Stones Into School (19 page)

“Sarfraz, for me to even consider agreeing to this, first I'd have to research this technology for myself, and then I'd have to talk to the board, and then . . . ”

“No problem, sir,” he interrupted. “Call me when you have made your decision. I am waiting by the phone.”

Then he hung up.

Five minutes later, he sent me another fax, this one a sheaf of pages with budgets, contracts, and engineering specifications. I peeled off the schematics and drove over to Montana State University, just a few blocks away, to run them past Brett Gunnink, the head of the civil engineering department. Brett was impressed and confirmed that the design was sound. Then I began calling the board members and walked each of them through the arguments: The people needed hope; we had the money; a new standard of safe school construction needed to be set.

Fair enough, said the board members. Let's do it.

Time to call Sarfraz.

“Sarfraz, you realize that if this doesn't work out, we'll lose credibility and our reputation will be hatam (finished) in Azad Kashmir?” I told him when I phoned back with the news. “You understand how important this is, don't you?”

“No problem, sir, the U.S. Army Chinooks are ready to fly the loads into the Neelum Valley tomorrow. So you will send the goat today?”

“Inshallah, Sarfraz, I will send the goat today.”

The last of the many aspects of this enterprise on which Sarfraz had kept me in the dark was the fact that he had already set his machinery in motion on the assumption that I would say yes to the proposal. Word had been sent to the Wakhan, and a squadron of his most trusted masons from the Charpurson Valley had dashed back across the Irshad Pass, raced down the Karakoram Highway, and were now in Muzaffarabad waiting to assist the Chinese, who had been put on standby.

I wired the money to Pakistan, and work started immediately. I learned later that the atmosphere at each job site was cheery to the point of being almost jubilant. This was one of the first enterprises in the region that conveyed the feeling that what was being raised up might actually be better than what had been destroyed. As a result, the mood among the men who built those schools, Pakistani and Chinese alike, was unlike anything the Neelum Valley had seen in more than a year. They laughed, they joked, they sang at night--and to a man, they worked like demons.

Nineteen days later, all three schools--Pakrat, Nouseri, and Patika--were finished.

The pictures Sarfraz took of the new structures were uploaded a day or two later and e-mailed to my account. I looked them over with Tara, Khyber, and Amira. The school in Pakrat was tucked into the side of a steep hill, and a beaming girl in a colorful dupatta stood by the door. In Nouseri, they had created a six-room structure, and each of the photographs offered proof of Farzana's desks. It was the pictures from Gundi Piran, however, that we found most arresting.

At Saida Shabir's school, the structure that Sarfraz had created was a 162-foot-long, one-story building containing twelve classrooms that was painted white and neatly highlighted with red trim. About fifty feet away and facing the school was an open-air veranda, supported by steel posts and covered by a metal roof. Here, girls who were still too traumatized by the morning of October 8, 2005, could sit at their desks and attend classes without fear of being trapped inside.

Directly in the center of the veranda's cement floor, the construction team had left a rectangular patch of open ground. This was where the seven girls whose bodies were never claimed had been buried. Separated from their families and their loved ones, they now lay together in a neat row. Each grave was marked by a modest stone, and all of them rested with their heads toward the blackboard.

The reason for this design was beautifully clear to anyone who might step into the open-air classroom. If any grace or redemption can be said to reside in the words of a teacher who is imparting the gift of literacy, then that benediction will now pass directly over the graves of those lost little girls every day that the Gundi Piran school is in session.

Later that night, after my wife and children had fallen asleep, I went back down to the basement and pulled the photos up on my computer to marvel again at what had been achieved. As I scrolled through the images, I couldn't help thinking back to my father and the fulfillment of the prediction he'd made in the summer of 1971 when he inaugurated the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre with the declaration that within a decade, the head of every department in that hospital would be a local from Tanzania.

It was then that it occurred to me that without quite intending to follow in my dad's footsteps, I was now watching something no less marvelous unfold in Kashmir.

The Chance That Must Be Taken

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

--H. G. WELLS

Refugees leaving Pakrat village after Pakistan earthquake

O
n November 1, 2006, just five weeks after the new earthquake-proof schools were completed, Prince Charles and his wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, arrived in Islamabad for a five-day goodwill tour. During this trip, their first visit to Pakistan, the royal couple was scheduled to spend about three hours conducting a review of several reconstruction projects in Patika. Part of the purpose behind the stopover was to return global media attention to the continuing plight of the earthquake victims in Azad Kashmir and to underscore how much work remained to be done. The plan called for the royal couple to drop by a health-care facility built by the International Committee of the Red Cross, a German veterinary center that had given away nearly 1,500 milk cows to local residents, and the brand-new Gundi Piran girls' school.

Prior to the event, Shaukat Ali, who had helped to spearhead the effort to reopen classes at the school the previous November, was interviewed and vetted by personnel from the British embassy, then prepped on greeting the royal couple when they arrived at the Gundi Piran school. For the occasion he wore a snow white shalwar kamiz and polished black shoes. With his round gold-rimmed glasses and his mujahadeen-style beard, he cut quite a figure.

Security was tight throughout the royal visit, with British bodyguards shadowing the couple's every move. Each major road within Patika was closed down early in the morning, and around 10:00 A.M. a Royal Navy helicopter, accompanied by a pair of Pakistani Mi-17 military choppers, touched down at the supply depot near the center of town. The prince and the duchess stepped out in matching cream outfits, and after walking through Patika's bazaar, where children welcomed them with Union Jack flags, applause, and waves, they walked to the Red Cross hospital and then proceeded to the Gundi Piran school.

Shaukat Ali presented the duchess with a pashmina Kashmiri shawl, which he placed around her shoulders. Saida Shabir greeted the royal couple with tea and biscuits, and two girls handed them bouquets. After greeting the teachers, the prince and the duchess paid visits to several different classrooms and spent a few minutes at the graves of the girls whose bodies had never been claimed. Then something odd happened.

Turning to Shaukat Ali, the prince asked who was responsible for rebuilding the school. Without missing a beat, Shaukat Ali declared that credit went to two organizations: the Aga Khan Foundation--an Ismaili NGO that does excellent work in Muslim communities throughout Asia--and a construction company from China. The Central Asia Institute was never mentioned.

This struck the CAI staff as rather strange, and after the royal couple had departed, several of them approached Shaukat Ali and demanded that he explain himself. Flustered by the anger and the hurt he had caused, he protested that he had been confused about the CAI's role in the reconstruction of the school--confusion that was exacerbated by the fact that, unlike most NGOs, we had failed to advertise our accomplishment by putting up a large billboard with our name in front of the building when it was completed.

He had a point about the billboard--a detail that had somehow slipped through the cracks during the rush to finish the building. Moreover, the remorse he expressed over his faux pas seemed genuine and quite sincere. What struck me most forcefully, however, was a comment that Shaukat Ali later made to a visiting American journalist, who shared the remarks with me.

“You know, I think that what the Central Asia Institute has done here is a small kind of miracle,” he said. “Without help from anybody else, and without differentiating on the basis of religion, tribe, or politics, this organization has changed the minds of the people who live in this area, 70 to 80 percent of whom are conservative Muslims. Before the earthquake occurred, many of these people were thinking that the American people are not good. But the CAI has proved that this is not true--and now the people here are paying much respect, much honor, to this organization.”

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.