Stones Into School (28 page)

In the simple business model that Wakil had designed, the start-up costs were minimal--the main expense was the instruction, which was provided by part-time schoolteachers who would earn about sixty dollars a month. Each literary center would draw its students from the surrounding neighborhood, so that the women would not have far to walk--and so that their husbands were less likely to object to their wives leaving the house for such brief periods. It was a good plan--but Wakil had failed to anticipate the reaction it would provoke.

The first women to attend these classes started telling their friends, who in turn told their friends, and before long applicants were signing up in such numbers that each center had reached maximum capacity. Initially these women came to learn to read and write, but as they acquired these skills, the scope of their ambitions began to expand radically. Some of them started book clubs. Others began to exchange information about dental hygiene and reproductive health. From there, the curriculum spilled into nutrition, diet, and disease prevention. Before long, there were miniature seminars on typing, learning to read calendars, counting money, and the most popular subject of all, for which the demand was simply off the charts: workshops on the rudiments of using a mobile phone.

Wakil quickly realized that this enthusiasm was the by-product of taking a group of women who had been forced to lead restricted and sequestered lives, putting them into the same room, and simply giving them the license to dream. But the chemistry was so combustible that he could barely keep up with the ensuing demands. The idea of women teaching other women was so electrifying that each class rapidly burgeoned from forty to one hundred students, forcing Wakil to set up two, three, and sometimes four teaching shifts to handle the extra load. Normally this would have created budget problems, but under the system he had devised there were virtually no operating expenses except for the teachers' salaries and the supplies--the latter cost being offset by the nominal tuition fees that each center charged. Within a few weeks, Wakil started beefing up his teaching staff, and soon after that the number of centers began to expand.

I knew the general outlines of these developments from my regular telephone briefings with Wakil, as well as from the reports that he e-mailed to me once or twice a week, but I lacked an accurate sense of the actual numbers.

“So how many of these centers have you got going at the moment?” I asked as the car whisked us toward the suburbs south of Kabul.

“Right now we have seventeen centers operating in different parts of the city.”

“Well, seven doesn't sound too bad.”

“Not seven, Greg--seventeen.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No joke,” he said. “We've got eighteen teachers and 880 students, but the demand is much greater than that. That's why you need to see this for yourself.”

When Wakil first went looking for places in which to set up shop, he had concentrated on Kabul's outlying areas, the rougher suburban districts that had been flooded with so many farmers and laborers fleeing the war-ravaged countryside that the capital city's population had tripled since 2001. These neighborhoods lay well beyond the newly paved roads and the glass-and-steel office buildings of downtown, and they bore a closer resemblance to the contours of rural Afghanistan: narrow dirt alleyways lined with open irrigation ditches where the low-slung houses were surrounded by high mud walls and guarded by barking dogs.

Our first stop was the home of Najeeba Mira, who lived on the south side of the city. Najeeba, who was in her forties and had five children, came from a family of illiterate farmers in Logar, a province southeast of Kabul that had seen fierce fighting between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. She had learned to read and write in a refugee camp in Pakistan, and her specialty was mathematics. For the past two decades, Najeeba had served as the headmistress of a girls' high school in Kabul that is currently bursting at the seams with 4,500 students. With Wakil's blessings, she had agreed to establish a literacy center in her home and teach for four hours a day. For this service, Wakil was paying her a salary of fifteen dollars per week.

We drove through a maze of alleys without sidewalks or street signs and arrived at a mud-walled compound where we were greeted by Najeeba's husband, Mira Jan, a retired veteran, who met us at the door and ushered us in for tea. When the rituals of hospitality had been observed, Mira Jan asked if we'd like to see the literacy center and then guided us around to the back of the compound and into a tiny eight-by-twelve-foot adobe storage room with a dirt floor and one large window. There were forty women inside, packed tightly into rows of five or six, all sitting cross-legged on the floor and facing a whiteboard. Most of these women were in their thirties or forties. Many had young children--the nursing mothers kept their babies with them, while the older children clustered in the back. Najeeba, a diminutive woman whose plain gray shalwar kamiz was accented by a black cape that reminded me of a nun's habit, was standing in the front.

A few of the younger women were wearing the white dupatta that indicated they were students--which meant they were here to supplement their studies at school. But the bulk of participants wore the drab and ragged shalwar kamiz of the urban working poor. Most of their husbands performed manual labor, working twelve or fourteen hours a day at jobs that included brick laying, road construction, garbage collection, and auto repair. They permitted their wives to attend this class in the hope that learning to read and write might eventually enable them to earn additional income for the family. Each night after preparing dinner and attending to their domestic duties, many of these women did their homework together with their daughters.

When we first walked in, everyone shot to their feet and stood silently. Then Wakil said, “Sit down,” and introduced me, saying, “This is Doctor Greg, he is from the United States and wants to help with the literacy center. He has a wife named Tara and two children. The money he raises comes from ordinary people in America just like you.”

Judging from the writing on the board, we had walked into a Dari class, but the room bore evidence of the women's determination to expand their education beyond vocabulary and grammar. There were nutrition charts on the back wall stressing the importance of eating vegetables and fruits (which most of them could not afford). There were toothbrushes and bars of soap used to accompany hygiene lessons. Glancing at several notebooks, I was struck by the tiny size of the handwriting. Each participant was writing as tightly as possible in order to save space and make the notebooks last as long as possible.

I began interrogating Najeeba, asking how long each class lasted, how busy her schedule was, what subjects her students were studying, and how she felt about their progress. She offered precise, rapid-fire responses in the same businesslike tone that she undoubtedly used with her students. Then I turned to the class.

“This is so amazing--what you've managed to do all by yourselves,” I said. “Each of you is achieving something incredible.” Then I asked if the teacher or the students had any concerns.

As a matter of fact, they did. Since classes like these were conducted in private homes, Najeeba explained, she and the other teachers were worried about insufficient drinking water, sporadic electricity, and inadequate latrines. As for the students, however, they were willing to put up with those inconveniences, but they were eager to start using computers and cell phones.

“And why do you need cell phones so badly?” I asked.

“Because we all talk to one another and exchange information about how to improve what we're doing,” explained Najeeba. “Plus there are many other important things to discuss.”

“Such as?”

“Well, the upcoming election, for example. Right now we're all talking to one another about how we're going to vote.”

Here was something rather extraordinary. In sixteen years of building schools and promoting girls' education, I had never seen women so on fire. But Najeeba wasn't finished. She went on to explain that each of her students had family members and friends from other provinces, and when these relatives heard about what was going on in Kabul, they had begun clamoring for information on how to establish literacy centers in their own towns and villages. Listening to Najeeba describe the speed with which the idea of a place like this was leapfrogging from one location to another, I was struck by the notion that there might well be a second Afghan insurgency bubbling away beneath the Taliban's uprising--a quiet and hidden revolution of female learning and liberation.

“Perhaps you and your colleagues should consider setting up some kind of co-op or NGO,” I said to Najeeba, “an umbrella organization that would assist in the establishment of literacy centers like this not just around Kabul, but also in other parts of the country. Do you think you could get something like that going?”

“Oh, absolutely,” she replied. “It would become big very quickly.”

And so the idea was born. Three weeks later, Wakil would send word that Najeeba and several other teachers had formed an executive committee and agreed on a name for themselves. By October, the Afghan Women's Co-op, headquartered in Kabul, would already have chapters in five provinces.

“I knew this idea of yours was popular,” I remarked to Wakil later that afternoon, after we had toured several more facilities, “but you didn't tell me how many there were or how quickly this concept was growing.”

“It's a bit hard to keep count--in another four months, we'll probably have three dozen,” he said. “When women take charge, things start to get out of control really fast.”

As impressive as all of this was, Wakil's responsibilities did not end with the construction of his new schools in Kunar and Nuristan, his plans to expand into Uruzgan, and the rapidly burgeoning literacy centers. The next morning at 3:00 A.M., he and I set off together with Sarfraz and Wohid Khan to have a look at the final project in his portfolio. Our destination, some ninety miles northeast of Kabul, was the most legendary valley in all of Afghanistan.

Home to more than three hundred thousand people and the country's largest concentration of ethnic Tajiks, the Panjshir Valley was the birthplace and fortress of Shah Ahmed Massoud, the courageous and charismatic mujahadeen commander who successfully repulsed no fewer than nine full-scale Soviet offensives against the valley during the 1980s, earning him the sobriquet “the Lion of the Panjshir.” Three years after the Soviets withdrew, Massoud's forces had captured Kabul and he briefly emerged as one of the more promising leaders among the rival mujahadeen factions that divided the country. By 1993, however, widespread looting and unchecked violence on the part of Massoud's soldiers had severely damaged his stature as a national hero--while simultaneously helping to pave the way for the Taliban. He was eventually assassinated by a pair of Al Qaeda suicide bombers, less than seventy-two hours prior to 9/11, and to this day the valley that he defended so staunchly remains a potent symbol of pride for many Afghans. For the staff of the Central Asia Institute, however, the Panjshir held a different significance.

Following the ouster of the Taliban, the Panjshir had benefitted from significant investment on the part of a number of international NGOs as well as the U.S. military, which together had done an impressive job building roads, health clinics, hydroelectric plants, and a number of boys' schools. Although the valley was now one of the safest and most progressive parts of the country, it was sorely lacking in terms of opportunities for girls' education. Moreover, because the Panjshir borders Badakshan to the north and Kunar and Nuristan to the east, the valley represented a gap in the line of outposts of female literacy that Sarfraz and Wakil hoped to create through the center of Taliban country. If there was eventually to be a continuous ribbon of girls' schools stretching all the way from the Wakhan to Deh Rawod, we needed to plant a few seeds inside the Panjshir.

In the summer of 2008, Wakil had somehow found the time to venture into the valley, establish relationships with local elders, and launch construction on a pair of girls' schools in the villages of Darghil and Pushgur. The Darghil school had opened in 2008, while the Pushgur project--an eight-room structure that would accommodate over two hundred girls--was scheduled to receive its official inauguration at 11:30 on the morning of July 15 with a very special guest.

The road from Kabul led past Bagram Airbase and across the brown expanse of the Shomali Plain to a point where the Panjshir River burst through the mouth of a narrow gorge. For the next ten miles, the road skirted between the river and the cliff until the valley abruptly opened up into an idyllic tableau of beautiful woodlands and irrigated farms, all protected by soaring, 2,000-foot walls of gray, crumbling rock.

We arrived in Pushgur at around 9:30. In the courtyard more than four hundred people had clustered, including several dozen bearded elders, a delegation of provincial officials, most of the two hundred girls who would be attending the school, a platoon of Wohid Khan's Border Security Force troops, and about thirty heavily armed U.S. soldiers. Nearby were several tables laden with food, soft drinks, and bottled water, all of it closely guarded by our friend Faisal Mohammed, the father who had lost his youngest son to a land mine outside our school in Lalander--and who had recently been working informally as Wakil's assistant.

Less than an hour after we arrived, two UH-60 Black Hawks and one CH-47 Chinook flew in from the southwest, circled the area, and then landed, creating an explosion of dust that covered everything. The first man to step out of the lead Black Hawk, clad in desert-camouflage fatigues, was Admiral Mike Mullen.

“Hey Greg,” he shouted over the roar of the engines. “I hope you don't mind that I brought some media with me.”

As he spoke, the Chinook disgorged a dozen journalists, including reporters from Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, NPR, the BBC, and ABC-TV, as well as Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer-Prize winning editorial-page columnist for the New York Times.