Stones Into School (30 page)

A week prior to his death, Munadi, a thirty-four-year-old father of two, had written the following blog posting for the New York Times:

Being a journalist is not enough; it will not solve the problems of Afghanistan. I want to work for the education of the country, because the majority of people are illiterate. That is the main problem facing many Afghans.

Sarfraz and I awoke at just after 5:00 A.M., nudged the driver to his feet and gently prodded him into the rear seat, then pulled back onto the road. With Sarfraz behind the wheel and the sun just beginning to come up, we crossed into Badakshan. The fertile valleys, rugged hills, and broken gorges carried a welcoming sense of familiarity, and the feeling of moving through a landscape to which we belonged was reinforced as we began passing some of our Central Asia Institute schools. First came Fakhar School, followed by Faizabad Girls' School, and beyond that, Sadhar Khan's school in Baharak--where the road south led to the Shodha Girls' School and the Jherum Girls' Primary School. We kept pressing east, skirting above the Eskan Girls' Primary School, the Koh Munjon School, the Wardugh Girls' Middle School, and the Ziabakh Girls' Elementary and Middle School.

On a normal trip we would have stopped at each of these places for tea and a quick visit, but not this time. As we entered the Wakhan proper, Sarfraz kept his foot to the accelerator, and eleven more schools flew past. Together these twenty projects provided visual affirmation of the fact that despite the endless setbacks and delays, we had managed to accomplish something worthwhile during our time in northern Afghanistan. And perhaps I would have given myself over to a wave of pride and self-congratulation, had I not been overtaken by something far more powerful. During my yearlong absence, I had forgotten that the Wakhan, despite its harshness and austerity, is a place of unspeakable loveliness.

Compelling evidence of this fact was on display everywhere. The previous winter had been the worst the Wakhan had seen in twelve years, bringing with it an endless succession of storms that had buried the High Pamir beneath a second mountain range of snow and kept temperatures below freezing well into June. The conditions had been devastating for livestock, and many of the surrounding villages had lost a significant portion of their animals. When the melt-out finally arrived, the hardships had continued with a larger-than-normal wave of avalanches, landslides, and flash floods. Now, however, the Corridor was finally reaping the flip side of the equation.

Thanks to all the moisture from the shrinking snowpack and the glacial melt, the vibrant emerald green colors of late spring were still refusing to surrender to the brown and ocher tones of midsummer. In village after village, every field was bursting with a bumper crop of wheat, potatoes, or millet. Above this shimmering green patchwork soared the double-walled architecture of the Wakhan's unique geologic signature: to the south, the bulwark of the Hindu Kush, blocking off Pakistan; and to the north, across the Amu Darya, the ramparts of the Pamirs defining the edge of Tajikistan. When taken in by the eye in a single, sweeping glance, this dramatic ensemble--the jagged peaks, the foaming river, the orange- and purple-hued rocks, the splashes of color from the wild roses and buttercups, all spread beneath the measureless immensity of the sky--offered a vision of unmatched beauty and grandeur.

On the second day from Kabul, we reached our twenty-first and final school, the Sarhad School, where the road ended and the central reaches of the Corridor began giving way to the colder and more severe lines of the High Pamir. Here, even in midsummer, winter was never more than half a step away. The stretches of flatland that were wedged between the mountains and the river around Sarhad were carpeted in a thick, tightly knotted tundra grass that resembled what one might see in the subpolar latitudes of northern Canada.

Aside from its visual splendor, what makes Sarhad so striking is that more than any other place in the Wakhan, or even Afghanistan, it suggests the possibility that you have arrived in a land where time itself has frozen. Beyond the cluster of low-slung, mud-and-stone houses that make up the village, wildhaired children preside over herds of shaggy-coated yaks and shovel-footed Bactrian camels that look as if they are still part of the Pleistocene. In the nearby fields, which have been fenced off with the bleached bones and the curled horns of ibex and Marco Polo sheep, men turn the earth with plows whose design has not changed in two thousand years.

By the time we arrived, we had been driving almost nonstop for about forty hours. We pulled up in front of the residence of Tashi Boi, the local chief who was in charge of civil affairs in this part of the Corridor and who had been a fierce advocate for literacy and girls' education since he completed a drug-treatment program a decade ago and successfully overcame his addiction to opium, the scourge of so many families in the Corridor. Tashi Boi's home, which he shared with his wife, children, and fifteen members of his extended family, was a traditional Wakhi “hearth house.” A hexagonal structure, its interior featured an earthen floor in which a sunken area in the center, which contained the hearth, was surrounded by a raised platform covered with thick blankets and rugs upon which members of the household spent most of their time. The roof was supported by rough-hewn wooden beams, and a touch of modernity was provided by the addition of a support post fashioned from a long steel girder that had once served as the tread cover of a Soviet T-62 tank.

Sarhad was the deepest I had ever penetrated into the interior of the Wakhan, and before stepping inside the house to share a meal of noodle soup, I paused to cast a glance at what lay beyond the end of the road. About fifteen miles to the south rose the escarpments of the Hindu Kush. A day and a half's walk in that direction would take one to the northern entrance of the Irshad Pass. Meanwhile, forty-two miles to the east lay the old Kirghiz burial grounds of Bozai Gumbaz. If Sarfraz and I started first thing in the morning, within three days we could make our rendezvous with Wohid Khan and Abdul Rashid Khan.

I headed indoors with the hope that in less than seventy-two hours, we would finally finish off a piece of business that had been languishing for a decade. It was at this point, however, that fate apparently felt the need to demonstrate the irritating truth that in this place, nothing ever happens the way it's supposed to.

One of the benefits of having been raised in rural Africa was that it imbued me with an unusually strong constitution. During my sixteen years of work in Pakistan and Afghanistan, I had only been severely sick twice. When I awoke the following morning, however, my entire body was wracked by chills and my limbs and chest had been overtaken by a fatigue so dense and so heavy that it seemed to have penetrated all the way to the bone. An hour later, my head was spinning wildly and I was locked in the grip of a remorseless fever.

The dizziness and the pounding headache made me think it might be malaria, to which I had succumbed twice as a boy in Tanzania. There were no mosquitoes this high in the Wakhan, however. Whatever it was that had a hold of me, there was no resisting its onslaught, and as Tashi Boi and Sarfraz pumped me full of green tea and piled four or five blankets on me, I slipped into a deep delirium.

Inside the cauldron of my fever, I lost all sense of time, fumbling to the surface only periodically to register what was happening around me. On several occasions, I experienced the blurred sense that someone seemed to be piling yet another blanket on top of me or performing a kind of pressure massage that involved pressing down on my legs and head with two or three fingers, then letting go. In other instances, I could hear the mumbled whispers of Sarfraz and the members of Tashi Boi's household as they discussed my condition and speculated on what to do. Once or twice, I awoke in the middle of the night to realize that a circle of elders was sitting quietly beside me and keeping vigil. The residents of Sarhad were doting and they were worried, and they never once left me alone. Drifting through my illness, I had the sense that people were taking turns sitting beside me and holding my hand for hours.

As the days and the nights melded, my sense of the present slipped away and was overtaken by scenes from my past. I flashed back to my childhood battles with malaria, when I had lost six months of school. I also traveled back to Korphe, where the care that I had received during my first stay in Haji Ali's village seemed to merge with what the people of Sarhad were now doing. At night, over the roar of Tashi Boi's generator, I could hear the yaks clustered outside the house, grunting and mooing in the moonlight--sounds that convinced me that I had been transported back to Montana and was standing on the Great Plains surrounded by a herd of buffalo. At one point, an elderly woman awakened me from my stupor to ask if I wanted to smoke some opium, which she said would take away the pain.

“No thanks,” I said, “I've already got some medicine.”

As I descended back into sleep, I could hear Sarfraz rhythmically shaking our jumbo-sized jar of ibuprofen like a maraca.

Rattle-rattle-rattle.

Rattle-rattle-rattle.

On the morning of the third day, I awoke with a vast ache over my whole body, but the thoughts in my mind were now running with a coolness and a clarity that mirrored the streams flowing through the fields outside.

The fever had broken.

I sat up, took some tea and some bread, and tried to calculate how long it would take us to reach Bozai Gumbaz.

When he realized what I was doing, Sarfraz, who was sitting on the other side of the room, shook his head wordlessly.

“It's only three days' walk from here,” I said, sensing his skepticism.

“You are too weak to walk, and you cannot keep going,” he replied. “We need to get you out of here.”

“That's not true. How about if I ride a yak?”

“Greg, you cannot play games with being sick in the Wakhan--there is no medicine here, there are no doctors, there is no way to leave quickly if you get worse. Three years ago I was in the same position you are in now, and I pushed things too hard and almost died. I am not going to let that happen to you. Tara would never forgive me.”

“But Sarfraz, we can still make it!”

And then he said something that I had never heard during all my years in Asia.

“I will not take you any further, Greg,” he remarked quietly, but in a tone that made it clear that there would be no negotiation.

“I refuse to allow it. We are returning to Kabul.”

Later, as Sarfraz and I drove out of the corridor down the very same road that we had just come up, I was struck by the unwelcome thought that after having failed not once but twice to reach the High Pamir, Bozai Gumbaz was beginning to feel as elusive and as unreachable to me as the summit of K2. It also seemed to me that this retreat from the Wakhan bore a disturbing resemblance to my confused withdrawal from K2 base camp down the Baltoro Glacier during the autumn of 1993 when I had wandered off the path, spent the night in the open, and eventually wound up stumbling into Korphe.

In several respects, it almost seemed as if that debacle and this were one and the same. Both experiences had imbued me with a sense of abject failure after having fallen short of an important and meaningful goal. Worse, both forced me to confront the realization that I had let down people to whom I had made a promise. In the case of K2, the pledge I had broken had been made to my sister Christa, in whose memory I had promised to place on the summit an amber necklace that she had once worn. In the case of Bozai Gumbaz, I had failed to keep my word to the Kirghiz. Although we had managed to construct an impressive line of twenty-one schools stretching from Faizabad to Sarhad, one for nearly every village in the Wakhan, the single community we had yet to reach was the one on whose behalf we had ventured into Afghanistan in the first place. Now it looked as if the passing of yet another winter (the eleventh!) was about to mark our continued inability to follow through on the original vow--the vow that had mattered the most, because of all the people at the end of the road whom we were trying to serve, none had needed our help more than the Kirghiz.

As it turned out, however, there were also some key differences between my original failure on K2 and what was happening now. Unlike the defeated mountaineer who had taken a wrong turn on the Baltoro Glacier sixteen years earlier and submitted himself to the kindness of a village filled with people he had never met, I was not among strangers and I was no longer lost. And although I knew nothing of it as Sarfraz and I silently completed our drive out of the Wakhan, despite all the challenges involved in this nearly impossible mission to raise up a school on the Rooftop of the World the Kirghiz were about to be given exactly what they needed most.

The Last Best School

The world has turned away from Afghanistan.

--AHMED RASHID, Taliban (2001)

Yaks head to eastern Wakhan, Afghanistan

T
he first storm of the season struck the eastern Wakhan on September 5, and the eight inches of snow that fell to the ground found Sarfraz back in Badakshan, having completed yet another epic sprint through northern Afghanistan. After bidding me farewell in Kabul, he had flown back to Faizabad to confirm that the Kamaz and Wohid Khan were on their way through Tajikistan. There he had commissioned a second truck to haul an additional forty bags of cement, plus the frames for the Kirghiz school's doors and windows, through Baharak to Sarhad. As Kamaz number two started its journey east, Sarfraz then raced ahead to Sarhad to see if he could round up a dozen yaks--a considerable challenge because the bulk of these animals were still grazing the summer pastures high in the mountains and weren't due to be driven down to the lower elevations for another three weeks.

While Sarfraz concentrated on wrangling his yaks, Wohid Khan was completing his arc through Tajikistan across the top of the Wakhan, and adding items onto the load in the back of the truck with each stop. In Faizabad he purchased an assortment of tools, including trowels, hammers, plumb lines, twine, baling wire, and mason squares. In Ishkoshem he picked up two dozen shovels and several boxes of dynamite, plus eight wheelbarrows. After crossing the bridge into Tajikistan, he worked his way north to Khurog and took on thirty-eight bags of cheap Russian cement, which would be used in the foundation, along with several bags of calcium. The following day he reached Murgab, where he confirmed that the 190 four-inch-diameter poplar trees, which had been ordered two weeks earlier, were now being stripped of their bark and sawn into fifteen-foot-long poles for framing the school roof. Then he and his driver turned south for the Afghan border, where they crossed a barbed-wire fence demarcating the northern edge of the Wakhan and followed the old Soviet tank tracks toward the grazing lands of the Kirghiz.

Together with their horses, sheep, camels, and yaks, the Kirghiz migrate across an area of two thousand square miles. There are nearly two thousand of them, and they prefer to move in small bands to avoid taxing the grasslands of the High Pamir. At various times of the year, however, they congregate around three primary encampments that are arranged in a triangle and separated from one another by a distance of roughly thirty-five miles. The first of these cantonments, a few miles south of the Tajik border, lies on the eastern shore of Chakmak Lake, a shallow body of Windex-blue water that received its first recorded mention in the writings of the Buddhist pilgrim Hsuan Tsang, who passed through the Wakhan on his way to China in A.D. 644. (“The Valley of Pamir,” wrote Hsuan, “is situated between two snowy mountains. The cold is glacial and the wind is furious. Snow falls even in spring and summer, day and night the wind rages. Grain and fruit cannot grow there, and trees are few and far between. In the middle of the valley is a large lake, situated in the centre of the world on a plateau of prodigious height.”)

Wohid Khan swiftly discovered that the tank track was in terrible shape, having received almost no traffic during the previous twenty years. It took another full day for the Kamaz to reach the encampment at the center of the world, which the Kirghiz call Kara Jilga, and which offers almost nothing in the way of amenities. The infrastructure here consists of three crumbling cinder-block buildings, some twenty yurts, and a corral the size of a football field that is surrounded by a low earthen wall designed to shelter the nomads' animals during bad weather and protect them from wolves. But what is truly remarkable about this place--and the reason why the Kirghiz flock to it in such numbers each summer--is the fecundity of the surrounding pastures: an immense carpet of thick-bladed grass so nutritious that even the leanest animals grow fat after ten days of feeding upon it.

In Kara Jilga, the tank tracks ended, and the Kamaz completed the next fifteen miles by bushwhacking across the roadless meadows and bludgeoning through the boulder-strewn deltas until it could go no further. At this point, the load was dropped to the ground and the truck started the long loop back to Ishkoshem. As for the tools and the cement that had just been deposited, another yak train would need to be put together before these materials could complete the final fifteen-mile leg to Bozai Gumbaz.

In the meantime, Sarfraz had managed to assemble his twelve yaks in Sarhad. After loading them with the window and door frames and the bags of cement that had just arrived on Kamaz number two, he started the arduous three-day haul into Bozai Gumbaz from the west. At the same time, yet another column of yaks--a minitrain of only six animals that had also been organized by Sarfraz--was ferrying a load of twenty-two-gauge roofing panels over the Irshad Pass from Pakistan.

While all this was taking place, I was back in the United States juggling a spate of university speaking engagements. At odd moments during these twenty-hour days, I would duck into the hallway outside a student seminar or pause before going through airport security to phone Sarfraz for a progress update. On September 10, he reported that his twelve-yak supply train had reached Bozai Gumbaz and he was now rounding up an additional half dozen yaks in order to retrieve the load that Wohid Khan had dumped between Kara Jilga and Bozai Gumbaz. He anticipated returning to the school site at roughly the same time that the roofing panels arrived over the Irshad Pass. Once all of this material had been delivered, the construction crew could get to work in earnest.

Everything seemed to be coming together beautifully, so when my phone beeped on the night of September 15 with Sarfraz's number, I was expecting to receive triumphant news that the project was back on schedule and racing toward completion. Instead, he announced that he was calling from Kara Jilga, where he was sitting at the bedside of a critically ill and possibly dying Abdul Rashid Khan.

Even by the extreme standards of Afghanistan, a country that has endured far more than its fair share of misery and misfortune, it is not easy to find a story more star-crossed than that of Abdul Rashid Khan. Born in the fall of 1937 inside a yurt that his mother and aunts had pitched near Chakmak Lake, the Kirghiz leader had been a witness to one of the darkest periods of his people's history, an era of virtually uninterrupted social disruption and economic decline.

In 1978, the fortunes of the Kirghiz had disintegrated when they were forced to flee their homeland prior to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and seek refuge in Pakistan, where they found the climate and the living conditions to be intolerable. At this point, as recounted in chapter 1, the community had split into two groups. The larger faction had decided to accept an offer for asylum from the Turkish government, and in 1982 they embarked on an odyssey known as the Last Exodus to eastern Anatolia, where they remain to this day. Meanwhile, a smaller group of incurably homesick Kirghiz had opted to follow Abdul Rashid Khan back to the High Pamir and resume the migratory lifestyle of their ancestors--a decision that exposed them directly to the chaos that had by now overtaken Afghanistan.

During the final years of the Soviet occupation, Abdul Rashid Khan had played a delicate game that involved cooperating with the Soviet army (which garrisoned approximately a thousand troops in the High Pamir) while secretly channeling provisions and logistical support to the Afghan mujahadeen. By blending diplomacy with deception, he was able to avoid provoking the vicious reprisals for which the Soviets were so hated, while simultaneously benefiting from Russian trade and development assistance. But when the occupation finally concluded and Afghanistan's rival mujahadeen factions plunged the country into civil war, the tiny band of nomads found themselves cut off and, in effect, abandoned by their own government.

As the Taliban clawed their way to power during the mid 1990s and seized control of more than 90 percent of the country, virtually all communication and contact with the world beyond Badakshan ceased. With each passing season, the Kirghiz seemed to slip several notches deeper into poverty and squalor--a slide that accelerated when predatory mujahadeen commanders from Baharak began flooding the Wakhan with opium as a means of financing their war against the Taliban. By the winter of 2001, when the U.S. military retaliation against the attacks of 9/11 finally drove the Taliban into exile, the Wakhan Kirghiz were buckling under the ravages of pervasive drug addiction, chronic malnutrition, inadequate health care, and economic ruin. At this point, Abdul Rashid Khan felt that his only option was to go begging.

When I first met the Kirghiz leader during the Baharak riots in the fall of 2005, he was returning from the second of three grueling and prohibitively expensive trips from the Wakhan to Kabul to beseech members of the Karzai government for schools, medical care, police protection, veterinary services, road construction, a post office--anything to demonstrate that the Kirghiz actually belonged to Afghanistan. On each occasion, elaborate promises were made and later broken--with a single exception. In the summer of 2007, a battered gray van that had been dispatched through Tajikistan along the same route now being traveled by our Kamaz truck had lumbered over the border, followed the tank track across the tundra, and sputtered to a stop in Bozai Gumbaz, at which point the driver got out and walked home. The van--which carried no medical supplies, no nurse or doctor, and no extra fuel--was apparently the federal government's idea of a comprehensive health-care program for the eastern Pamirs. To this day, the only apparent purpose served by this rusting, abandoned vehicle was to offer visual evidence of just how little the Kirghiz mattered to anyone.

By the summer of 2008, when I had cut short my trip to Bozai Gumbaz in order to have tea with the president of Pakistan, the Kirghiz were growing desperate. By now, the only thing that enabled them to survive the relentless Pamir winters was the assistance of their sole outside ally--Wohid Khan, who used his Border Security pickups to deliver sacks of flour, rice, salt, tea, and clothing each fall before the snows arrived. Even with this aid, however, the nomads were playing touch-and-go with starvation and were dangerously vulnerable to illness. The tipping point had finally arrived during the marathon winter of 2008-9, when the Kirghiz began to die in unprecedented numbers. By the time spring arrived, twenty-two people had perished, fourteen of them women who passed away in the midst of either pregnancy or childbirth. Among a population of less than nine hundred adults, losses like these were unsustainable. In addition to saddling the eastern Wakhan with probably the single worst maternal and infant mortality rates anywhere on earth, these deaths upset the ratio between males and females--an imbalance that, thanks to the number of unborn children who had also been lost, would take more than a decade to redress.

Two months later, as the community was still reeling from these events, an Afghan military helicopter had clattered above the alpine grasslands, touched down in Bozai Gumbaz, and deposited a politician named Abdullah Abdullah, who spent several hours shaking hands and asking for everyone's votes in the upcoming presidential election. Yet despite the effort that had been made to solicit the Kirghiz's participation, when election day finally arrived on August 20, 2009, not a single ballot box arrived in the Pamirs. Regardless of whether this failure stemmed from corruption, bureaucratic incompetence, or the fact that the federal election officials had simply forgotten about the Kirghiz, this marked the second consecutive election in which Abdul Rashid Khan and his people had been deprived of their right to vote. (In the October 2004 presidential election, a ballot box did actually make it to the Pamirs--but on the flight back to Kabul, the helicopter that was transporting the box crashed in the mountains and all of the ballots were lost.)

Among a host of other concerns, the ballot-box debacle of 2009 seemed to suggest the humiliating possibility that the Afghan government's apathy toward the Kirghiz might have burgeoned to the point where not even their votes were deemed to have value. Which, in turn, provoked some bleak and troubling questions from the elders to whom Abdul Rashid Khan turned when he was in need of counsel. Was there any reason, these elders demanded, why the entire community should not pull up stakes the following spring, gather together their yurts and their animals, and embark on a Final Exodus? If the government of Afghanistan neither wanted nor cared about them any longer, was it possible that somewhere in China, Tajikistan, or Kirghizstan they might be able to find someone who did? And at this point, did they really have anything left to lose?

During the second week of September, the hardships and the disappointments of the previous years caught up with the aging Kirghiz commandhan, and his health took a severe turn for the worse. When word that Abdul Rashid Khan had taken to his bed reached Bozai Gumbaz, Sarfraz mounted Kazil, his shaggy white horse, and set off on a midnight race to Kara Jilga. Despite the fact that Kazil had been given almost no rest in more than a week, he completed the thirty-mile trip by dawn.

When horse and rider stumbled into Kara Jilga, Sarfraz found several dozen distressed Kirghiz gathered inside and outside Abdul Rashid Khan's yurt. Lying beneath five or six blankets, the stricken leader exhibited the classic symptoms of congestive heart failure: His skin was clammy, his pulse was racing, and his breathing was labored. None of this prevented Abdul Rashid Khan from registering his intense displeasure at seeing Sarfraz.

“Why did you come here when you are supposed to be working on our school?” he croaked.

“I heard that you were ill,” replied Sarfraz, “and I needed to find out how you were doing.”

“Your duty does not involve fussing over me! If you are not in Bozai Gumbaz, how is our school going to get finished before winter?!”

As he absorbed this dressing-down, Sarfraz realized that the task to which we had committed overselves had suddenly expanded to embrace a new dimension of urgency and import. Following as it did on the heels of the previous year's tragedies and betrayals, the project at Bozai Gumbaz had now become more than just a schoolhouse. In addition to nurturing a sense of hope for the future of this community, it would offer perhaps the only compelling reason, in the spring of 2010, for the Kirghiz to refrain from abandoning their home and surrendering themselves to a permanent diaspora. To fulfill that role, however, the school first had to be finished--and time was running out.