5th October 2012

Another challenging breakfast of mutton and onions, fresh naan from the bread oven and hot milk with half a mug of sugar...all under the watchful eye of the girls and they expect you to eat everything and then pile on more. 


 











 We leave Worsaj. I so wish people could really understand what it is like to be a guest in this place. It is such a privilege and it is so far from how Afghanistan is perceived by the outside world. We have grown fat with the endless meals we have been given, my case is weighed down with bags of almonds and new clothes I have been given. Most of all we have felt safe and the gratitude of this community for the work we have done with their schools, is overwhelming. 

On our way home, we go off road in search of a school we have been asked to build. The district is Fakhar, which borders Worsaj. The people have heard about our  work and want us to visit this school and help them.  We travel through boulder strewn river beds and up steep ravines, past tiny mud villages perched precariously on the hillsides and  lines of donkeys carrying huge loads, on past  villagers of  all ages, who are  busy harvesting in the fields and eventually, to the village of  Naryaab, where we see 8 tents in the dust, Ghulam Rasool Shaheid School. Nearly 600 girls and boys attend this school. It is so remote and to build a school is so challenging, that several NGOs have refused their help. We are all won over by the determination of the headmaster to get help for his school. He shows us two sites where we could build a boys and a girls school, we meet the owners of the land, we are told the community has the money collected ready to purchase it. We will try our best. The community is so isolated, the lives so tough and the place so desolate, it would be wonderful to build a school where it  is so needed.

 We leave the school and head for Faizabad. Sad farewells to Mukhtar on the way.  Dramatic landscape all the way along the  Kokcha River, a tributary of the Amu Darya- the mighty Oxus.