The Power of One

The tragic murder of Canadian Michael Frastacky in Afghanistan proves determination trumps tyranny.
By Dianne Rinehart
The Hamilton Spectator (Aug 5, 2006)

In a world where most of us feel helpless in the face of tyranny, oppression, and terrorism, Vancouver carpenter Michael Frastacky just quietly got the job done.

And what a job he did.

Without a charitable organization behind him, and with nothing but his own money and funds he raised from friends, Frastacky, 56, went to Nahrin, Afghanistan, for four summers in a row, starting in 2002, and after seeking the buy-in of village elders, built a school -- where none had existed before -- then filled it with books, teachers and sports equipment.

When he was brutally shot on the night of July 23 -- his puppy, Lucky, a bodyguard, and translator helpless to defend him -- his school was educating about 550 students, 255 of them, amazingly, girls.

He did it, "so that together they can build a country where Afghans feel safe and look towards their tomorrows with hope and confidence."

It wasn't an easy task. His e-mails home described the challenges -- risking his life to buy supplies in Kabul where suicide bomb attacks, often on the offices of charities, were a daily event; the "barbarity" of a local man who, when a family denied him the 15-year-old daughter he demanded for his son, "went outside, got his Kalashnikov, and threatened to kill the mother"; and of school officials who stole operating funds -- he tracked them down and got it back -- or demanded bribes from parents.

But he also celebrated the joys: that the population appeared healthier since the ousting of the Taliban; that he finally had a good principal.

Ironically, this summer was to have been his last. He felt his job was done, and had only returned to finalize details -- the digging of a well, the creation of a soccer pitch for girls -- since boys monopolized the other -- the building of a girls playground, so they'd be allowed out to play.

"He felt endangered," his sister Luba Frastacky, a librarian at the University of Toronto, says of this last trip, but he went anyway. "Nobody wanted him to go. But Mikee was headstrong. He was a Frastacky."

Indeed, in his last few e-mails Frastacky mused about arming himself and jokes that his puppy is his alarm system.

Lucky, alas, could not save him when the tyrants -- no one knows whether it was drug lords, warlords, or the Taliban -- came to murder him.

But Michael's legacy is not just that he managed to build a co-ed school in the face of tyranny and corruption in a country where fewer than half of primary school-age girls are in school and one-third of the country's districts have no girls' schools at all; or that his school exists, when 204 other girls' schools were either closed or razed in 2005 alone. (And that number, Human Rights Watch reports, "underestimates the severity of the crisis ... already there appear to have been more attacks on education in the first half of 2006 than in all of 2005.")

No, "Mikee's" legacy is that he saw the possible, where the world apparently sees the impossible. "You have a drop in the bucket," he said. "Many drops make a cup. Many cups make a bucket." And, in fact, the World Bank estimates that 5.2 million children are in school now, up from 775,000 in school under the Taliban reign in 2001.

The World Bank tells us something else Michael implicitly knew: that countries in which girls are educated have healthier populations, faster growing economies and -- this is key to world security, not just Afghanistan's -- less government corruption.

So in the end, should we give up on Afghanistan, as many Canadians advocate?

Not if we have one one-millionth the courage and vision Michael Frastacky did.

So on Tuesday, when friends and family gather in his hometown of Toronto to celebrate his life, perhaps we can all raise our glasses and toast his bravery and vision -- and, perhaps, dream this dream: that one child graduating from his school will turn out to be the Nelson Mandela, Gandhi or Martin Luther King Afghanistan so desperately needs.

It only takes one -- as Michael so richly illustrates.

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If you would like to help carry on Michael Frastacky's work educating girls in Afghanistan, go to Give Girls a Chance ( http://www.givegirlsachance.org/), which is establishing a special fund in his honour.

Dianne Rinehart is a Toronto-based writer and co-founder of Give Girls a Chance.