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National Geographic : 1987 Oct
Contents
together. Little girls carry around baby sis ters instead of dolls. One girl I met was 13 when her parents married her to a 40-year old man. "I felt an inner conflict," Barbara contin ued, "wanting the women to know there is another way of life through education, that they could have freedom of choice and not have a husband forced upon them at an ear ly age. But 'fulfillment' or 'consciousness raising' would be misunderstood here. If I convinced one woman, she would only be come a misfit among her people." Askole's one schoolteacher, a slender Bal ti in his late 20s, takes a dim view of vil lage education. "We have no schoolroom," he told me, "so I must teach in someone's house. I have only six students, though there are more than 40 boys of school age in the village. For the girls I can do nothing, since local custom forbids me to teach boys and girls together. "Askole families," he said, "want their children to work in the fields, not waste time studying. Parents don't think of a child's future while life in the present is so hard." H AJJI MAHDI, Askole's village leader, thinks the new road from Skardu will solve many of the problems of the village. "Skardu is 85 miles away," he points out. "Goods brought from there by porter cost us dearly. Sugar, for example, costs nine ru pees [55 U. S. cents] a kilogram in Skardu, but it costs 17 rupees a kilo by the time it reaches Askole. When things can be brought in by truck, life will be better for us all." Perhaps, but not for Askole's wild inhab itants. Just before Barbara and Nazir and I left, a villager took me aside and whispered, "Snow leopard skin. Come my house, see. You buy, 10,000 rupees?" The snow leopard is an endangered spe cies now protected by international agree ment.* But for lack of funds the law is not enforced in the higher valleys of the K2 region, where snow leopards normally dine on the area's large stock of Siberian ibex. The leopards get in trouble when they come down to Askole for a fast-food meal of do mestic goat. The villager who took me aside was offering a highly illegal item for $600 with little risk of being caught or punished. Although forbidden to do so by law, a villager in Askole offers for sale the pelt of a snow leopard,an endangered species,for $600-the equivalent of a year's income. The cat had killed a village goat. Like a pipeline from the snowy peaks, the Braldu River carriesmeltwater to fields aroundAskole (facingpage). When the Askole road is completed, it could become a poacher's highway, a threat not only to the snow leopard but also to ibex, brown bear, and the rare and graceful urial, a mountain sheep. One morning near Askole I saw a herd of the latter flowing across a hillside like wind rippling through a field of wheat. In the weeks that followed, Barbara and Nazir and I visited a number of other remote Balti villages. One of them, the community of Arandu in the lush Basha Valley, would no longer exist had it been located a mere 200 feet higher up. (Continued on page 549) *See "Tracking the Elusive Snow Leopard," by Rodney Jackson and Darla Hillard, in the June 1986 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. Baltistan-The 20th Century Comes to Shangri-la 541
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