfraz and Wohid Khan to have a look at the final project in his portfolio. Our destination, some ninety miles northeast of Kabul, was the most legendary valley in all of Afghanistan.
Home to more than three hundred thousand people and the country’s largest concentration of ethnic Tajiks, the Panjshir Valley was the birthplace and fortress of Shah Ahmed Massoud, the courageous and charismatic mujahadeen commander who successfully repulsed no fewer than nine full-scale Soviet offensives against the valley during the 1980s, earning him the sobriquet “the Lion of the Panjshir.” Three years after the Soviets withdrew, Massoud’s forces had captured Kabul and he briefly emerged as one of the more promising leaders among the rival mujahadeen factions that divided the country. By 1993, however, widespread looting and unchecked violence on the part of Massoud’s soldiers had severely damaged his stature as a national hero—while simultaneously helping to pave the way for the Taliban. He was eventually assassinated by a pair of Al Qaeda suicide bombers, less than seventy-two hours prior to 9/11, and to this day the valley that he defended so staunchly remains a potent symbol of pride for many Afghans. For the staff of the Central Asia Institute, however, the Panjshir held a different significance.
Following the ouster of the Taliban, the Panjshir had benefitted from significant investment on the part of a number of international NGOs as well as the U.S. military, which together had done an impressive job building roads, health clinics, hydroelectric plants, and a number of boys’ schools. Although the valley was now one of the safest and most progressive parts of the country, it was sorely lacking in terms of opportunities for girls’ education. Moreover, because the Panjshir borders Badakshan to the north and Kunar and Nuristan to the east, the valley represented a gap in the line of outposts of female literacy that Sarfraz and Wakil hoped to create through the center of Taliban country. If there was eventually to be a continuous ribbon of girls’ schools stretching all the way from the Wakhan to Deh Rawod, we needed to plant a few seeds inside the Panjshir.
In the summer of 2008, Wakil had somehow found the time to venture into the valley, establish relationships with local elders, and launch construction on a pair of girls’ schools in the villages of Darghil and Pushgur. The Darghil school had opened in 2008, while the Pushgur project—an eight-room structure that would accommodate over two hundred girls—was scheduled to receive its official inauguration at 11:30 on the morning of July 15 with a very special guest.
The road from Kabul led past Bagram Airbase and across the brown expanse of the Shomali Plain to a point where the Panjshir River burst through the mouth of a narrow gorge. For the next ten miles, the road skirted between the river and the cliff until the valley abruptly opened up into an idyllic tableau of beautiful woodlands and irrigated farms, all protected by soaring, 2,000-foot walls of gray, crumbling rock.
We arrived in Pushgur at around 9:30. In the courtyard more than four hundred people had clustered, including several dozen bearded elders, a delegation of provincial officials, most of the two hundred girls who would be attending the school, a platoon of Wohid Khan’s Border Security Force troops, and about thirty heavily armed U.S. soldiers. Nearby were several tables laden with food, soft drinks, and bottled water, all of it closely guarded by our friend Faisal Mohammed, the father who had lost his youngest son to a land mine outside our school in Lalander—and who had recently been working informally as Wakil’s assistant.
Less than an hour after we arrived, two UH-60 Black Hawks and one CH-47 Chinook flew in from the southwest, circled the area, and then landed, creating an explosion of dust that covered everything. The first man to step out of the lead Black Hawk, clad in desert-camouflage fatigues, was Admiral Mike Mullen.
“Hey Greg,” he shouted over the roar of the engines. “I hope you don’t mind that I brought some media with me.”
As he spoke, the Chinook disgorged a dozen journalists, including reporters from Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, NPR, the BBC, and ABC-TV, as well as Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer-Prize winning editorial-page columnist for the New York Times.
After everyone had moved under a large tent and taken their seats, seve
ral girls dressed in their new school uniforms presented the admiral with a garland of flowers. Another group of girls recited a prayer while holding U.S. and Afghan flags. Then the speeches began, with extensive remarks being offered by the governor, the district officer, the provincial education director, and a number of other dignitaries. Finally, after thirty minutes, Admiral Mullen stepped to the podium.
To translate the admiral’s speech from English into Dari, Wakil had selected one of our brightest students, a twelfth-grader named Lima whose father, a retired petroleum engineer, was so poor that he now fed Lima and her fourteen brothers and sisters by selling firewood in Kabul. Lima was fluent in five languages (Dari, Pashto, Urdu, Arabic, and English) and taught part time in one of Wakil’s literacy centers. For four years running, she held the top position among the 3,100 girls in her high school.
With Lima translating, the admiral announced that he was bringing good wishes from the American people, and then spoke with eloquence and passion about the vital importance that education held for the future of Afghanistan. “This school is here because of you, the local people, and your commitment and dedication to start education in your community,” he said. “This is a proud moment in which we all celebrate your efforts to build a better future for your country.”
It would be difficult to overstate the symbolic impact of witnessing an eight-room school for girls inaugurated by the admiral who served as the principal military adviser to the president of the United States. For Wakil and Sarfraz, there could have been no more powerful vindication of the work to which they had dedicated their lives. For me, however, perhaps the most moving part of that day came when Wohid Khan was asked to stand up and offer a few remarks.
During the past several years, this veteran mujahadeen had demonstrated his passionate dedication to the cause of promoting education in his homeland in more ways than I could count, from helping to transport building materials to our construction sites in the Wakhan to rescuing one of our teachers and his family from the middle of a river. But Wohid Khan is a man of few words, and until that morning in Pushgur, I had never really heard him articulate his feelings in public.
“In our country, our people have suffered through three decades of war, and as you know many of our fellow mujahadeen have died in these hills and mountains,” he began, speaking in Dari. “We have fought hard and we have paid dearly.”
He looked up toward the surrounding peaks and ridges.
“A wise man from my home once told me that these mountains have seen far too much suffering and killing, and that each rock and every boulder you see represents a mujahadeen who died fighting either the Russians or the Taliban. Then the man went on to say that now that the fighting is finished, it is time to build a new era of peace—and the first step in that process is to take up the stones and start turning them into schools.”
He paused for a moment.
“Having fought for so long under the shadow of war, I believe that the finest service that a mujahadeen can now perform is to build schools and promote literacy. The opportunity to participate in this effort is one of the greatest honors of my lifetime.”
Before stepping from the podium and returning to his seat, the Afghan commander then turned gravely to the American admiral and—one warrior to another, one champion of girls’ literacy to another—snapped off a crisp, razorlike salute.
When the speeches were over, Admiral Mullen met privately for about an hour with the excited students inside the school. Upon emerging, he lingered for a few minutes to shake hands and exchange good wishes, before he and his entourage piled back into the helicopters and departed. Then, as the village of Pushgur sat down to a feast that would undoubtedly take its place in the lore of the Panjshir Valley, Wakil, Sarfraz, Wohid, and I started the drive back to Kabul.
We took our time, pausing to pay our respects at the tomb of Shah Ahmed Massoud and making three separate stops so that Wohid, who loves fresh fruit, could purchase some apples, cherries, and mulberries. Later that afternoon, as we rolled southward along the Shomali Plain, our fingers stained with berry juice, Sarfraz lavished Wakil with compliments.
“You are making even more schools here than we are making in the Wakhan,” he exclaimed. “You have achieved much success!”
“It has nothing to do with me,” protested our Pashtun colleague. “This is all the will of Allah.”
When we finally reached the capital, Wakil excused himself and raced off to receive yet another delegation of elders from a distant province who wanted to talk about the possibility of starting up a girls’ school. Meanwhile, Sarfraz and I turned our attention to our most pressing piece of unfinished business—getting to Bozai Gumbaz.
CHAPTER 16
The Point of Return
And coming down from the Pamir where the lost Camels call through the clouds.
—ANDRÉ MALRAUX, Les Noyers de l’Altenburg
Kirghiz elders meeting at Bozai Gumbaz to plan new school, East Wakhan, Afghanistan
Back in the autumn of 2008, as I was rushing west out of the central Wakhan in order to fly to Islamabad and attend my tea-drinking session with President Musharraf, Sarfraz had slowly made his way east on horseback to Bozai Gumbaz. Once there, he had discovered that his crew of quarrymen was making excellent progress on the task of dynamiting large boulders into smaller pieces that could be shaped with chisels and hammers into the stones that would eventually form the walls of the Kirghiz school. But as he stared at the impressive mound of melon-sized rocks that his masons had created on the flat green meadow next to the glassy lake where the Kirghiz were hoping to locate their school, he found himself grappling for the first time with the practical obstacles we would need to surmount in order to make that vision a reality.
Logistical challenges, of course, are nothing new to us, and over the years, we’ve been forced to overcome some ludicrously daunting problems. For example, the bridge that we had to build over the Braldu River, which would enable us to carry in the supplies to construct our first school in Korphe in 1996, required two dozen men to haul five 284-foot steel cables wound on wooden spools on their shoulders for a distance of eighteen miles. Similarly, one of Sarfraz’s earthquake schools in Azad Kashmir required him to assemble a human chain of more than two hundred men in order to pass cement and other materials by hand around places where landslides had destroyed the roads. Yet even by the standards of our most difficult projects, the Kirghiz school was in a class all by itself.
Bozai Gumbaz had more than enough native stone for the purpose of building the foundation and walls, but there were no commercially available supplies of cement, rebar, glass, nails, corrugated roofing, paint, or any of the other items that Sarfraz’s construction crew would need to complete the job. All of that material would have to come from the outside, plus the lumber, too. (There are few trees in the Pamirs.)
In theory, of course, these materials could easily have been purchased in Faizabad or Baharak and—despite the usual setbacks stemming from muddy roads, landslides, flash flooding, and mechanical breakdown—we could have arranged to have everything hauled into Sarhad by tractor or truck. But how would we have proceeded from there?
From the place where the Wakhan road ends in Sarhad, the journey to Bozai Gumbaz involves a three-day trek along a narrow trail that clings to the cliffs and whose surface is covered in treacherously shifting talus. Along its forty-mile length, this trail ascends and descends a total of 20,000 feet, nearly twice the vertical relief between Everest base camp and its summit. What’s more, these ups and downs all take place at altitudes of between ten thousand and fourteen thousand feet, where the oxygen levels make it impossible for conventional pack animals such as donkeys and mules to carry substantial loads. Finally, there are three major river crossings.
To haul all the supplies in from Sarhat would have required a pack train of at least a hundred yaks or Bactrian camels, far more than the number of animals that were available for hire. For similar reasons, a very larg
e yak train leading out of the Charpurson Valley over the Irshad Pass was equally unworkable. On the other hand, perhaps, maybe a supply convoy could have been assembled in western China and punched into the eastern end of the Wakhan, where the terrain was not nearly as rough. But the Chinese-Afghan border had been sealed for more than sixty years—and thanks to the current political unrest among Xinjiang Province’s restive Muslim population, the likelihood of Chinese border officials granting a special laissez-passer was less than zero.
As Sarfraz stood beside the mound of freshly chiseled stones scratching his head, he found himself pondering a question that seemed to encapsulate the absurdity of our work: How do you build a school on the Roof of the World when transporting the construction materials from any direction is virtually impossible?
Even by the standards of his own audacity and innovation, the plan that he came up with was magnificently nuts.
In July, Sarfraz had submitted a budget request for the purchase of a used Kamaz, a type of heavy-duty truck that is manufactured in Tartarstan and has a well-deserved reputation for toughness and reliability (the trucks have racked up a record eight victories in the Dakar Rally and are the preferred means of transport for the Russian army). A Kamaz was one of the few motorized vehicles capable of hauling massive loads along the axle-snapping roadbed of the Wakhan without breaking down every few miles, and Sarfraz had calculated that with the money we would save by no longer paying exorbitant fees to have our building supplies brought into the western Wakhan, the truck would recoup its cost in two years. The CAI board of directors had approved the expenditure, and our battered gray Kamaz—which had been freighting construction material all summer long—now emerged as the key to Sarfraz’s strategy for Bozai Gumbaz.
Stones Into Schools Page 28