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Lesson 8 Three Cups of Tea CHAPTER 12 HAJI ALI?S LESSON
It may seem absurd to believe that a “primitive” culture in the Himalaya has anything to teach our industrialized society.
But our search for a future that works keeps spiraling back to an ancient connection between ourselves and the earth, an interconnectedness that ancient cultures have never abandoned.
—Helena Norberg-Hodge
The rocks looked more like an ancient ruin than the building blocks of a new school. Though he stood on a plateau high above the Braldu River, in perfect fall weather that made the pyramid of Korphe K2 bristle, Mortenson was disheartened by the prospect before him.
The previous winter, before leaving Korphe, Mortenson had driven tent pegs into the frozen soil and tied red and blue braided nylon cord to them, marking out a floor plan of five rooms he imagined for the school. He?d left Haji Ali enough cash to hire laborers from villages downriver to help quarry and carry the stone. And when he arrived, he expected to find at least a foundation for the school excavated. Instead, he saw two mounds of stones standing in a field.
Inspecting the site with Haji Ali, Mortenson struggled to hide his disappointment. Between his four trips to the airport with his wife, and his tussle to reclaim his building materials, he had arrived here in mid-October, nearly a month after he?d told Haji Ali to expect him. They should be building the walls this week, he thought. Mortenson turned his anger inward, blaming himself. He couldn?t keep returning to Pakistan forever. Now that he was married, he needed a career. He wanted to get the school finished so he could set about figuring out what his life?s work would be. And now winter would delay construction once again. Mortenson kicked a stone angrily.
“What?s the matter,” Haji Ali said in Balti. “You look like the young ram at the time of butting.”
Mortenson took a deep breath. “Why haven?t you started?” he asked.
“Doctor Greg, we discussed your plan after you returned to your village,” Haji Ali said. “And we decided it was foolish to waste your money paying the lazy men of Munjung and Askole. They know the school is being built by a rich foreigner, so they will work little and argue much. So we cut the stones ourselves. It took all summer, because many of the men had to leave for porter work. But don?t worry. I have your money locked safely in my home.”
“I?m not worried about the money.” Mortenson said. “But I wanted to get a roof up before winter so the children would have some place to study.”
Haji Ali put his hand on Mortenson?s shoulder, and gave his impa-tient American a fatherly squeeze. “I thank all-merciful Allah for all you have done. But the people of Korphe have been here without a school for six hundred years,” he said, smiling. “What is one winter more?”
That night, lying under the stars on Haji Ali?s roof next to Twaha, Mortenson
thought of how lonely he?d been the last time he?d slept on this spot. He pictured Tara, remembering the lovely way she had waved at him through the glass at SFO, and a bubble of happiness rose up so forcefully that he couldn?t keep it to himself.
“Twaha, you awake?” Mortenson asked. “Yes, awake.”
“I have something to tell you. I got married.”
Mortenson heard a click, then squinted into the beam of the flash-light he?d just brought from America for his friend. Twaha sat up next to him, studying his face under the novel electric light to see if he was joking.
Then the flashlight fell to the ground and Mortenson felt a sharp flurry of fists pummeling his arms and shoulders in congratulations. Twaha collapsed on his pile of bedding with a happy sigh. “Haji Ali say Doctor Greg look different this time,” Twaha said, laughing. “He really know everything.” He switched the flashlight experimentally off and on. “Can I know her good name?”
“Tara.”
“Ta... ra,” Twaha said, weighing the name, the Urdu word for star, on his tongue. “She is lovely, your Tara?”
“Yes,” Mortenson said, feeling himself blush. “Lovely.”
“How many goat and ram you must give her father?” Twaha asked.
“Her father is dead, like mine,” Mortenson said. “And in America, we don?t pay a bride price.”
“Did she cry when she left her mother?”
“She only told her mother about me after we were married.”
Twaha fell silent for a moment, considering the exotic matrimonial customs of Americans.
The next morning, Mortenson found a precious boiled egg on his plate, next to his usual breakfast of chapatti and lassi. Sakina grinned proudly at him from the doorway to her kitchen. Haji Ali peeled the egg for Mortenson and explained. “So you?ll be strong enough to make many children,” he said, while Sakina giggled behind her shawl.
Haji Ali sat patiently at his side until Mortenson finished a second cup of milk tea. A grin smoldered, then ignited at the center of his thick beard. “Let?s go build a school,” he said.
Haji Ali climbed to his roof and called for all the men of Korphe to assemble at the local mosque. Mortenson, carrying five shovels he had recovered from Changazi?s derelict hotel, followed Haji Ali down muddy alleys toward the mosque, as men streamed out of every doorway.
Korphe?s mosque had adapted to a changing environment over the centuries, much like the people who filled it with their faith. The Balti, lacking a written language, compensated by passing down exacting oral history. Every Balti could recite their ancestry, stretching back ten to twenty generations. And everyone in Korphe knew the legend of this listing wooden building buttressed with earthern walls. It had stood for nearly five hundred years, and had served as a Buddhist tem?ple before Islam had established a foothold in Baltistan.
For the first time since he?d arrived in Korphe, Mortenson stepped through the gate and set foot inside. During his visits he had kept respectful distance from the mosque, and Korphe?s religious leader, Sher Takhi. Mortenson was unsure how the mullah felt about having an infidel in the village, an infidel who proposed to educate Korphe?s girls. Sher Takhi smiled at Mortenson and led him to a prayer mat at the rear of the room. He was thin and his beard was peppered with gray. Like most Balti living in the mountains, he looked decades older than his forty-odd years.
Sher Takhi, who called Korphe?s widely dispersed faithful to prayer five times a day without the benefit of amplification, filled the small room with his booming voice. He led the men in a special dua, asking Allah?s blessing and guidance as they began work on the school. Mortenson prayed as the tailor had taught him, folding his arms and bending at the waist.
Haji Ali provided the string this time. It was locally woven twine, not blue and red braided cord. With Mortenson, he measured out the correct lengths, dipped the twine in a mixture of calcium and lime, then used the village?s time-tested method to mark the dimensions of a construction site. Haji Ali and Twaha pulled the cord taut and whipped it against the ground, leaving white lines on the packed earth where the walls of the school would stand. Mortenson passed out the five shovels and he and fifty other men took turns digging steadily all afternoon until they had hollowed out a trench, three feet wide and three feet deep, around the school?s perimeter.
When the trench was done, Haji Ali nodded toward two large stones that had been carved for this purpose, and six men lifted them, shuffled agonizingly toward the trench, and lowered them into the corner of the foundation facing Korphe K2. Then he called for the chogo rabak.
Twaha strode seriously away and returned with a massive ash-colored animal with nobly curving horns. “Usually you have to drag a ram to make it move,” Mortenson says. “But this was the village?s number-one ram. It was so big that it was dragging Twaha, who was doing his best just to hold on as the animal led him to its own execution.”
Twaha halted the rabak over the cornerstone and grasped its horns. Gently, he turned the animal?s head toward Mecca as Sher Takhi chanted the story of Allah asking Abraham to sacrifice his son, before allowing him to substitute a ram after he passed his test of loyalty. In the Koran, the story appears in much the same manner as the covenant of Abraham and Isaac does in the Torah and the Bible. “Watching this scene straight out of the Bible stories I?d learned in Sunday school,” Mortenson says, “I thought how much the different faiths had in common, how you could trace so many of their traditions back to the same root.”
Hussain, an accomplished climbing porter with the build of a Balti-sized sumo wrestler, served as the village executioner. Baltoro porters were paid per twenty-five-kilogram load. Hussain was famous for hauling triple loads on expeditions, never carrying fewer than seventy kilograms, or nearly 150 pounds, at a time. He drew a sixteen-inch knife from its sheath and laid it lightly against the hair bristling on the ram?s throat. Sher Takhi raised his hands, palms up, over the rabak?s head and requested Allah?s permission to take its life. Then he nodded to the man
holding the quivering knife.
The women prepared rice and dal while the men skinned and butchered the ram. “We didn?t get anything else done that day,” Mortenson says. “In fact we hardly got anything else done that fall. Haji Ali was in a hurry to sanctify the school, but not to build it. We just had a massive feast. For people who may only get meat a few times a year, that meal was a much more serious business than a school.”
Every resident of Korphe got a share of the meat. After the last bone had been beaten and the last strip of marrow sucked dry, Mortenson joined a group of men who built a fire by what would one day soon, he hoped, become the courtyard of a completed school. As the moon rose over Korphe K2, they danced around the fire and taught Mortenson verses from the great Himalayan Epic of Gezar, beloved across much of the roof of the world, and introduced him to their inexhaustible supply of Balti folk songs.
Together, the Balti and the big American danced like dervishes and sang of feuding alpine kingdoms, of the savagery of Pathan warriors pouring in from Afghanistan, and battles between the Balti rajas and the strange European conquerors who came first from the West in the time of Alexander, and then, attended by their Gurkha hirelings, from British India to the south and east. Korphe?s women, accustomed by now to the infidel among them, stood at the edge of the firelight, their faces glowing, as they clapped and sang along with their men.
The Balti had a history, a rich tradition, Mortenson realized. The fact that it wasn?t written down didn?t make it any less real. These faces ringing the fire didn?t need to be taught so much as they needed help. And the school was a place where they could help themselves. Mortenson studied the construction site. It was little more than a shallow ditch spattered with ram?s blood. He might not accomplish much more before returning home to Tara, but during that night of dancing, the school reached critical mass in his mind—it became real to him. He could see the completed building standing before him as clearly as Korphe K2, lit by the waxing moon. Mortenson turned back to face the fire.
In May 1996, when Mortenson filled out his arrival forms at the Islamabad airport, his pen hovered unfamiliarly over the box for “occupation.” For years he?d written “climber.” This time he scrawled in his messy block printing “Director, Central Asia Institute.” Hoerni had suggested the name. The scientist envisioned an operation that could grow as fast as one of his semiconductor companies, spreading to build schools and other humanitarian projects beyond Pakistan, across the multitude of “stans” that spilled across the unraveling routes of the Silk Road. Mortenson wasn?t so sure. He?d had too much trouble getting one school off the ground to think on Hoerni?s scale. But he had a yearly salary of $21,798 he could count on and a mandate to start thinking long-term.
On the far bank of the Braldu, Haji Ali stood, sculpted as always, to the highest point on the precipice. Flanked by Twaha and Jahan, he welcomed his American son back with a bear hug.
The next morning, before first light, Mortenson paced back and forth on Haji Ali?s roof. He was here as the director of an organization now. He had wider
responsibilities than just one school in one isolated village. The faith Jean Hoerni had invested in him lay heavy on his broad shoulders, and he was determined that there would be no more interminable meetings and banquets; he would drive the construction swiftly to completion.
When the village gathered by the construction site, Mortenson met them, plumb line, level, and ledger in hand. “Getting the construction going was like conducting an orchestra,” Mortenson says. “First we used dynamite to blast the large boulders into smaller stones. Then we had dozens of people snaking through the chaos like a melody, carrying the stones to the masons. Then Makhmal the mason would form the stones into amazingly regular bricks with just a few blows from his chisel. Groups of women carried water from the river, which they mixed with cement in large holes we?d dug in the ground. Then masons would trowel on cement, and lay the bricks in slowly rising rows. Finally, dozens of village children would dart in, wedging slivers of stone into the chinks between bricks.”
“We were all very excited to help,” says Hussein the teacher?s daughter Tahira, who was then ten years old. “My father told me the school would be something very special, but I had no idea then what a school was, so I came to see what everyone was so excited about, and to help. Everyone in my family helped.”
“Doctor Greg brought books from his country,” says Haji Ali?s granddaughter Jahan, then nine, who would one day graduate with Tahira in the Korphe School?s first class. “And they had pictures of schools in them, so I had some idea what we were hoping to build. I thought Doctor Greg was very distinguished with his clean clothes. And the children in the pictures looked very clean also. And I remember thinking, if I go to his school, maybe one day I can become distinguished, too.”
All through June, the school walls rose steadily, but with half the construction crew missing on any given day as they left to tend their crops and animals, it progressed too slowly for Mortenson?s liking. “I tried to be a tough but fair taskmaster,” Mortenson says. “I spent all day at the construction site, from sunrise to sunset, using my level to make sure the walls were even and my plumb line to check that they were standing straight. I always had my notebook in my hand, and kept my eyes on everyone, anxious to account for every rupee. I didn?t want to disappoint Jean Hoerni, so I drove people hard.”
One clear afternoon at the beginning of August, Haji Ali tapped Mortenson on the shoulder at the construction site and asked him to take a walk. The old man led the former climber uphill for an hour, on legs still strong enough to humble the much younger man. Mortenson felt precious time slipping away, and by the time Haji Ali halted on a narrow ledge high above the village, Mortenson was panting, as much from the thought of all the tasks he was failing to supervise as from his exertion.
Haji Ali waited until Mortenson caught his breath, then instructed him to look at the view. The air had the fresh-scrubbed clarity that only comes with altitude. Beyond Korphe K2, the ice peaks of the inner Karakoram knifed relentlessly into a defenseless blue sky. A thousand feet below, Korphe, green with ripening barley fields, looked small and vulnerable, a life raft adrift on a sea of stone.
Haji Ali reached up and laid his hand on Mortenson?s shoulder. “These