Three Cups of Tea

by Greg Mortenson

Bashir took a breath, and peered back through his tiny window to Baghdad, where a camera crew was filming radicalized young Iraqi men shaking their fists and firing their weapons into the air after setting off a roadside bomb. “Sorry, sir,” he said, “I’m really inexcusably rude. Of course you know this as well as I do. Shall we have lunch?” Then Bashir pushed a button on his intercom and asked his lieutenant to send in the tubs of Kentucky Fried Chicken he’d ordered from the Blue Area especially for his American guest.

  Skardu can be a depressing place when weather sets in. But in October 2003, making his last visit of the year to the Northern Areas before leaving to launch his new CAI initiative in Afghanistan, Mortenson felt perfectly content, despite the low cloud cover and encroaching chill.

  Before Mortenson left Rawalpindi, Brigadier General Bashir had pledged four lakh rupees, or about six thousand dollars, a considerable sum in Pakistan, toward a new CAI school to be built in his home village southeast of Peshawar, where Wahhabi madrassas were plentiful. And he had promised to press his friends in the military for further donations, voicing his confidence that at least one American’s war on terror was being fought in an effective fashion.

  Mortenson had also won a landmark victory in Shariat Court, overcome his second fatwa, and humbled his most vocal opponent. Ten more schools would open their doors in the spring, once the nine new schools funded by Parade readers were completed, and the Ned Gillette School in Hemasil was rebuilt. Already, as Mortenson prepared to leave for Afghanistan, more than forty CAI schools were tucked into the high valleys of the Karakoram and Hindu Kush, where they were thriving. Thanks to Mortenson, the students who studied within their stone walls had become each village’s most carefully tended crop.

  And downside in bustling Skardu, in a small mud-block house Twaha had rented, with a view of a broad field where neighborhood children played soccer around clusters of grazing cattle, the new nurmadhar of Korphe’s daughter was now living with her former classmate, chaperoned by two male cousins who’d come down from upside to see that the boldest young women in the entire Braldu were well looked after while they pursued their dreams.

  Jahan and her classmate Tahira, the Korphe School’s first two female graduates, had come to Skardu together, as two of the CAI’s first harvest of scholarship students. And on his last day in Skardu, when Mortenson stopped by with Jahan’s father, Twaha, to inquire about the girls’ progress, Jahan took pride in preparing tea for him herself, in her own home, as her grandmother Sakina had so often done.

  While Mortenson sipped the Lipton Tea, brewed, not from handfuls of torn leaves and rancid yak milk, but from tap water and bags bought in Skardu’s bazaar, he wondered what Sakina would have made of it. He imagined she would prefer her paiyu cha. Of her granddaughter, he was certain, she would be very proud. Jahan had completed her maternal health training course, but elected to stay in Skardu and continue her studies.

  Courtesy of the CAI, both Jahan and Tahira were taking a full complement of classes at the private Girls’ Model High School, including English grammar, formal Urdu, Arabic, physics, economics, and history.

  Tahira, wearing a spotless white headscarf and sandals that wouldn’t have been practical in the mountains, told Mortenson that once she graduated, she planned to return to Korphe and teach alongside her father, Master Hussein. “I’ve had this chance,” she said. “Now when we go upside, all the people look at us, at our clothes, and think we are fashionable ladies. I think every girl of the Braldu deserves the chance to come downside at least once. Then their life will change. I think the greatest service I can perform is to go back and insure that this happens for all of them.”

  Jahan, who had come to Skardu planning to become a simple health worker and return to Korphe, was in the process of revising her goals upward. “Before I met you, Dr. Greg, I had no idea what education was,” Jahan said, refilling his teacup. “But now I think it is like water. It is important for everything in life.”

  “What about marriage?” Mortenson asked, knowing that a nurmadhar’s daughter would always be in demand, especially a pretty girl of seventeen, and a Balti husband might not support his brash young wife’s ambitions.

  “Don’t worry, Dr. Greg,” Twaha said, laughing in the rasping fashion that he’d inherited from Haji Ali. “The girl has learned your lesson too well. She has already made it clear she must finish her studies before we can even discuss marrying her to a suitable boy. And I agree. I will sell all my land if necessary so she can complete her education. I owe that to the memory of my father.”

  “So what will you do?” Mortenson asked Jahan.

  “You won’t laugh?” she said.

  “I might,” Mortenson teased.

  Jahan took a breath and composed herself. “When I was a little sort of girl and I would see a gentleman or a lady with good, clean clothes I would run away and hide my face. But after I graduated from the Korphe School, I felt a big change in my life. I felt I was clear and clean and could go before anybody and discuss anything.

  “And now that I am already in Skardu, I feel that anything is possible. I don’t want to be just a health worker. I want to be such a woman that I can start a hospital and be an executive, and look over all the health problems of all the women in the Braldu. I want to become a very famous woman of this area,” Jahan said, twirling the hem of her maroon silk headscarf around her finger as she peered out the window, past a soccer player sprinting through the drizzle toward a makeshift goal built of stacked stones, searching for the exact word with which to envision her future. “I want to be a… ‘Superlady,’” she said, grinning defiantly, daring anyone, any man, to tell her she couldn’t.

  Mortenson didn’t laugh after all. Instead, he beamed at the bold granddaughter of Haji Ali and imagined the contented look that would have been on the old nurmadhar’s face if he had lived long enough to see this day, to see the seed they planted together bear such splendid fruit.

  Five hundred and eighty letters, twelve rams, and ten years of work was a small price to pay, Mortenson thought, for such a moment.

  Chapter 23

  Stones Into Schools

  Our earth is wounded. Her oceans and lakes are sick; her rivers

  are like running sores; The air is filled with subtle poisons. And the oily

  smoke of countless hellish fires blackens the sun. Men and women,

  scattered from homeland, family, friends, wander desolate and uncertain,

  scorched by a toxic sun….

  In this desert of frightened, blind uncertainty, some take refuge in

  the pursuit of power. Some become manipulators of illusion and deceit.

  If wisdom and harmony still dwell in this world, as other than a dream lost

  in an unopened book, they are hidden in our heartbeat.

  And it is from our hearts that we cry out. We cry out and our voices

  are the single voice of this wounded earth. Our cries are a

  great wind across the earth.

  —From The Warrior Song of King Gezar

  THE KING SAT in the window seat. Mortenson recognized him from pictures on the old Afghan currency he’d seen for sale in the bazaars. At eighty-nine, Zahir Shah looked far older than his official portrait as he stared out the window of the PIA 737 at the country he’d been exiled from for nearly thirty years.

  Aside from the king’s security detail and a small crew of stewardesses, Mortenson was alone on the short flight from Islamabad to Kabul with Afghanistan’s former monarch. When Shah turned away from the window, he locked eyes with Mortenson across the aisle.

  “As-Salaam Alaaikum, sir,” Mortenson said.

  “And to you, sir,” Shah replied. During his exile in Rome, Shah had become conversant with many cultures and had no trouble pinpointing the place the large fair-haired man in the photographer’s vest came from. “American?” he inquired.

  “Yes, sir,” Mortenson said.

  Zahir Shah sighed, an old man’s sound, born of decades of dash
ed hopes. “Are you a journalist?” he asked across the aisle.

  “No,” Mortenson said, “I build schools, for girls.”

  “And what is your business in my country, if I may ask?”

  “I begin construction on five or six schools in the spring, Inshal-lah. I’m coming to deliver the money to get them going.”

  “In Kabul?”

  “No,” Mortenson said. “Up in Badakshan, and in the Wakhan Corridor.”

  Shah’s eyebrows lifted toward the brown dome of his hairless head. He patted the seat next to him and Mortenson moved over. “Do you know someone in the area?” Shah said.

  “It’s a long story, but a few years ago, Kirghiz men rode over the Irshad Pass to the Charpurson Valley, where I work in Pakistan, and asked me to build schools for their villages. I promised them I’d come… discuss schools with them, but I couldn’t get there until now.”

  “An American in the Wakhan,” Shah said. “I’m told I have a hunting lodge the people built me there somewhere, but I’ve never been to it. Too hard to reach. We don’t see many Americans in Afghanistan anymore. A year ago this plane would have been full of journalists and aid workers. But now they are all in Iraq. America has forgotten us,” the King said. “Again.”

  A year earlier, Shah had flown into Kabul fresh from exile and was greeted by a cheering crowd who saw his return as a tiding that life would once again resume its normal course, free from the violence that had marked the decades of misrule by the Soviets, the feuding warlords, and the Taliban. Before being ousted by his cousin Mohammad Daud Khan, Shah had presided, from 1933 to 1973, over Afghanistan’s most enduring modern period of peace. He had overseen the drafting of a constitution in 1964, which turned Afghanistan into a democracy, offering universal suffrage and emancipating women. He had founded Afghanistan’s first modern university and recruited foreign academics and aid workers to assist with his campaign to develop the country. To many Afghans, Shah was a symbol of the life they hoped to lead again.

  But by the fall of 2003, those hopes were fading. American troops still in Afghanistan were largely sequestered, hunting for Bin Laden and his supporters or providing security for the new government of Hamid Karzai. The level of violence across the country was, once again, escalating, and the Taliban was said to be regrouping.

  “Just like we abandoned the mujahadeen after the Soviets pulled out, I was afraid we were in the process of abandoning Afghanistan again,” Mortenson says. “As best I could tell, only a third of the aid money we’d promised had ever made it over there. With Mary Bono, I found one of the people in Congress who was responsible for Afghan appropriations. I told him about Uzra Faizad and all the teachers who weren’t being paid, and asked him why the money wasn’t getting there.”

  “ ‘It’s difficult,’ he told me. ‘There is no central banking in Afghanistan. And no way to wire money.’

  “But that didn’t sound like much of an excuse to me,” Mortenson says. “We had no problem flying in bags of cash to pay the warlords to fight against the Taliban. I wondered why we couldn’t do the same thing to build roads, and sewers, and schools. If promises are not fulfilled, and cash not delivered, it sends a powerful message that the U.S. government simply does not care.”

  Zahir Shah placed his hand, with its enormous lapis ring, on Mortenson’s. “I’m glad one American is here at least,” he said. “The man you want to see up north is Sadhar Khan. He’s a mujahid. But he cares about his people.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Mortenson said.

  Zahir Shah pulled a calling card out of the breast pocket of the business suit he wore under his striped robe and called for one of his security guards to bring his valise. Then the king held his thumb to an ink pad and pressed his print on the back of his card. “It may be helpful if you give this to Commandhan Khan,” he said. “Allah be with you. And go with my blessing.”

  The 737 dove for the Kabul airport in a tight spiral. The capital wasn’t as secure as it had been a year earlier, and pilots now took this precaution to make themselves difficult targets for the many Stinger missiles still unaccounted for in the country.

  Mortenson found Kabul’s traffic more frightening. With Abdullah calmly spinning the wheel of his Toyota between his clawed hands, they managed to survive four near-collisions on the short drive to the Kabul Peace Guest House. “A government supported by America was supposedly in control of Kabul,” Mortenson says. “But their power barely extended to the city limits, and they couldn’t even control the traffic. Drivers just ignored road signs and a few shouting traffic cops and went where they wanted.”

  Where Mortenson wanted to go was Faizabad, the largest city in the Badakshan Province of northeastern Afghanistan, which would be his base for venturing out to the sites of possible rural school projects. And to get there, he’d have to go by road, braving not just chaotic traffic, but a two-day trip through the insecure countryside. But Mortenson had no other choice. On this, his third trip to Afghanistan, he was determined to keep his promise to the Kirghiz horsemen. In his absence, they had conducted a complete survey of the Wakhan Corridor, and again ridden six days each way to deliver it to Faisal Baig in Zuudkhan. The survey reported that fifty-two hundred elementary-age children had no school of any kind available, and were waiting, In-shallah, for Mortenson to start building them.

  General Bashir had offered to have one of his pilots fly Mortenson directly to Faizabad, in a small twin-engine Cessna Golden Eagle that Askari Aviation contracted to fly ice cream, mineral water, protein bars, and other supplies to American operatives in Afghanistan. But the American CentCom headquarters, based in Doha, Qatar, which controlled Afghanistan’s airspace, denied Bashir’s request to send his plane into Afghanistan on a humanitarian mission.

  Mortenson paced his powerless room in the Kabul Peace Guest House, annoyed that he hadn’t remembered to charge his laptop and camera batteries in Islamabad. Power was predictably unpredictable in the Afghan capital and he might not find a working outlet between this room and Badakshan.

  He planned to set off on the long drive north in the morning, traveling by day for safety, and had sent Abdullah out to look for a vehicle to rent that was capable of negotiating the gauntlet of bomb craters and mud bogs lining the only road north.

  When Abdullah didn’t return by dinnertime, Mortenson considered going out to look for food, but instead, lay down with his feet dangling over the edge of the narrow bed, pulled a hard pillow that smelled like hair pomade over his face, and fell asleep.

  Just before midnight, Mortenson sat up abruptly, trying to make sense of the knocking on the door. In his dream it had been incoming RPG rounds exploding against the guest house walls.

  Abdullah had both good and bad news. He’d managed to rent a Russian jeep and found a young Tajik named Kais to come along and translate, since his usual companion, Hash, wouldn’t be welcome where they were going, because of his time with the Taliban. The only problem, Abdullah explained, was that the Salang Tunnel, the only passage north through the mountains, would be closing at 6:00 a.m.

  “When will it open?” Mortenson asked, still clinging to his hope of a full night’s sleep.

  Abdullah shrugged. With his burned face and singed eyebrows, it was difficult to read his expression. But his hunched shoulders told Mortenson he should have known better than to ask. “Twe-lev hour? Two day?” he guessed. “Who can know?”

  Mortenson began repacking his bags.

  As they drove north through the unelectrified city, Kabul seemed deceptively peaceful. Groups of men in flowing white robes floated between the town’s lantern-lit all-night tea stands like benevolent spirits, ready to leave on early morning flights for Saudi Arabia. Every Muslim of means is expected to perform the Haj, a pilgrimage to Mecca, at least once in his life. And the mood on the city’s dim streets was festive, as so many men prepared to embark on the trip that was meant to be the high point of their earthly existence.

  The last thing Mortenson remembers seeing, a
fter circling the streets searching for an open gas station, was Afghanistan’s former Ministry of Defense. He’d passed it by day, a looming shell so gutted by the bombs and missiles of three different wars that it seemed too unstable to stand. At night, the cooking fires of squatters living in it gave the structure a sinister jack-o-lantern glow. The building’s jagged shell holes and rows of glassless windows gaped like eyeless sockets over a gap-toothed grin as firelight flickered behind them.

  Drowsily, Mortenson watched the ministry’s leer die in the darkness behind him, and drifted, picturing a laptop army racing through the halls of the Pentagon, and endless marble floors buffed to the same brilliant gloss as Donald Rumsfeld’s shoes.

  The Salang Tunnel was only one hundred kilometers north of Kabul, but the low-geared Soviet-era jeep ground up the distance so slowly as it climbed into the Hindu Kush Mountains that, despite the danger of ambush, Mortenson was lulled back to sleep hours before they entered it. This rocky spine of fifteen-thousand-foot peaks separating northern Afghanistan from the central Shomali Plain had been Massoud’s most formidable line of defense from the Taliban.

  On his orders, Massoud’s men dynamited the two-kilometer tunnel Red Army engineers had built in the 1960s so they could open a trade route south through Uzbekistan. Leaving only the barely navigable twelve-thousand-foot-high dirt roads open to his stronghold, the Panjshir Valley, Massoud’s outgunned and outnumbered mujahadeen prevented the Taliban from driving their tanks and fleets of Japanese pickup trucks north in force. Afghanistan’s new government was employing Turkish construction crews to clear the tunnel of all the concrete rubble deposited by the explosions and to buttress the sagging structure against further collapse.

  Motionlessness woke Mortenson. He rubbed his eyes, but the blackness surrounding him was seamless. Then he heard voices beyond what he guessed was the front of the jeep, and in the flare of a match, Abdullah’s scorched, expressionless face appeared next to the worried pout of the Tajik teenager named Kais.