Stones Into School (10 page)

The greatest likelihood of our being abducted or attacked was during the thirty-hour drive from Kabul to Baharak, and on this stretch of the drive, Sarfraz's concerns about security occasionally placed him at odds with my desire to get to know ordinary Afghans--a point of contention that he and I still wrestle with even today. This difference first surfaced during one of our earliest trips together in the spring of 2004.

As usual, we had left from Kabul late in the afternoon in order to pass unimpeded through the Salang Tunnel, which was only open to civilian traffic at night. Just north of the tunnel, the rattletrap jeep we had hired emitted a loud sizzle, and steam began pouring out of the engine. Sarfraz ordered the driver to drift down the hill about a mile and pull into a roadside mechanic shop. There, a boy who was no older than eleven stepped up in a pair of flip-flops to ask what we needed. His head was shaved and covered with a black woolen cap, and he wore an oil-stained shalwar kamiz that was coated with grease. His name was Abdul, and he walked with a limp.

Abdul jumped into the engine compartment like an acrobat, and by the time Sarfraz and I had eaten a quick meal and had a cup of tea at a nearby canteen, our young mechanic had deftly replaced our radiator and hoses. He told us the price was fourteen hundred Afghans (about twenty-eight dollars), and as Sarfraz counted out the money, I tried to get a sense of who Abdul was and what his story entailed.

“Where is your father?” I asked. “It is nearly midnight and you are working alone?”

“I am an orphan from Pul-e-Khumri,” he replied matter-of-factly. “I have no father because the Taliban killed my entire family.”

“Where do you live?”

“I live here--I sleep in the truck trailer over there where we keep our spare parts.” He pointed to a rusting metal container.

“How much money do you make?” I asked as I searched in my pocket to offer him a small tip.

“None,” he replied. “I don't get paid--I only get some food, tea, and a place to sleep. I work day and night, every day, and sleep when there is no customer. And if my boss finds out I have taken any money, he will beat me with the iron rod over there.”

By this point our driver was revving the engine to signal that we needed to get moving, and Sarfraz had lit up a cigarette and was glaring at me with impatience. It was the middle of the night on a dangerous road, we were behind schedule, and it was time to go.

“Sarfraz,” I pleaded, initiating an exchange that he and I were to repeat endlessly over the next several years, “can't we please do something here?”

“Greg, this is Afghanistan--you cannot help everyone!” Sarfraz barked. “If he works hard, this boy might eventually own his boss's garage. But for now he has food and a place to sleep, and that is better than half of the orphans in Afghanistan.”

“Okay, but how about if we just--”

“No, Greg!” he declared, cutting me off. “I promise that when I pass through here again, I will stop to check on Abdul. But we really need to go now, or we will become shahids on the highway, and for that your wife will never forgive me.”

Knowing that he was right, I pulled out my camera to take a picture of the boy mechanic, and then we drove away.

On his next trip north, Sarfraz did indeed stop to check on Abdul and discovered that another young boy was working in his place. Sarfraz asked what had happened to Abdul, but no one in the shop could offer any information. Perhaps he had gone north to Faizabad, or maybe south to Kabul. No one knew anything except that Abdul, whose story seemed to mirror that of so many others in this nation of orphans, had simply disappeared.

In the black-and-white image I shot that night, Abdul is standing in the garage, covered in grease and oil, with a flat expression of resignation and loss that no eleven-year-old boy should ever feel. The photo sits on my desk in Bozeman, and I see it every day that I am home.

Once we finally reached Baharak and were traveling through territory controlled by Sadhar Khan, Sarfraz's concerns about security began to drop away. They were immediately replaced, however, by a whole new set of challenges connected to the terrain.

The rutted dirt track through the western half of the Wakhan Corridor followed the Panj River, and during the spring and summer months the runoff from the glaciers and snowfields in the Hindu Kush created a series of channels that spilled directly across the roadbed. These flood zones could be up to half a mile wide, consisting mostly of loose gravel interlaced with braided streams of varying widths and depths. Upon reaching the edge of a new series of streams, we often were forced to cruise up and down the shoreline for half an hour or more before finding a spot that seemed to offer a promising place to cross. Then Sarfraz would order the driver to gun his engine and blast into the water with as much speed as possible. If we were lucky, we'd smash through to the other side. If not, we might wind up in waist-high water that would gush through the floorboards and fill up the inside of the car. Then we'd have to pile out, make our way to the edge of the stream, wait for a truck or a jeep to come by, and pay them to haul us out.

It's fair to say that Sarfraz and I treated our drivers without mercy. We goaded them into pushing their vehicles to the point where the axle seized or the transmission dropped out or the muffler was torn to pieces. If the driver himself had been forced beyond the point of exhaustion, Sarfraz would order him into the back and one of us would get behind the wheel. In the spring and the fall we'd hydroplane through acres of mud (which can be two or three feet deep in the Wakhan) until the vehicles would bog down and gurgle to a stop. Then, while the driver headed off to find a team of yaks to pull his car out, Sarfraz and I would take off our shoes, and sometimes even our pants, and start walking. (The tunic top of a shalwar kamiz extends well below the knees, so exposure was not a problem.)

Sooner or later, we would reach our goal--whatever stretch of the Corridor formed the focus of the trip. And it was at this point that our real work would begin.

Over the years, Sarfraz and I gradually developed a routine to which we would adhere once we had arrived in a particular “project zone.” Each day would begin well before dawn, when we would wake up, blinking, in the same clothes we'd been wearing for more than a week, surrounded by the components of our mobile office: one small black backpack, a wheeled compact carry-on, and my black Pelican case bearing the THE LAST BEST PLACE bumper sticker. Together these pieces of luggage held all the paperwork for our schools in the Wakhan, along with several extra copies of Three Cups of Tea (which made excellent presents to the mujahadeen), our sat phone, a Nikon battery charger, one spare 28 mm camera lens, a spare shalwar kamiz, a Sony laptop, three cameras, several large bricks of cash, and our GPS unit.

First on the agenda were morning ablutions, which basically consisted of me smearing some aloe-scented hand sanitizer into my hair and Sarfraz scratching himself in the right spots. (Showers, bathtubs, and wet wipes were extremely scarce in the Wakhan.) Then we would pop the cap on our jumbo-size jar of ibuprofen, and each of us would take two or three tablets as a prebreakfast appetizer. (When we were going hard, we'd each go through about twelve or fifteen pills a day in order to help dull the aches and pains induced by the arduous travel and the lack of sleep.) At this point, one of us might put on the pair of reading glasses that we shared--we both have the same prescription--while the other stepped outside with the toothbrush. (Yep, we shared that, too.)

The spectacle of two men passing personal grooming items back and forth was bizarre enough that one morning a reporter from a national magazine, who was traveling with us in order to write an article about the Wakhan, asked me to provide a list of everything that Sarfraz and I used in common.

“Well, let's see,” I replied. “We share our jackets, our razors, our hairbrush, our soap, our socks, our hats, our shalwar kamiz, our undershirts--”

“How about your underwear?” the reporter interjected. “Do you guys share that?”

“Look, I'm not sure I want to reveal this,” I said, squirming with embarrassment, “but there's really no sense in lying about it either.” Then I explained that having spent the first fifteen years of my childhood in rural Tanzania--where underwear is not a big priority--I have sort of gone “alpine style” for my entire life.

“And what about you, Sarfraz?” demanded the reporter, who was diligently writing all of this down.

“Alpine style for me, too.”

When we had completed our morning ritual, it was time to pile back into the car, hit the road, and head off toward that day's destination. Upon arrival, the first item on the agenda called for an inspection of the school--usually surrounded by a scrum of children tugging us by the hands. (One of the greatest joys in my work is spending time with the students and teachers, and at every school, I make it a priority to greet each child, one by one, and encourage them to give me an update on how their studies are progressing.)

At every stop where there was a project, the bricks of cash that we were carrying were brought out and Sarfraz would balance the accounts with Mullah Mohammed, sixty-three, a former Taliban bookkeeper from the village of Khundud who served as our accountant for the entire Wakhan (and who usually traveled with us). Our ledgers were kept according to the old British double-entry system and were laid out by hand, from right to left, in Persian script. Every transaction was recorded down to the penny, and at the end of each accounting session, which could take hours, Sarfraz would “seal” the ledger by drawing a line in ink along the edge of the page so that no additional expenses could be written in later. Then he would solemnly warn Mullah Mohammed that if any errors later emerged, Mullah Mohammed would be shipped off to rejoin the Taliban.

While this business unfolded, I often found myself besieged by people submitting requests for assistance. In Khundud, there might be a man asking for money to set up a grocery store in exchange for providing tutoring services to our students. In the town of Ishkoshem, I might be approached by a pair of local officials seeking funds for a water-delivery system. In the tiny hamlet of Piggush, the school principal might claim to need additional cash to purchase desks and filing cabinets for her teachers. The pleading was always polite, but the needs were endless: more books, more pencils, more uniforms, another classroom. I would get proposal after proposal, and unfortunately, I would have to say no to dozens of them, even though many of the petitioners might have traveled for days on foot or by public transport to present me with their requests.

As the day progressed, Sarfraz and I would also find ourselves passing the sat phone back and forth in order to keep in contact with the rest of the CAI staff who were scattered throughout the Punjab, Baltistan, and eastern Afghanistan. There were hourly chats with Suleman in Islamabad, who served as our communications hub and who would keep me abreast of who among the staff was arguing with whom--an inevitable by-product of an organization staffed with members of half a dozen different tribal and religious backgrounds.

Finally, as evening drew near, we would be invited to gather at the home of a village leader and convene with the local heavyweights for a jirga, or council session. A jirga is a formal gathering of elders sitting in a circle on a carpet, or under a tree, and as a rule the participants are forbidden from adjourning until consensus has been achieved around a decision. As a result, jirgas can go on for hours and often extend through much of the night. They invariably feature long speeches, periods of intense deliberation conducted in absolute silence, and prodigious amounts of tea drinking.

Toward dawn, Sarfraz and I would snatch a brief nap in an empty room in someone's house or bunk down on the floor of the school. Two or three hours later, it would be time to pack up, pile into our hired vehicle, and race off to the next project. And so it would go, school by school and village by village, until we had worked our way through the places we needed to visit and it was time for me to fly home to Montana and for Sarfraz to head back to the Charpurson Valley.

These trips were long and grueling, and during the course of them my respect and affection for Sarfraz continued to deepen. By the end of that first year, he had impressed me with his intelligence, his diligence, and his work ethic. He was culturally savvy, constantly on the move, and able to switch between charming and harsh as the situation demanded. For our point man in the Wakhan, I do not think there could have been a better choice than Sarfraz Khan.

There was one area, however, in which both he and I were an absolute disaster.

Thanks to Sadhar Khan's support and protection, we were making fair progress inside the Wakhan itself. Eventually, however, we would need to make contact with the government in Kabul and obtain official permission for our projects. With this in mind, Sarfraz and I set up meetings with a number of government officials during the course of three separate visits to the capital city--and it was in those offices that we achieved a whole new level of no much success.

To be fair to the officials with whom we collided, the country they were attempting to govern had been at war for more than two decades, and virtually every aspect of civil society was in shambles. Nevertheless, the people we tried to work with in Kabul didn't make it easy for us to help them rebuild their own school system. On the contrary, I'd say. Never have we drunk three cups of tea so many times to so little purpose.

In that part of the world, if an office doesn't have its own tea, someone has to go for takeout, which can sometimes take up to half an hour. As often as not, we would wait for the tea and only after it had arrived be informed that the individual we needed to see wasn't in. Once or twice, we announced the name of the official we needed to see and were told “no problem,” invited for tea, eventually served, and then informed that this person wasn't actually in the office after all, and could we come back tomorrow? To some degree you get used to this in central Asia, but in Kabul such tendencies were more pronounced than usual.