Afghanistan Schools and Greg Mortenson

This is a long article (only read it if the subject matter interests you)

Preface: Last year media coverage of British soldiers' deaths in Afghanistan was intense - but how had this remote, impoverished country become the focus of the world's hatred? What history, what culture, what unique difficulties led it to this point? And should British troops be there at all? Probably, like me, you are ill-equiped to answer. That was my project. To inform myself through the writings of both native afghan authors and western journalists. The more I read the stronger the pull. Somewhere so different to anywhere I'd ever been got under my skin.

This is not the full answer to my questions. But it is of interest and will give you a flavour of the place.

It is a short introduction to a remarkable maverick humanitarian campaigner who I met along the way. He has given his life to building schools for Afghan children, especially girls. Or rather he enables Afghans to build schools for themselves. In the remotest places on earth.

When Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize last year Mortenson was a nominee. This is an introduction to his work which I wrote as a review of his second book. It also supplies a tiny part of the background to this whole fraught country, a place described by one of its own female politicians as a "land of tragedy". I hope it may whet your appetite to go on a similar literary journey. Or just admire the man.



STONES INTO SCHOOLS: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan
By Greg Mortenson

At the end of his book Three Cups of Tea Greg Mortenson stands on a rooftop in the remote town of Baharak in the far north eastern corner of Afghanistan. The whitened peaks of the Hindu Kush mountains rise all around him. Beside him, in brown robes and a photographer’s vest, is Sadhar Khan, the local commandhan. A man who had led his people through almost twenty four years of fighting – for a decade of soviet occupation, in a bitter civil war and finally against the Taliban.
“Look here. Look at these hills,” he tells Mortenson. “There has been far too much dying in these hills. Every rock, every boulder that you see before you is one of my mujahadeen, shahids, martyrs who sacrificed their lives fighting. Now we must make their sacrifice worthwhile. We must turn those stones into schools.”
Minutes earlier the slight, wizened Tajik leader, a man wielding absolute power over the impoverished poppy farmers in the surrounding valleys, had thrown his arms about the tall, polite and astonished figure of the American.
“Yes, yes, you’re Dr Greg……..this is incredible. To think I didn’t even arrange a meal or a welcome from the village elders. Forgive me.”
The two men grin excitedly at their unlikely meeting.
“War has caused us to starve not only our bodies,” says Khan, “but also our minds. This should never happen again to my people.”

Mortenson’s journey to that rooftop is remarkable. In 1993, as the people of Afghanistan were gripped in the jaws of a savage fight for power between rival warlords following the fall of the communist government, he was stumbling – lost and exhausted - down the lower reaches of the Karakoram Mountains of Pakistan. He had just failed to fulfil his dream to summit K2, the second highest peak in the world and to leave there a necklace, as a memorial to his sister Christa who had died on her twenty third birthday. Separated from his guide he eventually staggered into Korphe, a village so obscure it failed to appear on any of his maps. During three weeks of recuperation he experienced the hospitality and care of people who had nothing.


“Everything about their life,” he wrote, “was a struggle.”
But it was when he asked to see the school that he properly realised how great that was. Seventy eight boys and four girls sat on a vast, rocky ledge in the open air. Those without slateboards scratched in the dirt with sticks. A teacher would have cost the equivalent of $1 a day but the Pakistani government would not supply one. For three days each week one came from the neighbouring village – until the ground they were sitting on froze. Yet, he says:
“There was a fierceness in their desire to learn….I knew I had to do something.”



As he parted from Haji Ali, Korphe’s chief, he made him a promise. He would return and build a school. And Mortenson, we learn, always fulfils a promise. He kept his word. But only after he’d first had to construct a bridge to get his building materials over the river where the only crossing was a wooden cable car – a big fruit crate - suspended from a 350ft greasy cable. In December 1996 the school in Korphe was completed. And there the story could have ended, with a debt repaid. But something was begun that day which was to take him on a far more ambitious and arduous challenge than any mountain had ever posed. For within a decade he had built not one school but eighty two, raised not just the $12,000 he needed for a single school but over a million. A man who describes himself as “nothing more than a fellow who took a wrong turn in the mountains and never quite managed to find his way home” had become extraordinary.


Then in 1999 he made another pledge: this time to semi-nomadic Kirghiz horsemen who had crossed four mountain ranges from their home at the far end of the Wakhan Corridor in north east Afghanistan to seek him out. They too wanted one of these schools they had heard so much about. Even by Mortenson’s standards their homeland was remote. The geography of Afghanistan is harsh. But here was a place with no phones, faxes, email connections, postal systems or roads which was cut off from the rest of the world for seven months of the year by snow. A place where materials would have to be transported on trains of yaks and bactrian camels. A school it took another ten years to bring to fruition. A school on the roof of the world.
“These are areas that few people in the outside world even know about, the regions where almost nobody else goes,” Mortenson writes. “They are the places where we begin.”
(“We” is the Central Asia Institute which Mortenson set up to channel donations and front his work)

Tenacity does not even begin to describe the mechanics of fulfilling this second pledge. Readers of Three Cups of Tea will recognise the soft-spoken, unassuming man bewildered by the attention his story attracted. Persuaded now to write in the first person, Mortenson continues his story and recounts the day by day struggle to bring education to the children – especially girls – of Afghanistan, a task often chaotic, exhausting and at times outright dangerous.


Thirty hour drives over barely-serviceable roads, hitching a ride under a pile of rotting goatskins or caught in crossfire between rival opium traffickers – yet here, you sense, with his feet on the often barren, war torn soil, he feels his true calling. For Mortenson it is very simple.
“If you teach a boy,” he quotes a proverb, “you educate an individual. But if you teach a girl you educate a community. No other factor comes close to matching the cascade of positive changes triggered by teaching a single girl how to read and write….. to deprive Afghan children of education is to bankrupt the future of their country.”

When he is finally able to cross the border into Afghanistan from Pakistan in late autumn 2001, after the fall of the Taliban, even Mortenson is shocked by what he finds. A terrible price had been exacted by the long years of war. A beautiful and mesmerising country, on the old Silk Road from China to the Mediterranean, had been broken. And not just by the black-turbaned, young fundamentalists and their Arab companions who called themselves talibs or religious students. Much of it was in ruins before they swept in, millions displaced, thousands dead, a nation traumatised. In retreat in 1989 after a decade of occupation the soviets left destruction in their wake. The warlords who tried to rule in their stead were no better. There was rivalry, bloodshed and betrayal.

But the Taliban had surpassed even these. They attacked the cultural fabric of society itself. A movement which was begun to replace anarchy and lawlessness with peace and order soon degenerated into a draconian regime with deadly edicts and strict sharia law. Music, movies, books, television, photos, dance, card games, bird keeping, kite flying - and even laughter itself - were banned in a twisted attempt to return to a pure, Islamic, 7th century world.

But worst was what was done to women. All girls’ schools were closed. Overnight mothers, sisters, aunts, daughters were ordered out of universities, hospitals and places of work - and out of sight beneath suffocating, sky blue burkas. Any rights or independence they might have gained in a still ultra-traditional society were utterly obliterated. Brash young men in pick-up trucks policed the streets with whips and guns, fed a radical interpretation of the Koran.

Women didn’t “live” under the Taliban, a young woman tells the reporter Christina Lamb in The Sewing Circles of Herat. They just stayed in their rooms doing nothing “like cows in their sheds.”
A few, in the cities, were luckier. Lamb and others – Kathy Gannon, Asne Seierstad, the author Khaled Hosseini - write of underground classes which took place in homes, basements and even caves. In their bags, hidden beneath sewing fabric, young women carried notepads, pens and copies of the Persian poets. Booksellers concealed books in attics and behind false walls. Librarians buried them in gardens to escape the burnings. Men and women, by teaching girls, risked punishment or public execution, hanged or stoned. Then 9/11 happened and the world woke up to Afghanistan once more. For giving sanctuary to Osama Bin Laden the Taliban had to pay.

As an account of a humanitarian campaign Stones into Schools is humbling.
But it is not just Mortenson’s story. While he crashes between family and fundraising in America, barely catching sleep, and the steep walled gorges of the Hindu Kush a colourful cast of a dozen men (the Dirty Dozen he calls them) push through the work on the ground.

Men like Sarfraz Khan, a peddler who speaks seven languages, Wakil Karimi, for 23 years a refugee in Pakistan, Suleman Minhas, a snoring taxi driver. Mortenson does not choose them – mostly they choose themselves. A cook, a goatherd, a former Taliban accountant, a high altitude porter. A third themselves unable to read or write, their qualifications are their ferocious passion for schools and their sheer dogged refusal to be beaten. When the Vale of Kashmir is shaken by an earthquake, they are there, to put schools in tents, then rebuilding stronger, better buildings. Mountains can never reach each other despite their bigness Mortenson says. But humans can. In what they achieve these men are giants.


It is also a tale of ordinary proud Afghans who, after the fall of the Taliban, emerged to restart schools in buildings without roofs, in animal sheds, garages, old toilet blocks and shipping containers. And of former fighters like Wohid Khan. Surrounded by men armed with kalashnikovs and shoulder held rocket launchers he seems an unlikely advocate for the education of girls. Yet for him, to help build a school in his homeland, is “one of the greatest honors of my lifetime.”

And finally it is of girls who never had them before now dreaming dreams. Female literacy in Afghanistan is in single figures. Nine years on from the Taliban women and girls still suffer huge levels of violence and discrimination. In half of all marriages wives are under sixteen. Average life expectancy is 44. Infant mortality is one in five before they are five. But an educated woman’s children are less likely to die; just as later they are less likely to hold extremist views. Girls want to become doctors, healthcare workers and teachers but need, too, to become community leaders, government officials, politicians. There are few prominent women in public life in Afghan society. Educating girls is the way to set that right.

These are the people we never see on our television screens or in our newspapers, the people beyond the roadside bombs and the struggles for power. Mortenson too feels like a big man. He looks tall in the photographs. There is something of the maverick about him, a character who might be more at home in a boys’ own adventure strip than taking tea with an American Admiral or the President of Pakistan. He is obviously consummate at both.

What Mortenson eloquently describes is the humanity of individuals caught in the most brutal of times. He succeeds because he instinctively respects a culture built on status, courtesy and patience. Central to this is drinking tea.
“The first cup of tea you share with us you are a stranger. The second you are a friend. But with the third cup you become family – and for our families we are willing to do anything, even die.”
So spoke Haji Ali all those years ago in Korphe; a simple act of hospitality. To win hearts and minds works both ways.


For decades the world, and especially the USA, quietly armed Afghanistan with guns and bombs. He is clear about his country’s responsibility now to help it to rebuild and credits the US army with good intentions and a willingness to engage with and be of service to the Afghan people. Maybe. Or maybe it is just better to keep them on side, their wives and children supporting his fundraising efforts back home.
“Fighting terrorism is based in fear. Promoting peace is based in hope. The real enemy’s face is ignorance. Most Americans aren’t aware of all the good things going on.”

CAI projects are conceived on the ground, often literally, with the elders of a community, the Shura. When people take charge of their own development progress can be made. It is unclear how his schools will tie in with a national education system. But at the moment there is none.

Afghanistan is still a land of tragedy, as Malalai Joya calls it, a young female member of parliament in Karzai’s first government. Taliban insurgents have not gone away – the opposite. Several hundred girls’ schools have been attacked; schoolgirls had acid thrown in their faces. But in a country of mistrust, crippling poverty and still too much dying – including British and other NATO soldiers – this story casts light in a tunnel of darkness. Thanks to one man’s wrong turn in the mountains its future just got a tiny bit brighter.








Visit http://www.stonesintoschools.com/ for more information and for how to donate to the Central Asia Institute.
Also http://www.penniesforpeace.org/ for a fundraising project for schoolchildren.

Reading:

Greg Mortenson	Three Cups of Tea
Christina Lamb	The Sewing Circles of Herat
Ahmed Rashid	Taliban
Ahmed Rashid	Descent into Chaos
Rory Stewart	The Places in Between
Asne Seierstad	The Bookseller of Kabul
Johnson and Leslie	Afghanistan: the Mirage of Peace
Kathy Gannon	I is for Infidel
Khaled Hosseini	The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini	A Thousand Splendid Suns
Ann Jones	Kabul in Winter
Hamida Ghafour	The Sleeping Buddha
Ursula Meissner	Afghanistan: Hope and Beauty in a War-torn Land
Frank Gardner	Blood and Sand

Annie Hitch is a charity fundraiser.