Free Stones Into School by Greg Mortenson Page A

moist slurping sounds. Everything was consumed--the head, the testicles, the eyeballs--and when they were through, the men took their hands, which were now slathered in grease, and carefully smeared them over their faces, their hair, and their beards.
    Later, when everyone had pronounced himself sated, Chinese thermoses filled with salt tea were brought in, followed by large bowls of arak, fermented mare's milk. Then it was time to prepare for bed, and as blankets were brought to Sarfraz's home from all over the village, the guests stepped outside to perform final ablutions.
    By this time, the wind was settled, the snow had subsided, and the sky was littered with a spray of constellations so dense and so bright that the milky glow of the heavens defined every inch of the ridgelines along the peaks surrounding Zuudkhan. As the horsemen squatted in the starlight cleaning their teeth with matchsticks or the tips of their knives, Roshan Khan stood beside me for a moment, looking up at the night sky. Then, with Sarfraz translating so that I could follow, he said that he had a message from his father that he needed to recite:
    For me, a hard life is no problem. But for our children, this life is no good. We have little food, poor houses, and no school. We know you have been building schools in Pakistan, so will you come and build the same for us in Afghanistan? We will donate the land, the stones, the labor, everything that you ask. Come now and stay with us for the winter as our guest. We will take tea together. We will butcher our biggest sheep. We will discuss matters properly and we will plan a school.
    I replied that I was honored by this invitation, but I could not possibly return over the Irshad Pass to camp out with Abdul Rashid Khan for the next five months. First, I had no formal permission to enter Afghanistan--and the Taliban, who ran the government in Kabul, weren't exactly handing out visas to U.S. citizens. More important, my pregnant wife was expecting me home, and if I did not return soon, she would be deeply upset. Surely the Kirghiz could understand the seriousness and the magnitude of a wife's displeasure?
    Roshan Khan nodded gravely.
    However, I continued, I would definitely come to visit them when I got the chance, and when I arrived, I would do my best to help them. In the meantime, I needed some information. Could Abdul Rashid Khan perhaps give me a rough sense of the number of children, ages five to fifteen, who needed education?
    “No problem,” Roshan told me. “Soon we will give you the name of every single person inside the Wakhan.”
    This seemed a bit far-fetched. In the region that these men had just ridden out of, there are no phones, no faxes, no e-mail, no postal system, and no roads. Moreover, thanks to the snow and the storms, the area was about to be sealed off from the rest of the world for seven months.
    “How in the world do they propose to get this information to us?” I asked, turning to Sarfraz. “And when it comes time for us to enter Afghanistan and make our way up to the Wakhan, how can we tell Abdul Rashid Khan when we're coming?”
    “No problem, we do not need to tell,” Sarfraz replied airily. “Abdul Rashid Khan will find a way of getting us the information. And he will know when we are coming.”
    Having no other alternative, I shrugged and took him at his word.
    Now Roshan Khan and I enacted a ritual that I recognized from six years earlier, when Haji Ali had stood in the barley fields of Korphe and asked me to provide an assurance that I was coming back to him. The leader of the Kirghiz horsemen placed his right hand on my left shoulder, and I did the same with him.
    “So, you will promise to come to Wakhan to build a school for our children?” he asked, looking me in the eye.
    In a place like Zuudkhan, an affirmative response to a question like that can confer an obligation that is akin to a blood oath--and for someone like me, this can be a real problem. As those