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The debris is everywhere you look—except, thank God, for the runway. As the Ariana Airlines jet approaches the airport in Kabul, four American scholars see that the place is littered with old missile shells and wrecked airplanes. "Later I find out that they can't clean up this debris because the ground is still filled with land mines," professor Teri McCarthy, one of the passengers, tells Christianity Today.

Mines kill between 40 and 100 Afghans a week in the rugged, mountainous Asian country. In the land still bleeding from 25 years of cruelty, an average person's life expectancy is 47 years. Afghanistan's infrastructure is in shambles: buildings lay in ruin; there's no central heating for cold winters; warlords are gaining power; local mafias grow opium, which supplies 80 to 90 percent of the heroin consumed in Europe.

But this literal ruin fades compared to a more damaging waste—that of Afghans' intellect and spirit. Only 21 percent of women, and 51 percent of men, can read. UNICEF reports that more than 85 percent of Afghans have never been to school. Many people are homeless. A phone line or Internet access is a sign of opulence. Only 4 percent of Afghanistan's university professors have doctorates. The nation defiled by thugs and bigots is on the verge of insanity, and its mind must be saved.

Afghan Minister of Higher Education Sherief Fayez, who earned his doctorate on Walt Whitman in the U.S., knows this. As the ministry of education website says, the oppressive rulers have turned schools into "centers for ideological extremism, sloganeering, and fermenting discord and conflict." But the ministry wants Afghan colleges and universities to become communities of "scholarly integrity, academic freedom, research and teaching excellence, and personal and intellectual growth."

The Spirit of God, it seems, saw this as an opportunity, convincing McCarthy and her three colleagues to fly to Kabul last March.

As soon as Fayez took office in 2001, he asked educators worldwide to help him take Afghan university professors—40 percent of whom are homeless and most of whom haven't had training for 25 years—into the 21st century. McCarthy decided to help, along with her husband, Daryl (CEO of the International Institute for Christian Studies) and two other members of the IICS team, Terry Mitchell and Hallet Hullinger.

Helping Fayez fit well with IICS's mission. The group sends Christian scholars to live out the gospel by teaching at secular universities worldwide. IICS was the first and, for a long time, the only organization that accepted Fayez's invitation. They stayed at a bullet-riddled hotel at a time when U.S. citizens were advised not to travel to the 98 percent Muslim country.

On the day when the U.S. started bombing Iraq, the four showed up in the classroom despite U.N. warnings to stay put at their hotel. That "turned some hearts," says Mitchell. This was not lost on Fayez: "You are the first ones to come to help us," he told them. "And you came at your own expense at such a critical time, when others were canceling their visits to this country."

For two weeks (an unusually short stint for IICS), the McCarthys, Mitchell, and Hullinger trained 120 faculty—including 35 women who had been under house arrest for six years under the Taliban—from the University of Education and Kabul University.

In a remarkable twist, the seminars took place in the building of the University of Education. If its walls could talk! First the building housed a Marxist think tank for the Soviets. Then a school for radical Islamic leaders moved in. Most recently it was a Taliban training center in which Osama bin Laden himself taught his followers.

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December 2003, Vol. 47, No. 12