An Evening With Greg Mortenson

Last night my wife and I had the pleasure of attending Greg Mortenson's appearance at the Visalia Convention Center. Greg Mortenson is the author of the bestselling books "Three Cups of Tea" and "Stones into Schools" and the director of the Central Asia Institute, which has built over 140 schools in the rugged mountainous areas of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. What began as the promise of one lost mountaineer to build a school for the villagers who saved his life in 1993 has turned into an ongoing mission to spread education and hope to one of the most remote and poverty-stricken corners of the globe.

What an inspiration this man is. He started as a nurse with no money of his own and had to raise it from scratch. The materials for the first school he built in Khorfe, Pakistan cost only $12,000 and teachers can be hired for $100 a month. He has been effective in an area notoriously volatile and suspicious of outsiders because he listens and lets the local villagers determine what they want--with the one rule that girls must be educated as well as boys. Experience has shown him the wisdom of an African proverb he uses, "Teach a boy and you educate an individual, teach a girl and you educate a community." That's because 2/3 of the schooled boys tend to leave the local community looking for jobs while 2/3 of the girls remain local. They also have much less infant and maternal mortality; since Bangladesh increased female literacy from 20% to 65% the average woman has gone from 8.5 children to 2.8.

Though much of his work is in areas with strong Taliban influence, not a single one of these schools has been bombed. Education is an effective antidote to extremism. And the local buy-in is a strong protective factor. While Mortensen raises the money, the local people must provide the land and most of the unskilled labor for each project. He showed lots of slides of the region, its people (especially the children) and the schools his organization has helped build. The conditions they live under have to be seen to be believed, high-altitude vistas of rugged beauty to be sure, but places with sparse vegetation where agriculture is difficult and herding on the scant forage a challenge made often perilous by the presence of lethal mines left over from the region's legacy of war.

I was impressed with Greg's demeanor. He is not a really adept speaker, which was reassuring. He seemed like a regular person of strong purpose rather than a glib salesman type. That made his sincerity evident. He related how he asked the Afghan minister of Education how much money he would need to revive a good national education system. $248 million a year, he was told. Greg commented that with 100,000 troops in Afghanistan and a war effort costing $100 billion a year, that works out to $1 million per soldier a year. Greg asked, "What if we withdrew 248 soldiers and used that money to completely fund the country's school system?"

Greg Mortenson has already been awarded the Star of Pakistan, the nation's highest civilian honor, by the country's president. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 and I'm quite certain he will win it one day. He certainly deserves it. One of the most touching parts of the evening was pictures Greg showed of a group of elders touring one of his schools to see if they wanted one for their own community. These scary looking guys with black turbans, big beards, and toting Kalashnikovs dropped their weapons and turned into little boys when they got to the school's playground. Imagine the audience's laughter when we were treated to pictures of them playing on the swing set. "We were trained to hate and fight from an early age," Greg reported the leader saying. "I never got to be a child, to play and laugh and learn to read and write. Now I have the opportunity to give our children the chance we never had."

Just as the subtitle of "Three Cups of Tea" says, Greg Mortenson and his Central Asia Institute are truly "promoting peace one school at a time." If you have not read this book or looked into this worthy organization I heartily recommend you to click on the links provided here and spend a few minutes. This cause is really worth your support.

Greg Mortenson's Amazing Story

I recently finished reading one of the most remarkable true stories of recent times, Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. The book, which spent three years on the New York Times bestseller list, tells Mortenson's story of surviving a disastrous failed attempt to climb the notoriously dangerous Himalayan peak K-2 in 1993 and stumbling into the mountain village of Khorfe in northern Pakistan where the villagers took him in and nursed him back to health. In exchange for their hospitality Mortenson promised to build them a school.

Not a wealthy man, Mortenson went back to the United States, working as a nurse, and raised the money. What makes the story so interesting are the cultural aspects of dealing with people in that part of the world. Mortenson found he had to learn local languages, respect and follow local customs, listen to local concerns and hire and work through local people to get anything done, and often indeed, to stay alive. His approach has been so successful he and his Central Asia Institute has now built over 155 schools, insisting that girls be admitted as well as boys. As he likes to quote an African proverb, "Teach a boy and you educate an individual, teach a girl and you educate a community."

Beginning in 2004 he began building schools in Afghanistan as well, after initially having been invited to do so by Kirghiz tribesmen in the Wakhan Valley who heard of his efforts across the border in Pakistan. I am currently reading this story in a sequel book, Stones into Schools. His nonideological schools are a welcome alternative to the fundamentalist madrasas often funded in the region by Saudi Wahabis which all too often preach the kind of xenophobic and sexist extremism that inculcates a Taliban or terrorist perspective. Three Cups of Tea is said to be required reading at the Pentagon these days.

I really recommend you pick up Three Cups of Tea if you haven't done so yet and treat yourself to this amazing story. This is the way to spread peace and goodwill in the world. I'm thinking Greg Mortenson will win a Nobel Peace Prize someday. And if you live in my area you even have an opportunity to see him this fall. He will be appearing at the Visalia Convention Center at 7:00 PM on Tuesday, November 16. For tickets you can contact the Convention Center or Tickets.com. I hope to see you there.