Page 284 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

milestones agreed in the project plan I’ll release the next sum of
cash.’
After that, I went out to Lahore, often with Aisha, about every
six weeks to monitor progress. We enjoyed being there so much
that we decided to buy a house: after all, once the school was built
we would be regular visitors and we weren’t comfortable imposing
ourselves on relations that frequently.
It was incredible the number of things we didn’t anticipate. It’s
just not as simple as building a school and then having the children
turn up. The first problem we realised was that there weren’t
enough children in the village to fill the school. We were building
a facility for 400 pupils, so we were going to have to invite
children from the surrounding villages to enrol, and that meant
purchasing minibuses, which also meant hiring drivers.
Then I realised I’d screwed up by building the school so far from
the city. Stupidly, it never dawned on me that I would have trouble
finding teachers, but in a small village there was no one who spoke
English – most of the lessons were going to be in English, as being
bilingual would transform the children’s prospects – or who had
any teaching experience.
So now I had to buy another minibus to bring in teachers from
Lahore, and with the additional traffic it also meant I had to build
a road from the village to the school that wouldn’t wash away in
the monsoon! The costs kept piling up: books, computers, catering
equipment for the kitchen, uniforms. The troubles, pitfalls and
delays are too numerous to go into, but suffice it to say that
opening the school was a huge challenge, and the first day of term
at the Abdul Rashid Khan Campus was one of the proudest
moments of my life.
Going there today is an amazing feeling. Every time I see my
dad’s name above the gate a tear comes to my eye. All the teachers
know me and they always get the children to say ‘Good morning,
Mr James,’ when I visit. The last time I was there, the kids recited

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