Epic saga

Stones into Schools by Greg Mortenson; Viking (Penguin Books); Price: Rs.399; 420 pp

This is a book which every educationist and individual connected with the great task of societal and national development must read. For the simple reason that it dynamites one of the most enduring myths propagated by self-serving third world establishments and politicians in particular: that the poor in developing countries don’t value education or care about schooling their children.

Quite the contrary, says Greg Mortenson in this poignant memoir which narrates the story of how dirt-poor villagers of the insurgency-ridden Afghan-Pak border areas — perhaps the world’s harshest terrain surrounded by the towering peaks of the Hindu Kush and Pamir mountain ranges — persuaded him and his dedicated team of Pak-Afghan employees of the Central Asia Institute (estb. 1996), to build primary-secondary schools in which 58,000 children, mostly girls, are receiving regular education. Moreover this contemporary historical narrative is important because it simultaneously shatters the popular myth that lay Muslims are indifferent to formal education for girl children. Indeed Stones into Schools offers convincing proof that the rantings of hate-filled Muslim fundamentalists notwithstanding, ordinary, everyday Muslim parents are ready to sacrifice all, and endure any hardship, to secure it for them.

This book is a sequel to Mortenson’s international bestseller (but typically unsung in India)  Three Cups of Tea (Penguin, 2007), which has sold over 3 million copies and featured in the New York Times bestseller list for 130 weeks. TCT derived its title from the utterance of a Balti (Northwest Frontier Province, Pakistan) chief to the effect that the first cup of tea with an outsider is with a stranger, the second transforms him into a friend and the third into family. Likewise Stones into Schools derives its title from a remark of an Afghan tribal chieftain who, pointing to a rock-strewn hillock marking the graves of young men  martyred in three decades of anti-Soviet jihad (Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and occupied it for a decade) and subsequently with the savage forces of the Taliban,  supplicates the author to transform the stones into schools.

Mortenson’s involvement with the illiterate and neglected — indeed forgotten — tribals of the Afghan-Pakistan border began in 1993 when as an aspiring mountaineer, he stumbled into the village of Korphe in Pakistan’s  NWFP, following an aborted bid to get to the summit of the 28,208 ft. tall K2 (Kanchenjunga). In the miserably poor village he was given food, shelter and succour. Later, while on a walk-about, he chanced upon a common scenario in South Asia: “82 children sitting outside writing their lessons with sticks in the dirt, with no teacher in sight”. One of the students extracted a promise from the American stranger, that he would return someday and build the children of Korphe a school.

“The fulfillment of that promise involves a tale that recounts my fumbling efforts in Berkeley, where I worked as a nurse, to sell my car, my climbing gear, and all of my books in order to raise the necessary money — and the subsequent chain of events through which a lost mountaineer eventually came to discover his life’s calling by fostering education and literacy in the impoverished Muslim villages of  the western Himalayas,” writes Mortenson in the introduction to Stones into Schools, an epic and yet unfinished saga driven by exemplary humanism and love of children.

When in fulfillment of his promise Mortenson duly arrived to construct a school in Korphe, he discovered that he first had to build a suspension bridge over a turbulent river to transport construction material to the village. This assignment of  great “symbolic significance” was duly completed, as was the school in December 1996. “Since then every school we have built has been preceded by a bridge. Not necessarily a physical structure, but a span of emotional links that are forged over many years and many shared cups of tea,” writes Mortenson whose modus operandi ever since has been to build strong ties — often at a glacial pace — with local communities to ensure that they assume ownership of their schools.

In a country wracked by tribal wars and Islamist insurgency, such kinder tactics are an effective strategy to build enduring institutions. Since the completion of Central Asia Institute’s first school in Korphe in Pakistan’s unruly NWFP,  “without using a dollar of money from the US government”, the institute has established 131 schools with an aggregate enrolment of 58,000 children. And while the best-selling Three Cups of Tea narrated the history of CAI in the decade 1993-2003, Stones into Schools tells the story of the establishment of the first ever primary school in Bozai Gumbaz, the remotest village of Afghanistan sited at the end of the Wakhan Corridor which snakes through the Pamir Range of Tajikstan to the north and the Hindu Kush mountains of Pakistan to the edge of the western border of China.

“No project has ever taken us so long or required such complex logistics as the little school we built next to the old Kirghiz burial grounds in the heart of the Afghan Pamir’s Bam-I-Dunya, the ‘Rooftop of the World’. And next to Korphe itself, no school is closer to my heart because, in many ways both large and small, it was the most miraculous,” says Mortenson in this compelling narrative of how a small band of dedicated education missionaries overcame insuperable odds to bring secular primary education to 200 girl students of Bozai Gumbaz.

Parleys were held and a solemn promise was made. It took ten years — an era punctuated with the devastation of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York; the ouster of the Taliban regime in Kabul; the cataclysmic earthquake of 2005 in Azad Kashmir and Pakistan which took a toll of 79,000 lives; and the invasion of Afghanistan by American and NATO troops — before the promise could be fulfilled.

A page-turning account of how  this objective was finally attained following the convergence of motorised and yak supply trains entering the Wakhan Corridor through three countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tajikstan) last September (2009) in the nick of time before the winter snows isolated Bozai Gumbaz, is what this gritty and inspiring book is about. It’s a tribute to true heroes driven by the noblest of missions, and reaffirms the faith of ordinary people in education for the advancement of their children. Moreover the unlikely heroes of this chronicle of commitment and compassion are not only the dedicated volunteers of CAI, but also altruistic Americans who contributed millions of dollars to fund CAI, so that schools could be built for girl children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which most Americans won’t be able to locate on the world map.

Simultaneously an adventure story and EFA (education for all) campaign material, Stones into Schools should be mandatory reading for all educationists and teachers. Not least for India’s omniscient politicians, bureaucrats and central planners for whom provision of qualitatively meaningful primary and secondary education to the world’s largest child population is low priority, if not an afterthought.

Dilip Thakore

Rebel with a cause

A Beginner’s Guide to Changing the World by Isabel Losada; Harper Collins; Price: Rs.555; 371 pp

If you are an idealist, you need to read this book. It tells the story of London-based Isabel Losada, a kind-hearted middle-aged woman and single parent of a teenage girl, who makes it her mission to spotlight one of the greatest, even if largely unrecorded, tragedies of modern times — the ruthless Chinese occupation of Tibet. It highlights the pathetic plight of Tibet’s six million native inhabitants and almost a million more of their compatriots who, forced out from their homeland, live as stateless refugees scattered around the world. Losada’s one-woman crusade may not have succeeded in overturning the world, but it provides ample inspiration to question deeply-rooted notions of what constitutes a ‘successful’ life.

First attracted to the cause of Tibet after eye-witnessing a group of demonstrators outside the Chinese embassy in London a decade ago, Losada describes the outrage that the indignities suffered by the people of this deeply religious ‘nation’ provoked in her, the seriousness of which offered her an opportunity to reflect about changing the world for the better and finding meaning in her own life. The book lays bare the tragedy of Tibet, the destruction of its distinctive, invaluable religious and cultural heritage by communist-style modernity, gross human rights violations, and the almost complete indifference of world powers, who, unwilling to antagonise the Red Dragon, fearing its economic might, turned an almost complete blind eye to the tragedy of the Chinese re-occupation of Tibet in 1950. The more Losada read and learned about Tibet, the more she was prompted to shout out loud to stir public opinion.

How Losada goes about outing the Chinese destruction of Tibet and Tibetans is delineated in this book. She launched her campaign in the late 1990s networking with a host of UK-based Tibet groups, but adopted a conventional approach limited to petitioning and issuing occasional press releases. But soon she began to question whether a pacifist campaign could make any difference at all to the immensity of Tibet’s tragedy.

Therefore she switched to outright condemnation to British MPs about Tibet’s humiliating tribulations under Chinese autocracy, but found that few of them shared her empathy for the cause. Western, including British, business and economic interests in China ruled out any genuine concern for Chinese human rights violations. This provoked a more radical, daring and dramatic strategy. Together with a gang of Tibet-lovers, she picketed the Chinese embassy in London, cleverly engineering Tibetan flags to land on an aerial atop the embassy building, much to the embarrassment of embassy officials. Some weeks later, in early 2004, she traveled to the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, a grueling five day journey on rutted roads up the highest mountain passes in the world. A fortnight inside Tibet and she witnessed first-hand that under the guise of  ‘liberating’ Tibet, the Chinese communist regime had imposed the most horrific human rights outrages, spelling the virtual destruction of a unique, centuries-old culture based on compassion and non-violence.

Returning to London, Losada set about forming a non-profit agency and a website (www.actfortibet.org) for a full-blown awareness campaign about the enslavement of Tibet. To draw attention to her cause, she got a group of volunteers to scale Nelson’s Column in the heart of Trafalgar Square, and unfurl a giant banner displaying the likeness of the Dalai Lama. This dramatic initiative finally got the attention of British tabloids, ever on the prowl for sensa-tional news. Losada’s efforts were finally crowned with recognition when she was granted an audience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Social activists can be unduly serious, even dour, but Losada has a delightful sense of humour, which makes her unputdownable book a wonderful and easy read, and at the same time, immensely moving and inspiring.

Yoginder Sikand