Stones Into School (20 page)

“In the life of a person,” Saidullah reminded Ghosia's father one evening, “there may come along the one opportunity that must be taken. When this opportunity arrives, you cannot let your concerns about yourself be a burden to your daughter, whom you love and for whom you want the best. We will try to help everyone in your family, but you must recognize that this is Ghosia's opportunity. Many people in our country never get this opportunity at all. Ghosia may never get another one. If you allow it to pass by without seizing it, you may not have another chance.”

Saidullah was too modest to mention as part of his argument that years earlier and at considerable personal sacrifice, he had put his own wife through both high school and college, one of the few men in northern Pakistan ever to have done such a thing--and that as a result of this commitment, she now has an excellent job in a private school in Gilgit. Nevertheless, Saidullah's exhortation had a powerful effect on Ghosia's father.

“Yes,” he nodded after deliberating for several minutes. “We will do whatever is best for my daughter.”

Since that conversation, Sabir has continued to waver. We are very hopeful that with time and patience, he will eventually see the wisdom of allowing Ghosia to accept her scholarship and give his consent. In the meantime, however, we found ourselves confronting another situation in which it has been almost impossible to remain optimistic.

During the same period when we were negotiating with Ghosia's family, I received word about a man named Dr. Mohammad Hassan, a relatively prosperous dentist who lived in a village called Bhedi, high up in the Neelum Valley, and who was hoping we might consider giving his daughter Siddre a scholarship. Although we usually try to target the poorest families, who need our help the most, I passed this man's contact information along to Genevieve and suggested she might want to follow up. In addition to the fact that Dr. Hassan had provided some valuable assistance by steering us in the direction of other qualified scholarship applicants, he was an important man with influence in his part of the Neelum Valley--someone with whom we would do well to maintain friendly relations.

So one evening, Genevieve, Sarfraz, and Mohammed Nazir drove up the mountainside in Bhedi to meet with Dr. Hassan and the other members of his family, who besides Siddre included his wife, his four other daughters and two sons, and a son-in-law named Miraftab, who was visiting that evening from Muzaffarabad. Siddre proved to be a bright and articulate young woman who was finishing the twelfth grade at the Gundi Piran school and whose ambition was to attend college, become a doctor, and then return to Bhedi to put her skills to use. After her mother greeted the three guests in the common room, the women of the household ushered Genevieve into the kitchen, leaving Sarfraz and Nazir to talk with Dr. Hassan and Miraftab about Siddre's future.

Sitting on the concrete floor in the firelit kitchen, Genevieve learned that the women of the family were absolutely giddy about the prospect of Siddre pursuing her medical degree, but her brother-in-law, Miraftab, stood in opposition. Inside the common room, Sarfraz and Nazir quickly came to the same conclusion. Dr. Hassan was halfheartedly concerned that this American NGO wanted to convert his daughter to Christianity, but Sarfraz was successful in explaining that the CAI was a secular organization and had no interest in religious conversion. Miraftab, however, objected fiercely to the idea of a scholarship for his sister-in-law, and when the men had finished their discussion in the living room, he moved into the kitchen, took up a post on a bench with the women sitting on the floor below him, and directed his remarks to Genevieve in English.

Why, he wanted to know, did she think she could come into this culture from the West and propose to send “our girls” off to school? What did she think had given her the right to even dare to suggest a scholarship for a girl?

Miraftab then went on to ask what Siddre could possibly do with her education that would be of benefit to her family and to the people in Bhedi. And finally he got around to the heart of the matter. What the CAI really needed to be offering to this family--the only kind of sponsorship that made any sense and that would have actual value--was a scholarship not for Siddre, but for him.

The CAI staff spent that night with Dr. Hassan's family, and Genevieve slept in the same room with the daughters, who were weeping and distraught over Miraftab's behavior. The following morning, Siddre reiterated her dream of attending medical school. (Like so many of the girls we interview in these situations, she used the word for “dream” in Urdu--khawab.) Before they bid farewell and left, however, Miraftab made it clear that his position had not changed, thereby ensuring that Siddre's khawab would never be realized.

Driving down the mountainside that morning, Sarfraz turned to Genevieve and asked what she thought of Miraftab. She replied that he didn't seem to understand how important the education of just one girl could be for the entire village. Sarfraz and Nazir both agreed and went on to vent their frustration over the manner in which a son-in-law had been permitted to sabotage a talented young woman's chance of pursuing higher education.

It is always difficult to witness the end of a girl's khawab, but it's especially hard to swallow when such a thing has been undermined by a male member of her own family who has failed to overcome his envy and resentment over the opportunity she is being presented with. In many ways, Sarfraz, Genevieve, and Nazir agreed, building schools was proving to be easier than dealing with the obstacles thrown up by the extended families of our scholarship candidates.

Later, Genevieve wrote up a report that concluded that although Siddre would have made an excellent scholarship candidate, Miraftab had rendered the situation impossible. After reading what she had written, I reluctantly agreed that as long as Dr. Hassan was willing to permit his son-in-law to have a veto over his daughter's future, we would not be able to fund her medical-school expenses.

That is where matters have stood--and will continue to stand--until Miraftab changes his mind. If and when he relents, Siddre's scholarship will be waiting for her.

In the meantime, however, I was about to confront some new and unexpected challenges of my own back in the United States.

In February 2007, the just-published softcover edition of Three Cups of Tea surged onto the New York Times paperback nonfiction best-seller list. Driven by a grassroots interest from local bookstores, women's book clubs, and community organizations all across America, the book as of this writing has spent more than 140 weeks on that list, forty-three of them in the number one position.

This exposure and publicity, week after week and month after month, seemed to offer an unparalleled chance to spread the word about the importance of girls' education in Pakistan and Afghanistan while raising money for new schools. So on behalf of the thousands of young girls who were still waiting to attend classes, I set out to turn the CAI into a promotion-and-fund-raising machine.

With word spreading about the story behind Three Cups of Tea, the invitations started pouring in. As the campaign accelerated, several experts on marketing and promotion strongly advised me to concentrate mainly on addressing adults, for the obvious reason that they were the ones who would be purchasing copies of the book and donating money to the CAI. This strategy struck me as shortsighted and narrow. Plus, I simply prefer hanging out with kids. So I did my best to combine “official” events--the lectures and the book signings with adults in the evenings--with more informal appearances with children in the mornings and afternoons, many of them at libraries and schools.

As the bookings were made, my schedule quickly ballooned to the point where it was out of control. Back in 2005, I had traveled to eight different cities to give presentations on the work that we do in the western Himalayas. During 2007, I made a total of 107 appearances in eighty-one American cities. The results were impressive: Between 2005 and 2007, the CAI's gross intake tripled. The emotional and physical toll, however, was enormous. In January of 2007 alone, I made eighteen appearances in fourteen cities at venues ranging from the Harvard Travellers Club in Boston and the Rochester Public Library to the Blue Heron Coffeehouse in Winona, Minnesota. In April, there were fifteen events in thirteen cities. By September, my calendar called for speeches in Rosemont, Illinois; Charlotte, North Carolina; Helena, Montana; Bainbridge Island, Washington; and eighteen other places, all of which merged into a muddled blur in my mind.

On November 20, I crashed.

The venue was West Chester University in Pennsylvania. I had flown into Philadelphia from California, having made eleven appearances during the previous seven days in San Francisco, Palo Alto, San Jose, Colorado Springs, and Carbondale. I rented a car and punched in the address on the GPS system, and as I made my way toward yet another hotel, I was overcome by the sudden sensation of being wiped out and utterly overwhelmed. I also had no idea what I was going to say to all those people in five or six hours and found myself starting to panic. I called my wife from the car and told her that I was in trouble.

Upon hearing my voice, Tara feared that I might be experiencing a full-on panic attack. Nevertheless, after settling me down and talking me through my anxieties, she asked me to eat some food, get a little sleep, and give the speech.

I got to the hotel, took a shower, ironed my shirt, and slept for two or three hours. The next day I made it to the university on time and gave my presentation. But after it was over, with hundreds of people coming up to say hello, I found myself confronting one of the things I find most daunting.

Following my presentations, it is not uncommon to be greeted by a line of up to one thousand people who hope to purchase a signed copy of Three Cups of Tea, shake my hand, and share a few words about their own experiences in the third world or express their interest in volunteering their services overseas. In such situations, I understand that it's important for me to maintain speed and avoid getting into a long discussion with each and every person. My instinct, however, is to hang on to each exchange rather than letting it go to move along to the next one. Slowing down, making eye contact, and trying to establish a connection is important to me. The pace is draining and time-consuming. (Some of these book signings have gone on for five hours until 2:00 A.M.) But balancing out that scale is the value to the Central Asia Institute of having people walk away with a positive feeling of acknowledgment. There is also an element of basic respect and gratitude: After all, these are the people who pay for our schools. Without their support, it would be impossible to do what we do.

In West Chester on that day, however, I lost the desire and the ability to connect with others. Instead of reaching out to the people in front of me, all I wanted was to pull back inside myself. I felt as if I were standing inside a tunnel with the walls squeezing in. Overtaken by a sense of dismay over how disjointed and profoundly exhausting my outreach campaign had become, I was seized by the impulse to run out of there. Toward the end of the line, however, was a third-grade girl who had been waiting patiently to hand me a letter to take to one of our students in Pakistan--a letter that started: “To my best friend in Pakistan, you are my hero. I have a bucket of pennies at home that I collected so you can go to school. . . . ”

Thus was I reminded, even in this moment of personal extremis, of one of the main reasons why I do what I do.

I was scheduled to attend a dinner on campus later that evening, but there was no way I could have pulled that off. Instead I returned to the hotel, fell onto the bed, and passed out. Several hours later, I phoned Tara and told her I didn't know where I was or what was going on. She calmed me down again, then told me to get on a plane and come home.

When I reached Bozeman, she and the kids met me late at night at the airport and gave me a big hug, and then we returned to the house and snuggled up for story time. Later, my wife told me she had already arranged with our board of directors and with Jennifer Sipes, our amazing operations director in Bozeman, to cancel my next appearance. Both of my cell phones would be turned off, and at the peril of arousing my wife's displeasure, I was now under orders to ignore all e-mails and remain at home for the next week.

Mulling over what had happened, I found myself frightened and a bit confused. Up to this point, the idea of “crashing” was something I had never even considered. When I'm working with Sarfraz and the other members of the staff in Pakistan and Afghanistan, I often labor at an intense pace for weeks on end with almost no sleep and little nutrition. As I was beginning to realize, however, there was a big difference between being in Asia working directly with communities and with our teachers and students (which is a form of interaction that I find energizing and inspiring) and being in the United States engaged in nonstop promotion, salesmanship, and fund-raising--which leaves me feeling drained and debilitated.

Tara puts it simply: “Some people need to charge up by getting plugged in to others, while Greg needs to charge up by getting unplugged from others.”

What was equally clear to me, however, was that the unexpected success of Three Cups of Tea had created a unique moment for the Central Asia Institute, one that might not occur again. In short, this was one of those opportunities that must be taken. Personally, I would prefer to spend my time rattling along the dirt roads of Baltistan and Badakshan with Sarfraz, but what I wanted and needed didn't really matter. If the Central Asia Institute was urging the parents of our scholarship nominees to set aside their personal concerns and desires in the service of something larger, how could I not hold myself to the same obligation?

The conclusion was unavoidable. Like it or not, I was now the fund-raising engine of the Central Asia Institute, and as such, my duty was to remain mostly in the United States pulling in the donations that would fuel the work that Sarfraz and his colleagues were handling so superbly on their own. So in 2008, I hurled myself into yet another 169 appearances in 114 cities, traveling almost nonstop, and every few weeks experiencing yet another “crash” that would force me to hole up in a hotel room or make a beeline back home to Bozeman.