Free Stones Into School by Greg Mortenson

recognized a spirit that was not kindred to my own so much as its complement. In ways that neither Sarfraz nor I fully understood at the time, each of us seemed to round out and finish off something inside the other.
    And so it was that our conversation on that snowy evening in Zuudkhan marked the beginning of the greatest friendship of my life.
    The following day, after the elders of the village had taken me on a tour of their new water pipe and the hydroelectric generator whose construction the Central Asia Institute had financed, Sarfraz and I clambered into his cherry red Land Cruiser and drove north on a horrendous road whose surface was coated with a gelatinous soup of ice, mud, and loose boulders. Our destination was Baba Gundi Ziarat, a small hexagonal shrine at the edge of Pakistan's northern border, on the threshold of the Afghan frontier.
    It took an hour to complete the fifteen-mile trip, which took us through a barren landscape of treeless, rock-strewn hills that resembled the surface of the moon. The bleakness of the Charpurson (which translates to “place of nothing” in Wakhi) was hardened even further by the weather, a frigid mixture of sleet and snow that was periodically turned horizontal by the strong gusts of wind coming off the Hindu Kush.
    As we drew near the shrine, we spied a herd of roughly twenty yaks, tended by five men on horseback. A group of Kirghiz had apparently just come through the Irshad Pass for a final trading session before winter set in.
    These men were Sarfraz's friends and acquaintances, so after a round of introductions had been made, we gathered up several yak-wool blankets and spread them on the wet ground. It was while we were sitting there drinking salt tea that the squadron of fourteen Kirghiz riders, the men who had been sent out by Abdul Rashid Khan to find me, abruptly thundered around the corner at the entrance to the pass.
    Their leader was Roshan Khan, the oldest son of Abdul Rashid Khan, and when we had finished exchanging pleasantries, Sarfraz leaped into the back of his Land Cruiser and presented the Kirghiz with forty bags of flour as an early celebration of Id (one of the two biggest holidays on the Islamic calendar). When the cargo was unloaded, we headed back toward Zuudkhan, surrounded by the horsemen.
    We were back at the village by early evening and converged on Sarfraz's mud-walled home. While the Kirghiz dismounted and tended to their horses, Sarfraz selected a fat mai (sheep), dropped it gently to the ground with its head pointing southwest toward Mecca, said a quick blessing, and drew a knife across its throat. When the animal had finished bleeding out, Sarfraz's wife, Bibi Numa, removed the skin from the carcass and set about preparing the meat.
    By nightfall, nearly forty people had crammed into Sarfraz's one-room, sixteen by twenty-foot home and arranged themselves with their backs to the walls. The Kirghiz sat cross-legged in their enormous boots, from which they pulled out their riding knives to serve as silverware. (It is generally forbidden to wear shoes inside someone's home, but Sarfraz had given the Kirghiz a special dispensation because if they removed their boots, their feet would swell up as a result of the high-altitude crossing they had just completed, and it would be almost impossible to get their boots on again.)
    Most of the mutton had been boiled in a large pot, although a small portion had been fried into kebabs in a pan. The real delicacy, however, was the dumba, the blubberlike fat from the animal's tail and its hind end. This was placed on a platter in the center of the room, where it sat quivering like a hunk of golden Jell-O.
    The Kirghiz inhaled this feast with the harrowing relish of men who had been subsisting on rainwater and chewing tobacco. They scooped up the fat with their fists, they stripped the meat from the bones with their riding knives, and they snapped the bones in half and sucked the marrow into their mouths with