“How many people live here?” Mortenson asked.
“Just over fifteen hundred now,” Syed Abbas said. “Mostly men. They have come to find work and set up shelter before sending for their women and children. Within a few months, we may have four or five thousand refugees to deal with.”
Ducking out through the flap of a tent, Apo Razak bore down on the talking men. If there was one constant in Baltistan, it was the jester-like leer on the face of the old expedition cook who had spent his life providing food and comfort for large groups in inhospitable places. But his face, as he approached, was uncharacteristically grave, and his mouth was set like a vein of quartz in granite. Like Lear’s Jester, he had no trouble pointing out hard truths to his so-called superiors.
“Doctor Greg,” he said, taking Mortenson’s hand and leading him toward the tents, “enough talking. How can you know what the people need if you don’t ask them?”
Mullah Gulzar sat under a blue tarp in a black skullcap and struggled to his feet after Apo led Mortenson in. The elderly cleric of Brolmo village clasped Mortenson’s hand and apologized that he didn’t have the means to make tea. When they were all seated cross-legged on a plastic tablecloth that covered the warm sand, Apo prodded the mullah to tell his story.
The bright light filtering through the blue tarp reflected off the mullah’s oversized glasses and obscured his eyes as he spoke, giving Mortenson the unsettling impression he was listening to a blind man wearing opaque blue lenses.
“We didn’t want to come here,” Mullah Gulzar said, stroking his long wispy beard. “Brolmo is a good place. Or it was. We stayed as long as we could, hiding in the caves by day, and working the fields at night. If we had worked by day none of us would have survived, because there were so many shells falling. Finally, all the irrigation channels were broken, the fields were ruined, and the houses were shattered. We knew our women and children would die if we didn’t do something, so we walked over the mountains to Skardu. I’m not young and it was very difficult.
“When we came to the Skardu town, the army told us to make our home here,” Mullah Gulzar said. “And when we saw this place, this sand, we decided to go home. But the army would not permit it. They said, ‘You have no home to go back to. It is broken.’ Still, we would return if we could, for this is not a life. And now our women and children will soon come to this wasteland and what can we tell them?”
Mortenson took the old mullah’s hand in both of his. “We will help you bring water here for your families,” he promised.
“Thanks to Allah Almighty for that,” the mullah said. “But water is only a beginning. We need food, and medicine, and education for our children. This is our home now. I’m ashamed to ask for so much, but no one else has come.”
The elderly cleric inclined his head toward the sky the blue tarp imperfectly sheltered him from, as if casting his lamentation directly up to the ears of Allah. From this new angle, the glare vanished from his glasses and Mortenson saw the mullah’s eyes were moist.
“And we have nothing. For your mal-la khwong, for your kindness in fulfilling our prayers, I can offer you nothing,” Mullah Gulzar said. “Not even tea.”
The first uplift water scheme in the history of northern Pakistan took eight weeks to build. True to his word, Ghulam Parvi convinced his neighbor to donate the use of earth-moving equipment. The Director of Skardu’s PWD also donated all the pipe the project required. And twelve tractors appeared on loan from the army to move stones. Mortenson patiently returned again and again to the Public Call Office until, finally, he reached San Francisco. He requested, and was granted, permission to spend six thousand dollars of CAI’s funds on the project.
Mortenson ordered powerful pumps and Honda generators from Gilgit. With all the men of Brolmo village laboring around the clock, they constructed a huge concrete tank, capable of storing enough water to supply a settlement of five thousand people. And after drilling to a depth of 120 feet, they found the groundwater to draw up and fill it. Now the men of Brolmo could start building mud-block houses and transforming the desert wastes into a green new home for their families. But first their women and children had to survive the journey to Skardu.
During their time in the caves, Fatima Batool couldn’t stop crying. And Aamina, who had always been the one to comfort her younger sister, wasn’t capable of caring even for herself. Aamina’s physical wounds from flying shrapnel were slight. But the damage had been driven deeper than the skin. Ever since the day the artillery shell had landed near her by the mouth of the cave, after she had screamed once in fear and pain and collapsed, Aamina had said nothing. Not a word. Some mornings, huddled in the cave with the others, when the shells fell with especially brutal regularity, she would tremble and produce a sort of pleading whimper. But it was an animal sound, not human speech at all, and it gave Fatima no comfort.
“Life was very cruel in the caves,” says Fatima’s friend Nargiz Ali. “Our village, Brolmo, was a very beautiful place, with apricot and even cherry trees, on a slope by the Indus River. But we could only glance out at it and watch it being destroyed. We couldn’t go there. I was a little type of girl at the time and other relatives had to carry me quickly inside whenever the shells began to fall. I couldn’t leave to play outside or care for the animals, or even to pick the fruit that we watched ripening and then rotting.
“During rainy days, or, for example, snowfall, it was very difficult to cook or sleep there. But we remained for a long time, because only over the nullah was India, and it was too dangerous out in the open.”
One day, Nargiz says, returning to the caves after searching through the rubble of his home for supplies, her uncle Hawalda Abrahim was hit by a single shell that fell without accompaniment. “He was a very loving man and we wanted to go to him right away, but we had to wait until nighttime, until we were sure no more shells would fall, to carry my uncle inside,” Nargiz says. “Normally, people would wash the body after death. But he was so shattered, we couldn’t wash him. We could only gather him together in a cloth.”
The few men remaining in Brolmo held zjirga and announced afterward, to all the children like Fatima and Nargiz, that the time had come to be brave. They must venture out into the open, and walk a long way with little food, because remaining in the caves could not be considered a life.
They packed what little they could scavenge from their homes and left in the middle of the night, walking to a neighboring village that they considered sufficiently distant from the Indian artillery to be safe. That morning, for the first time in months, they took pleasure in watching the sun rise outdoors, out in the open. But while they were baking kurba for the journey over a fire, shells began to fall, marching toward them up the valley floor. A spotter on the ridges to the south must have seen them, Fatima believes, and was directing fire their way.
“Every time a shell exploded Aamina would shake and cry and fall to the earth,” Fatima says. “In that place there were no caves, so all we could do was run. I’m ashamed to say that I was so frightened that I stopped tugging at my sister and ran to save myself. I was fearful that she would be killed, but being alone must have been more frightening to my sister than the shelling, and she ran to join the rest of the village.”
For three weeks, the survivors of Brolmo trekked to the northwest. “Often, we walked on paths that animals had made, paths that were not for people at all,” Fatima says. “We had to leave all our kurba behind in the fire when the shells started to fall, so we were very hungry. The people cut the wild plants for food and ate the small berries to stay alive, even though they made our stomachs hurt.”
After surviving their odyssey, the last residents of Brolmo village arrived, exhausted and emaciated, in Skardu, where the military directed them to their new home. Here in the dunes by the airport, Fatima and the other survivors would begin the long process of learning to forget what they had endured and starting over. All except Aamina Batool. “When we reached our new village, Aamina lay down a
nd would not get up,” Fatima says. “No one could revive her and not even being safe at last with our father and uncles seemed to cheer her. She died after a few days.”
Speaking about her sister’s death five years later, the anguish in Fatima’s face looks as raw as it must have felt that day, as she allows the memory to bob to the surface briefly, before pushing it back down.
At her desk, in the fifth-grade classroom of the Gultori Girls Refugee School, which the Central Asia Institute constructed on sand dunes by the Skardu airport in the summer of 1999, at the height of the Kargil Conflict, Fatima Batool, fifteen, lets her white shawl fall over her face, taking refuge within the fabric from too many questions.
Her classmate Nargiz Ali, now fourteen, picks up the thread of the story, and explains how she came to be sitting at this desk, under a colorful relief map of the world, caressing her own brand-new notebook, pencil, and sharpener provided by a charitable organization headquartered in a place she has tried and failed to find on that map, Bozeman, Montana.
“When we arrived after our long walk, we were, of course, very happy to see all our family,” Nargiz says. “But then I looked at the place where we were supposed to live and I felt frightened and unsure. There were no houses. No trees. No mosque. No facility of any kind. Then Syed Abbas brought a large Angrezi to talk with us. He told us that if we were willing to work hard, he would help us build a school. And do you know, he kept his chat-ndo, his promise.”
Fifth-grade students at the Gultori Girls Refugee School, like Fatima and Nargiz, lag behind most of their peers. Because their formal education began only after they had fled from their ancestral villages, the average age of a fifth-grade student here is fifteen. Their brothers walk an hour each way to the government boys’ schools in surrounding villages that took most of the male refugee students in. But for the 129 Gultori girls who might never have seen the inside of a school, this building is the lone bright spot at the end of a long tunnel of fear and flight.
That’s why, despite how much talking about her ordeal has taken from her, Fatima Batool brushes aside her shawl and sits up straight at her desk, to tell her visitors one thing more. “I’ve heard some people say Americans are bad,” she says softly. “But we love Americans. They are the most kind people for us. They are the only ones who cared to help us.”
In recent years, some of the refugees have returned to the Gultori, to the two schools the Central Asia Institute has since established there, carved into caves, so that students will be safe from the shells that can still rain down from India whenever relations between the two countries chill. But Nargiz and Fatima are staying in the new village outside Skardu. It is their home now, they say.
Beyond the sandy courtyard of their ochre-colored five-room school, neat rows of mud-block homes now march toward the horizon, some equipped, even, with that ultimate symbol of luxury and permanent residence, the satellite dish. And shading these homes, where the unrelenting dunes once stood, cherry trees, nurtured by an uplift water scheme, grow thick and green and lush, blooming out of the sand as improbably as the students who walk home after school beneath their boughs, the girls of the Gultori.
Chapter 18
Shrouded Figure
Let nothing perturb you, nothing frighten you. All things pass.
God does not change. Patience achieves everything.
—Mother Teresa
SETTING UP THE two hundred chairs was taking longer than Mortenson had expected. At most of the potlucks, outdoor stores, churches, and colleges where he gave his slide shows, someone was on hand to help. But here at Mr. Sports, in Apple Valley, Minnesota, all the staff members were sorting inventory for an after-Christmas sale, so Mortenson worked alone.
At 6:45 p.m., with his talk due to begin in fifteen minutes, Mortenson had unfolded just over one hundred tan metal chairs, arranging them in neat rows between the racks of unfurled subzero sleeping bags and a locked case displaying valuable electronic GPS devices, altimeters, and avalanche beacons. He pushed himself to work faster, jerking the chairs open and slapping them into place with the sense of urgency he’d felt while working on the Korphe bridge.
Mortenson was soon slick with sweat. He had become increasingly self-conscious about the weight he had gained since K2, and was reluctant to remove the heavy, shapeless green sweatshirt he wore, especially in a room that would soon be packed with fit outdoor types. He smacked the last chairs into place at 7:02 and strode breathlessly along the rows, placing a Central Asia Institute newsletter on each of the two hundred seats. At the back of every photocopied pamphlet, a donation envelope was stapled into place, addressed to CAI’s post office box in Bozeman.
The harvest he reaped from these envelopes made the slide shows just bearable. With the CAI’s finances dipping toward insolvency, Mortenson was now averaging one talk every week he wasn’t in Pakistan. There were few things he loathed more than getting up in front of a large group of people and speaking about himself, but the difference even one bad night’s take, typically a few hundred dollars, could make for the children of Pakistan kept him hauling his overnight bag to the Bozeman airport.
He inspected the old slide projector he’d recently repaired with duct tape, to make sure the correct carousel was slotted, patted his pants pocket, checking that the laser pointer he used to highlight the peaks of the Karakoram was in place, and turned to face his audience.
Mortenson was alone with two hundred empty chairs.
He’d put up posters on local college campuses, pleaded for publicity with the editors of local papers, and done a brief early-morning interview for the drivetime segment of an AM radio station’s morning show, and he expected a full house, so Mortenson leaned against a rack of self-inflating sleeping pads, waiting for his audience to arrive.
He smiled broadly at a woman in an orange Gore-Tex parka with long gray braids coiled on top of her head as she approached. But she ducked her eyes apologetically, inspected the temperature rating on an eggplant-colored polarfill sleeping bag, and bundled it away toward the register.
By 7:30 Mortenson was still staring at a sea of empty chairs.
Over the store’s loudspeaker, an employee pleaded for the bargain hunters sifting through the sale racks to occupy some of the two hundred empty seats. “People, we have, like, a world-class climber waiting to show you gnarly slides of K2! Go on, check him out!”
Two salespeople in green vests, having completed their inventory, took seats in the last row. “What should I do?” Mortenson said. “Should I still give my talk?”
“It’s about climbing K2, right?” said a young, bearded employee, whose blond dreadlocks, stuffed up into a silver wool hat, made his head look like a cooked package of Jiffy Pop Popcorn.
“Sort of,” Mortenson said.
“Sweet, Dude,” Jiffy Pop said. “Go for it!”
After Mortenson showed the requisite images he’d taken of K2, and detailed his failed attempt of seven summers past, he segued awkwardly into the crux of his presentation: He told stories about and showed photos of the eighteen CAI-funded schools now operating, lingering on images of the latest: two schools in the Gultori Valley, built flush with the entrances of caves, so that the shells still falling—now that the Kargil “Conflict” had officially ended— couldn’t prevent the thousands of villagers now returning to piece together their shattered homes from sending their children to study in safety.
As images he’d taken just a month earlier, of Fatima, Nargiz, and their classmates, smiling over their textbooks in the newly built Gultori Girls Refugee School, flashed across the screen, Mortenson noticed a professorial-looking middle-aged male customer leaning around a corner, trying to unobtrusively study a display of multifunction digital watches. Mortenson paused to smile at him, and the man took a seat, letting his eyes rest on the screen.
Buoyed now that his audience had grown by 50 percent, Mortenson spoke passionately for thirty minutes more, detailing the crushing poverty children in the Karakoram faced eve
ry day, and unveiling his plans to begin constructing schools the following spring at the very edge of northern Pakistan, along Afghanistan’s border.
“By building relationships, and getting a community to invest its own land and labor, we can construct and maintain a school for a generation that will educate thousands of children for less than twenty thousand dollars. That’s about half what it would cost the government of Pakistan to build the same school, and one-fifth of what the World Bank would spend on the same project.”
Mortenson wrapped up the evening by paraphrasing one of his favorite quotations from Mother Teresa. “What we are trying to do may be just a drop in the ocean,” Mortenson said, smiling warmly at his audience of three. “But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.”
Mortenson appreciated the applause, even from six hands, almost as much as he was relieved to be done speaking. As he switched off the projector and began collecting CAI pamphlets from the empty seats, the two employees bent to help him, asking questions. “Do you, like, have any kind of volunteer deals over there?” Jiffy Pop’s coworker asked. ” ‘Cause I’ve worked construction and I could, like, come over there and pound in some nails.”
Mortenson explained that with CAI’s limited budget (“more limited than ever these days,” he thought), it was too expensive to send American volunteers to Pakistan, and directed him toward a few other NGOs working in Asia that accepted volunteers.
The bearded boy with the dreadlocks fished into his front pocket and handed Mortenson a ten-dollar bill. “I was going to go out for a couple beers after work,” he said, shuffling from foot to foot, “but, you know…”
“Thanks,” Mortenson said, sincerely, shaking his hand, before folding the bill and placing it into the empty manila envelope he’d brought along to collect contributions. Mortenson picked up the last few pamphlets and crammed them into his overnight bag with the others, sighing over the extra weight he’d carried halfway across the country for ten dollars, and would now have to carry home.