Came across this simple and beautiful article by someone...so just thought to share it

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My Principal Looks Like Bin Laden

By Cara Anna


I wonder if they’d let me give the $1,000 to Muslims in Pakistan. Is it still a too-sensitive area? Would my name end up on a List? I will try anyway.

I will explain that I just spent four months in the mountains of northwest Pakistan, a short walk from the Afghan border, teaching kids at a small rural school to speak English.

The school is 12 hours from the nearest city, over mostly unpaved roads. And as I write, it is winter, which means those roads are blocked and supplies must come on a daily plane to the main town, weather permitting, or in cargo trucks on a long detour through Afghanistan. When they don’t, families either pay the rising prices for food or eat what they spent the summer storing away – rice, wheat, corn, dried vegetables and fruit. Then there are the bundles of wood for fuel, carried from forests that with every year slip farther and farther away. Some families have electricity, but snowfalls cause shortages. Life could be easier.

It doesn’t help that someone high in the U.S. military thinks Osama bin Laden is hiding there. That’s what newspaper reports said recently. Lovely. That could mean even fewer foreigners will visit that part of the world, as I did, to spend money and volunteer. I’d like to think the military person is wrong.

The principal at my school looks like bin Laden, though, tall and lanky and gray. It took me a while to dare tell him. He’s a strict man. He spent most of his career in the army, but he opened this private school 13 years ago. He was disappointed with government schools.

His school runs on his discipline and passion. There’s really not much else. Here is a classroom: Cement walls, cement floors, wooden benches and a blackboard. Every day, each classroom gets a single piece of chalk.

But it works. When the school’s first group of graduates took their final exams, they placed first, second and third in a district with a well-scattered population of about 500,000. Local officials and principals with bigger budgets were shocked.

The school is funded with tuition fees and the principal’s own money. Still, somehow, about 10 percent of students are on full-tuition scholarships. Maybe their father died. Maybe they are talented but don’t have the money. The principal wants deserving students to succeed, even if they can’t pay.

And in a move that drives visiting education officials crazy, the principal teaches girls. This is in a region where women are not seen in public. This is where burqas still are worn. This is where girls’ education, according to the religious leaders who control the provincial government, should be stopped.

“Madam, we are bold,” my sixth-grade girls would say. They never just sat there, shyly whispering answers into their headscarves. They were even louder in class than the boys. They didn’t fear English. “Madam!” they would demand with dimpled smiles. “What is your favorite class?” “Yours, silly,” I wanted to say.

The principal’s philosophy on education is simple. You must be a good Muslim, he tells his students. But that means much more than just reciting the Koran. It means serving others. It means becoming a doctor, an engineer, a teacher. It means reaching out to the outside world and even, if necessary, hiring a non-Muslim, American, female teacher like me.

“Westerners are good people,” the principal told his students. And to me, he said, “You would make a good Muslim.” From him, it was the highest compliment.

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Now I would like to introduce my father. My father has never been to Pakistan. He is recovering from cancer, so he’s in no condition to go overseas. But he continues to teach third grade in an inner-city school in North Carolina. He is not a big spender. He’s a sandwich man. But after listening to my descriptions of Pakistan and looking at my photos, he said he’d like to donate to my school. He wanted to give $1,000.

“It sounds worth it,” he said.

It will be done. I am sending the money by Western Union, and the money will be picked up in Pakistan at the post office and deposited in a bank account in the town of Chitral. My host in Pakistan, who works for an aid organization, says interest on the account will be used for scholarships. The more that’s deposited, the more students, especially girls, will be able to study.

My father, a man who surely hasn’t bought a pair of dress pants in a decade, has created an endowment. And he did it without question. It’s nice to know he has such faith in me, but it’s amazing he has the same faith in a place and a people that seem so different, sometimes violently different, from him.

I hope others who read this might have the same faith, in all of us.

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Cara Anna (caraannaji@yahoo.com) has been a Peace Corps volunteer and a newspaper reporter and editor in the U.S. and China. She came to Pakistan for the trekking and was talked into teaching by a local guide. She spent six months in Pakistan in all.