Stones Into School (17 page)

What Farzana had understood was that in the minds of the children, desks provided concrete evidence that at least within the confines of their classroom, a degree of order, stability, and normalcy had returned to their lives. In a traumatized world where everything had been turned upside down and the ground itself had given way, a desk offered certitude. It was something you could trust.

That marked the beginning of “Operation School Desk.”

Armed with Farzana's insight, we started retrieving the remains of broken furniture from every possible source, and over the next week, our team of amateur carpenters knocked together about eight hundred desks for every tent school in the area. But it didn't end there. Other organizations in Balakot and Muzaffarabad got wind of Farzana's insight, and soon schools up and down the Neelum Valley were filling up with desks. From that time forward, desks became a requirement for all of the tent schools we established in Azad Kashmir.

In terms of solving the staggering crisis besetting Azad Kashmir, this desk business barely merited notice. It did, however, represent a small step forward during a moment when almost nothing seemed to be going well. And more important, perhaps, it was something that had been initiated by the children themselves.

As I was about to discover, however, it wasn't simply the children of Kashmir who had something to say to us.

In the middle of January, I was forced once again to say farewell to Sarfraz and return home to Montana. I was loath to leave the earthquake zone, but the run-up to the publication of Three Cups of Tea was in full swing, and this would offer a chance to raise some much-needed funds for our work in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Back in Bozeman, as I struggled to immerse myself in the endless rounds of phone calls and e-mails, all I could really think about were the survivors whom I'd left behind in Azad Kashmir. I found myself dwelling on the disparity between the urgent work that needed doing over there and what struck me as the rather mundane office tasks that I was performing in the United States. Within a week of getting home, I was depressed, disengaged, and already plotting how to return to Pakistan.

That's where things stood one evening in late January as I was reading a bedtime story to Khyber, who was five years old at the time. He was happy I was home, and that made me happy, too. Moreover, reading to him and Amira had always been one of Tara's and my favorite things to do. But as I read the words to Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, tracing each sentence with my finger, my mind was preoccupied with issues on the opposite end of the planet.

What time was it in Kashmir, and where was Sarfraz right now, and when would he be calling? How many teachers were on our payroll in the Neelum Valley at the moment, and did I need to wire funds to Islamabad in order to cover their salaries for this month?

Oh my goodness!

My reverie was derailed by the realization that my son had stopped listening to my voice and begun to enunciate the words on the page for himself. He was not reciting these words from memory. Khyber was reading for the first time in his life.

When you are a parent, the instant your child first begins to read is a moment of the purest magic. It doesn't matter whether you happen to live in Kashmir or Montana or Tanzania or Manhattan--witnessing the fire of literacy ignite in the mind of a child is something transcendent. To me, it felt exactly like releasing the string on a helium-filled balloon and watching it ascend into the sky all by itself.

But there was another feeling, too. Mixed with the intoxicating sense of buoyancy was an awareness of the many other mile-stones in the lives of my children that I had irrevocably missed. Their first steps. Their first spoken words. Their first bike rides. Their first day of school.

These developments, which are the delight of so many parents, had all unfolded while I was at work on the far side of the world, attending to the needs and the dreams of other people's children. And yet right now, I was permitted to be lying next to my own son for this one precious moment. The piercing combination of joy and loss was too much to bear, and the tears began rolling down my face.

This was deeply puzzling to Khyber, who had no way of grasping the enormity of this moment for his father.

“Daddy, what's the matter? Are you okay?” he asked, comforting me with a pat on the shoulder.

“Yes, Khyber, I'm okay, and I'm so proud of you today,” I responded. “You know how to read!”

Khyber then called out to Tara, who was in another room with Amira, and they dashed into the bedroom and tumbled onto the bed with us. For the next hour we stayed up past the children's bedtime, snuggled together as a family while Khyber continued to read, with some help from his big sister. Tara and I proudly celebrated the precious time together.

That evening offered one of the most succinct encapsulations of the blessings and the burdens that come out of the work I do to promote literacy and education for young readers in central Asia. It also helped sustain me through the challenges that were to unfold in the weeks ahead.

By February, Sarfraz had come to the conclusion that regardless of how eager we might be to use some of our earthquake-relief money to begin converting our tent schools into permanent structures, circumstances required that we wait. Back in December, we had been able to catch a few flights on the Chinooks, and from above it was easy to see how radically the landscape had been changed. Alluvial fans had been altered, drainage channels had changed, and hillsides that had taken centuries to terrace into arable fields had been eliminated. Thanks to those changes, entire villages would need to relocate, which meant that no one could be sure exactly where hundreds of thousands of people would ultimately end up.

Given this uncertainty, Sarfraz counseled, it was too early to start putting up actual buildings. Instead, he declared, what we needed to concentrate on was figuring out how to provide clean, dependable water sources. In the communities where we were working this was a top priority because, among other reasons, a good source of water is a prerequisite for a school.

In the villages of Baltistan, most of the water systems relied on glacial melt. In the villages of Azad Kashmir, however, there was an almost total reliance on springs, many of which had now been permanently plugged or rerouted. Taking everything into account, Sarfraz thought it was necessary for us to put in small water-collection tanks and delivery pipes for five villages, including Nouseri. With my approval, he paid modest sums to two water engineers to design these systems. He also managed to finagle quite a bit of free PVC piping from the Public Works Department in Rawalpindi, including twenty thousand feet for Nouseri alone.

So far, so good. Who could possibly be opposed to such a project? As it turned out, a Pakistani subcontractor who was working for an American contractor who, in turn, was receiving funding from the USAID objected on the grounds that the Central Asia Institute did not have an official permit to distribute water in Azad Kashmir.

You are an education NGO, he argued, whereas I have prepaid contracts to distribute hundreds of thousands of plastic bottles of mineral water, by truck and by helicopter, from warehouses in Muzaffarabad to the villages of Azad Kashmir.

When Sarfraz reported this to me, I initially thought he was kidding. By any yardstick one might care to use, the prohibitively expensive bottled-water delivery contract was a ridiculous boondoggle. Nevertheless, we were forced to spend several weeks wrangling with various government ministries in Azad Kashmir before the mess was sorted out and we were granted retroactive approval for the water-delivery systems that Sarfraz, exasperated by the unnecessary red tape, had already begun constructing.

At home in Montana, these and many other challenges formed the grist for my family's dinner-table conversations throughout February and March. Sarfraz's phone updates and the photos that he e-mailed provided Khyber and Amira with a sense of the challenges we were up against, and I was pleased by the interest that my son and daughter appeared to take in these matters. Then one evening, Amira posed a question that seemed to leapfrog over the tangled talk of PVC piping and the politics of sweetheart government deals for American contractors.

“Hey, Dad,” she asked, “what kinds of games do the children in your Kashmir schools play?”

Amid the devastation and the despair of the earthquake zone, I didn't recall seeing much in the way of games. But then again, it was possible that Sarfraz and I had been so focused on the mechanics of getting our water-delivery systems and our tent schools up and running that we simply hadn't been paying attention.

“Um . . . I'm not sure,” I replied. “I honestly have no idea.”

“Well,” declared Amira, “you should get those kids some jump ropes.”

Then she threw me a sharp look, as if a switch had just been flipped in her mind.

“Dad, you don't have any playgrounds at all in your schools, do you?”

“No,” I admitted. Playgrounds had not exactly been at the top of the priority list for Sarfraz and me.

“You really need to put them in,” she declared. “All children need to play, especially ones that are suffering and hurting like the kids in Pakistan.”

In truth, some of our schools did feature dirt fields where the kids were able to play soccer. But we had no real playgrounds with swings and slides and seesaws. How had we not thought about this earlier?

The next day, Amira phoned two of my friends, Jeff McMillan and Keith Hamburg, at Gold's Gym in Bozeman and told them that she needed their help in rounding up jump ropes. Word spread quickly, and before we knew it, Amira had more than two thousand jump ropes in our living room. We shipped them off to Suleman in Islamabad, and later that spring--along with an additional seven thousand jump ropes that we purchased in Rawalpindi--they were distributed throughout our tent schools and beyond.

The kids responded in a manner that mirrored their reaction to Farzana's desks. The play and exercise brought joy and delight to them, and their enthusiasm spread like wildfire into the depressed communities. Before long, we were fielding requests to supplement the jump ropes with cricket bats and soccer balls. And like Farzana's desks, Amira's jump ropes provoked a revision of the Central Asia Institute's operations policy.

Since the spring of 2006, we've incorporated playgrounds into most of our new schools, and we have also been working to retrofit a few of our existing schools with swings, seesaws, and slides. Our loyal donors love this idea and have been more than happy to chip in. The playgrounds have also won fans in some unexpected quarters. In the summer of 2009, for example, a group of elders who sympathized with the Taliban paid a visit to one of our schools in Afghanistan with a request to tour the facility. As they walked into the compound and put down their weapons, the leader of this delegation, a man named Haji Mohammad Ibrahim, spotted the playground and broke into a big smile. For the next half hour, he and his companions gleefully sampled the swings, the slide, and the seesaw. When they finally quit playing, Haji Mohammad Ibrahim announced that they did not need to see the inside of the school.

“But don't you want to take a look at the classrooms?” asked the principal.

“No, we have seen enough,” replied Haji Mohammad Ibrahim. “We would like to formally request you to come to our village in order to start building schools. But if you do, they absolutely must have playgrounds.”

Sarfraz's Promise

Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.

--ERNEST HEMINGWAY, The Sun Also Rises

Two sisters in UNHCR earthquake refugee camp, Pakistan

W
hile we continued moving forward with our tent-school projects in the upper Neelum Valley, down in Patika the teachers at the Gundi Piran Girls' School were dealing with their own set of challenges. On November 1, the school had reopened for business in the tents that Shaukat Ali had requisitioned from the Pakistani army. On the first day of class, only seven girls made an appearance, along with a handful of teachers. One of those teachers was Saima Khan, who continued to show up every day despite the fact that she was still recovering from a severe leg fracture.

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.