“Only 33 percent female enrollment?” Khan exclaimed, shaking his head and chuckling. “The number of girls waiting to attend this school is already almost double that, so perhaps you should consider giving our local council of elders a performance bonus for already exceeding your quota, no?”
I handed over the first down payment to the shura that morning, and work started immediately. By midafternoon the grid lines of the outer walls had been marked with twine and a crew of laborers was digging the trenches for the foundation with picks and shovels. Toward the evening, a series of explosions echoed between the walls of the surrounding mountains as the masons began dynamiting the granite boulders that would yield the stones for the walls. For Sadhar Khan, the reverberation of those blasts—which sounded eerily similar to Soviet or Taliban artillery—must have offered a deeply satisfying confirmation that we were truly turning stones into schools. For me, however, those concussive bursts signaled something else.
The door to the Wakhan Corridor was now unlocked, and it was time for Sarfraz and me to plan our next move.
When Sarfraz and I drew up our 2004 plan for northeastern Afghanistan, it was fairly straightforward. Since the only road into the Wakhan began in Baharak and ended halfway through the Corridor at the village of Sarhad, we decided on a two-pronged attack in which we would hit the beginning and end of the trail first, then literally build our way toward the middle until the literacy gap was closed. Once this process was complete, we would embark on the far more challenging task of leapfrogging into the roadless reaches at the far end of the Wakhan and fulfilling our commitment to the Kirghiz.
By this point, we had finally managed to get Sarfraz his first passport, and he had flung himself into a series of grueling trips from Kabul to Faizabad, through Baharak, and into the Wakhan in order to negotiate, launch, and supervise the first wave of school projects. Many of these journeys were solo undertakings, but whenever I flew into Kabul, Sarfraz and I would travel together—and it was during these ventures that our connection and our friendship began to deepen into something we both found rather remarkable. The chemistry we shared enabled us to understand each other so well that before long, each was able to anticipate the other’s moves and complete his sentences. Eventually, we even got to the point where we communicated using a nonverbal vocabulary of glances and facial expressions. This did not happen immediately, however—and before we achieved this level of synthesis, it was first necessary for me to pass through a kind of cultural version of Afghan boot camp: a series of tutorials, run by Sarfraz, that I now refer to as Style School.
Starting with our very first trip north from the capital, I learned that traveling with Sarfraz through Afghanistan would be a far more complex and perilous affair than in Pakistan. Among the new concerns we faced, the biggest involved getting kidnapped. At the time, the going rate for bribing someone to help set up the abduction of an American citizen was around five million Afghans, or roughly $110,000. (Today, that number has increased tenfold.) To avoid this danger, Sarfraz was willing to go to extraordinary lengths, starting with camouflage.
Afghanistan is one of the most ethnically complicated countries on earth, a place where the overlapping cultures, languages, religions, and tribal loyalties have bedeviled historians, anthropologists, and military strategists for centuries. Understanding these distinctions was an essential precondition to safe travel, and this accounted for Sarfraz’s obsession with a word that normally applies to the sartorial and behavioral nuances displayed on the streets of Manhattan or Paris, as opposed to the deserts and mountains north of the Hindu Kush. “To have much success in Afghanistan, you must understand style,” he would patiently lecture me again and again. “Style is everything here.”
In any given situation, regardless of whether it involved an all-night negotiation with a group of conservative mullahs or a five-minute break at a roadside tea stall, he paid keen attention to the body language of everyone involved. Who sat where and why? Who sipped his tea first and who hung back? Who spoke and who remained silent? Who was the most powerful person in the room, who was the weakest, and how did their respective agendas influence what they were saying? There can be many layers and shades of meaning within each of these distinctions, and by responding to them all with equally subtle adjustments of his own, Sarfraz strove to avoid drawing unwanted attention either to himself or to me. As a means of blending in as we moved from one region to another, for example, he often adopted different headgear, donning a lunghi (a Pashtun wrap-around turban) in the Taliban areas of Wardak province, exchanging it for a mujahadeen’s pakol (woolen hat) in the Tajik-dominated areas of Badakshan, and eventually discarding that for a kufi (a white skullcap) as we entered the mosque in Baharak. Among his network of trading partners and relatives in the eastern part of the Wakhan, he was also fond of putting on his favorite hat of all, a dashing peacock blue fedora—an expression, I suppose, of style in the more conventional sense of the word.
Sarfraz’s chameleon-like qualities included the spoken word as well as dress. His mastery of the seven languages at his command extended beyond lexicon and grammar to embrace a smorgasbord of accents and inflections. In Kabul his Dari might sound crisp and gentrified, but as soon as we were in the mountains, he would gradually downshift, like a truck descending a long grade, through a series of increasingly less refined accents and dialects until he abandoned Dari for Wakhi before finally sliding into Burushkaski—the patois of his Wakhan ancestors. (He kept his Pashto in reserve for the Pashtun-dominated territories east of Kabul, and his Urdu, Punjabi, and English for Pakistan.) Perhaps the only thing Sarfraz would not do in order to be as local as possible was to grow a beard. Other than that, he freely adopted any ruse he could conceive—including telling elaborate lies about where he was from and what he was up to—in order to fit in and avoid hitting people’s trigger points.
My job was to follow his lead by copying his mannerisms and his demeanor. I would mimic the manner in which Sarfraz crossed his legs as he sat, the angle at which he held a teacup, even where he permitted his gaze to fall. Under these circumstances, of course, I wasn’t deluding myself into thinking that I’d actually be mistaken for a local. But by following Sarfraz’s mannerisms and body language, I was hoping to avoid giving myself away as a wealthy American interloper. The goal was simply to make anyone whom we encountered experience a moment of confusion in which they dwelled, however briefly, on the possibility that in some strange way that they didn’t quite understand, I might actually belong. And as we moved around the countryside north of Kabul, this often worked surprisingly well—a tendency helped by the fact that Afghanistan is a vast melting pot in which green eyes, brown hair, and Caucasian features are not at all uncommon.
The second part of Sarfraz’s kidnap-prevention strategy involved transportation, and it was here that things started to get exciting.
Moving from one destination to the next inside Pakistan was a fairly simple matter. Suleman Minhas, the CAI manager in Islamabad, ferried us around the city in a company-owned Toyota Corolla, and for the mountains of Baltistan we relied on a twenty-eight-year-old, four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser. When none of these vehicles was available, we would hire one from a pool of local Pakistani drivers whom we had known for years. Afghanistan, however, was quite different. Because we had neither a fleet of our own vehicles nor a network of trusted chauffeurs, we were usually forced to rent a car and driver on the spot, an arrangement that placed us at the mercy of people we’d never met and whose loyalties were unknown.
The process began with Sarfraz’s paying a visit to a roadside bazaar in Kabul and negotiating an arrangement without actually telling anyone where we were heading. If there were a bunch of men standing around the rental place, Sarfraz might ostentatiously declare that he was looking for someone to take us to, say, Mazar-i-Sharif or Kandahar or Bamiyan—anywhere but our true destination. After he had completed his negotiations and we had piled into the vehicle, he would announce that our plans had ch
anged, divulging as little information as possible about the “new” destination—often no more than the name of a village twenty or thirty miles up the road.
Once we were heading in the correct direction, he would begin sniffing the air for signs that something might be wrong, and if his suspicions were aroused, all bets were off. If the driver seemed to be asking too many questions or spending too much time on his cell phone or simply didn’t look right, Sarfraz would abruptly exclaim that we needed to pull over at the next roadside truck stop, explain that he was dashing inside for a cup of tea, and once inside set about arranging for another car and driver. When he found someone new, he’d dash back out, open the door, and start flinging our bags into the parking lot. Then he’d toss a handful of money at the driver and tell him to get lost, and off we’d go—until it was time to fire the new driver. When it came to such precautions, he was unapologetic and completely ruthless.
Sarfraz also preferred to hire and fire drivers based on ethnicity and tribal affiliation. At any given point on the road, the goal was always to place ourselves in the hands of someone local, a man whose face and name would be known in the event that we were stopped at a roadblock or pulled over. Hiring local was also, in his view, the best way to obtain accurate information about road conditions, the weather, and the likelihood of being robbed.
This approach differed markedly from the conspicuous transport arrangements preferred by the larger humanitarian organizations and the international consulting groups, most of whom were easily distinguished by their shiny SUVs equipped with tinted windows, air-conditioning, and twelve-foot-long radio antennae. “That big antenna makes them a perfect target for the Taliban!” he would exclaim. He was also contemptuous of the disconnect that such equipment created between the employees of those organizations and the locals on whose behalf they were working.
The greatest likelihood of our being abducted or attacked was during the thirty-hour drive from Kabul to Baharak, and on this stretch of the drive, Sarfraz’s concerns about security occasionally placed him at odds with my desire to get to know ordinary Afghans—a point of contention that he and I still wrestle with even today. This difference first surfaced during one of our earliest trips together in the spring of 2004.
As usual, we had left from Kabul late in the afternoon in order to pass unimpeded through the Salang Tunnel, which was only open to civilian traffic at night. Just north of the tunnel, the rattletrap jeep we had hired emitted a loud sizzle, and steam began pouring out of the engine. Sarfraz ordered the driver to drift down the hill about a mile and pull into a roadside mechanic shop. There, a boy who was no older than eleven stepped up in a pair of flip-flops to ask what we needed. His head was shaved and covered with a black woolen cap, and he wore an oil-stained shalwar kamiz that was coated with grease. His name was Abdul, and he walked with a limp.
Abdul jumped into the engine compartment like an acrobat, and by the time Sarfraz and I had eaten a quick meal and had a cup of tea at a nearby canteen, our young mechanic had deftly replaced our radiator and hoses. He told us the price was fourteen hundred Afghans (about twenty-eight dollars), and as Sarfraz counted out the money, I tried to get a sense of who Abdul was and what his story entailed.
“Where is your father?” I asked. “It is nearly midnight and you are working alone?”
“I am an orphan from Pul-e-Khumri,” he replied matter-of-factly. “I have no father because the Taliban killed my entire family.”
“Where do you live?”
“I live here—I sleep in the truck trailer over there where we keep our spare parts.” He pointed to a rusting metal container.
“How much money do you make?” I asked as I searched in my pocket to offer him a small tip.
“None,” he replied. “I don’t get paid—I only get some food, tea, and a place to sleep. I work day and night, every day, and sleep when there is no customer. And if my boss finds out I have taken any money, he will beat me with the iron rod over there.”
By this point our driver was revving the engine to signal that we needed to get moving, and Sarfraz had lit up a cigarette and was glaring at me with impatience. It was the middle of the night on a dangerous road, we were behind schedule, and it was time to go.
“Sarfraz,” I pleaded, initiating an exchange that he and I were to repeat endlessly over the next several years, “can’t we please do something here?”
“Greg, this is Afghanistan—you cannot help everyone!” Sarfraz barked. “If he works hard, this boy might eventually own his boss’s garage. But for now he has food and a place to sleep, and that is better than half of the orphans in Afghanistan.”
“Okay, but how about if we just—”
“No, Greg!” he declared, cutting me off. “I promise that when I pass through here again, I will stop to check on Abdul. But we really need to go now, or we will become shahids on the highway, and for that your wife will never forgive me.”
Knowing that he was right, I pulled out my camera to take a picture of the boy mechanic, and then we drove away.
On his next trip north, Sarfraz did indeed stop to check on Abdul and discovered that another young boy was working in his place. Sarfraz asked what had happened to Abdul, but no one in the shop could offer any information. Perhaps he had gone north to Faizabad, or maybe south to Kabul. No one knew anything except that Abdul, whose story seemed to mirror that of so many others in this nation of orphans, had simply disappeared.
In the black-and-white image I shot that night, Abdul is standing in the garage, covered in grease and oil, with a flat expression of resignation and loss that no eleven-year-old boy should ever feel. The photo sits on my desk in Bozeman, and I see it every day that I am home.
Once we finally reached Baharak and were traveling through territory controlled by Sadhar Khan, Sarfraz’s concerns about security began to drop away. They were immediately replaced, however, by a whole new set of challenges connected to the terrain.
The rutted dirt track through the western half of the Wakhan Corridor followed the Panj River, and during the spring and summer months the runoff from the glaciers and snowfields in the Hindu Kush created a series of channels that spilled directly across the roadbed. These flood zones could be up to half a mile wide, consisting mostly of loose gravel interlaced with braided streams of varying widths and depths. Upon reaching the edge of a new series of streams, we often were forced to cruise up and down the shoreline for half an hour or more before finding a spot that seemed to offer a promising place to cross. Then Sarfraz would order the driver to gun his engine and blast into the water with as much speed as possible. If we were lucky, we’d smash through to the other side. If not, we might wind up in waist-high water that would gush through the floorboards and fill up the inside of the car. Then we’d have to pile out, make our way to the edge of the stream, wait for a truck or a jeep to come by, and pay them to haul us out.
It’s fair to say that Sarfraz and I treated our drivers without mercy. We goaded them into pushing their vehicles to the point where the axle seized or the transmission dropped out or the muffler was torn to pieces. If the driver himself had been forced beyond the point of exhaustion, Sarfraz would order him into the back and one of us would get behind the wheel. In the spring and the fall we’d hydroplane through acres of mud (which can be two or three feet deep in the Wakhan) until the vehicles would bog down and gurgle to a stop. Then, while the driver headed off to find a team of yaks to pull his car out, Sarfraz and I would take off our shoes, and sometimes even our pants, and start walking. (The tunic top of a shalwar kamiz extends well below the knees, so exposure was not a problem.)
Sooner or later, we would reach our goal—whatever stretch of the Corridor formed the focus of the trip. And it was at this point that our real work would begin.
Over the years, Sarfraz and I gradually developed a routine to which we would adhere once we had arrived in a particular “project zone.” Each day would begin well before dawn, when we would wake up, blinking,
in the same clothes we’d been wearing for more than a week, surrounded by the components of our mobile office: one small black backpack, a wheeled compact carry-on, and my black Pelican case bearing the THE LAST BEST PLACE bumper sticker. Together these pieces of luggage held all the paperwork for our schools in the Wakhan, along with several extra copies of Three Cups of Tea (which made excellent presents to the mujahadeen), our sat phone, a Nikon battery charger, one spare 28 mm camera lens, a spare shalwar kamiz, a Sony laptop, three cameras, several large bricks of cash, and our GPS unit.
First on the agenda were morning ablutions, which basically consisted of me smearing some aloe-scented hand sanitizer into my hair and Sarfraz scratching himself in the right spots. (Showers, bathtubs, and wet wipes were extremely scarce in the Wakhan.) Then we would pop the cap on our jumbo-size jar of ibuprofen, and each of us would take two or three tablets as a prebreakfast appetizer. (When we were going hard, we’d each go through about twelve or fifteen pills a day in order to help dull the aches and pains induced by the arduous travel and the lack of sleep.) At this point, one of us might put on the pair of reading glasses that we shared—we both have the same prescription—while the other stepped outside with the toothbrush. (Yep, we shared that, too.)
The spectacle of two men passing personal grooming items back and forth was bizarre enough that one morning a reporter from a national magazine, who was traveling with us in order to write an article about the Wakhan, asked me to provide a list of everything that Sarfraz and I used in common.