Excerpts from candmwanderings blogspot:
In town, we met a very talented young Vancouverite, Aliaa, who was staying in a village near Ishkashim for a year, with a family that and all but adopted her, as she gathered material for her Ph.D. in anthropology. She was Ismaili, and she filled us in on bits of local culture and recent history which helped us interpret what we had seen over the past weeks.
The day after meeting Aliaa, and just as a ride to Dushanbe had been expediently arranged for us, we had the honour of meeting 86 year-old Dr. Ali Mohammad Rajput, a retired professor of mathematics from Birmingham (UK) who spends four months of the year in Khorog. Not only is he the venerable patriarch of the Pamir Lodge, but he played a key role in the recent history of Gorno Badahkshan Autonomous Oblast as we had just learned it from Aliaa. He was one of the three key people who came to GBAO to assess the situation in the early 1990s after the civil war..
He reported to the Aga Khan (with whom he had connections having started his academic career on an AK scholarship from Pakistan) and a decade of food aid and much more began. Aga Khan projects can now be seen everywhere in GBAO, and there is an AK Foundation office in Khorog. There are cynical stories of other aid programmes that have been mismanaged, with vast sums spent and no improvement in the lives of locals, but the Aga Khan Foundation has made and continues to make a huge difference here.
If I lived here, I ‘d be proud to have his photo on my wall, too.
Read at source: http://candmwanderings.blogspot.com/2009/06/khorog.html
Ismailimail 