Summer's Final Lesson

By Matt


The rusted blue gate was open when we got there. It was 8:30 in the morning and already hot. A tall, leathery-skinned Pashtun man with deep hazel eyes and a long dark beard waited for us at the entrance. “The headmaster,” my interpreter whispered to me as we approached.

“As-salam alaikum,” the headmaster said, shaking my hand before covering his heart in the Muslim way. “Wa alaikum assalam,” I replied, trying clumsily to find my own heart beneath an armored plate. He smiled at this, then stepped aside. Like a pendulum, his long arm waved us into his sanctuary.



Three buildings and a tree-filled courtyard that made up the school were concealed from the barricaded street by an eight-foot-high crumbling concrete wall. Razor-sharp concertina wire spiraled along the top. On the opposite side of the school’s north wall the provincial police headquarters buzzed with activity. Caddy corner to the school gate, two armed, humorless Afghan soldiers guarded an equally fortified Army medical facility. The school’s enclosure in this military compound was intentional, and it sent a powerful message: Nobody is getting into this place.

For good reason, too. With 1,650 enrolled students, the Halima Khazan Girl’s School is the only institute of learning for girls in Gardez. Across Afghanistan, Taliban militants have been known to beat or kill the headmasters of such schools, chop off the heads of girls who dare attend them or splash acid into their faces, disfiguring them for life. As targets for violence go, the girls at this school are no exception. Such are the challenges facing a brave new Afghanistan, to say nothing of the decadent conditions under which the girls study.

But that was where we came in. I and two of my NCOs, Staff Sergeant Justin Boeck and Master Sergeant Ronald Raflik, had come to the school that morning, backed up by a small security force, to perform a site survey for what should eventually become a NATO-funded refurbishment project. In one section of the schoolyard, the corrugated metal roof of one building had been ripped off in a recent storm and lay crumpled on the ground. Plaster fell from the walls of the main schoolhouse in fist-sized chunks, almost to the touch. The uneven dirt of the schoolyard caused pools of mosquito-infested water to accumulate each spring and sit stagnant for weeks. The problems went on.

As the headmaster continued to dictate, through my interpreter, the school’s litany of problems, I became distracted by significant activity in the schoolyard. Little girls darted gleefully about, laughing and chasing one another around trees and benches. After a few minutes, I couldn’t help but notice that the commotion was meant to draw our attention. How strange we must look to them, I thought. Here we were decked out in helmets, armored vests, sunglasses and automatic rifles in probably the safest place they know. As we continued to walk with the headmaster, I caught the eye of two girls no more than 10 years old sitting under a tree. In unison, they stood up and curtsied. “Salam,” they said with a giggle. It caught me off guard, and I blushed.

Across the schoolyard, about 40 older girls in their teens wearing either white or black headscarves sat facing the same direction in blue plastic chairs, the kind you might find at a backyard barbecue. All of them were hunched over, scribbling furiously in stapled packets of paper they held in their laps. I pulled my interpreter away from the headmaster for a moment and asked him what the girls were doing.

“Dey take final exam,” he said. “Tomorrow dey start vacation, 10 days.” I wondered why they should take a year-end exam outside in the heat like this.

When we finally entered the main schoolhouse, I understood. There was no electricity, the walls were badly damaged, windows were shattered and saucer-sized holes had been punched into doors. This was no place to study. And yet there they were, out in the yard, diligently scrawling answers to their exams as if this were the last thing they would ever get to learn.

I wasn’t supposed to, but as we wrapped up our inspection, I turned to the headmaster and looked him in the eye. “I promise we are going to fix this,” I said. Boeck and Raflik nodded in agreement.


The day before going to Halima Khazan, I’d read Thomas Friedman’s recent column in The New York Times about the importance of our efforts in providing education for Afghan girls. In it Friedman argues that this one good cause in a country mired in misery might just be worth America’s sticking it out a little longer. After seeing the hopefulness in the faces of these girls, I felt the same way.

But later that morning, less than half an hour after we’d left the school to head back to base, suicide bombers disguised as women wearing burqas detonated their vests in that very compound. More than 10 people were killed and several more wounded. When I found out, I trembled at what a close call my soldiers and I had had.

The attacks were soon all over the news. The mention of Gardez as the primary target for the bombings prompted me to shoot a quick e-mail to Molly. “I feel very grateful to be safe right now,” I wrote. “It really makes you think, you know? Anyway, I am OK, and I just wanted you to know. I love you so much.”

Thankfully, no one at the school was physically harmed. I later heard that a government office on the opposite side of the school's west wall was the target. Far enough away for the girls' safety, but close enough to cause plenty of damage, the invisible kind you just can't see.

I don’t presume to understand the depths of fear the mothers of these girls must feel everyday as they send their children off to school, hoping that education will liberate them from the bondage they themselves have endured. And I cannot fathom the courage these children possess. But I like to think that one day their daring individual efforts to build a more just society will pay off. Because hatred, violence and grisly death have plagued this unfortunate little country for far too long.

They deserve a vacation from it all.


Photos by Master Sergeant Ronald J. Raflik