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Greg Mortenson spends about four months a year in the mountains of Afghani-stan and Pakistan. But he doesn’t carry an M-16, and he’s not hunting Osama bin Laden.
He builds schools.
Mortenson, 49, says education — a scarce commodity in many of the rural villages where he’s built 58 schools since 1993 — is the key to keeping kids from becoming terrorists.
“What education brings is hope,” Mortenson said Saturday from his home in Bozeman, Mont. Women who are literate are less likely to allow their sons to join the Taliban or terrorist groups, he said.
“Women are tired of war.”
Mortenson has been kidnapped and escaped a gun battle by hiding under a load of rancid goat skins. He’s endured death threats — from Islamic extremists who didn’t approve of educating females and from American extremists who think he is aiding the enemy.
When not in Asia, Mortenson is busy raising his two kids and raising money to run his schools. He says his nonprofit company, the Central Asia Institute, can build schools cheaper than governments or other organizations because it teams with local residents for the land and labor and it can run them for less because it trains locals to be teachers. It costs about $1 a month to educate each of the 24,000 students in CAI’s schools.
Mortenson will be in Winona on Friday as part of the Frozen River Film Festival to talk about his work and his life story, which is told in his book “Three Cups of Tea.”
Mortenson was raised in Tanzania, the son of Lutheran missionaries. He developed an early taste for mountaineering after climbing Mount Kilimanjaro at age 11.
When he was 15, his parents returned to the Twin Cities.
He joined the Army and later graduated from the University of South Dakota with the hope of going on to medical school. Instead, he studied nursing and pursued his passion for climbing.
In 1993, his younger sister, Christa, died of an epileptic seizure just hours before a planned birthday trip to the cornfield in Deyersville, Iowa, where her favorite movie, “Field of Dreams,” was filmed.
Mortenson set out to climb K2, the world’s second-highest peak and one of the most challenging and dangerous. His plan was to leave Christa’s necklace on the 28,267-foot summit.
His team was a “shoestring operation” — poorly financed, no oxygen to breathe in the thin air, no Sherpas to guide them and haul their gear.
Mortenson came close — about 600 meters from the peak — but more than two months at high altitude had sapped his strength, withered his 6-foot-4, 210-pound frame.
After 78 days on the mountain, exhausted and disoriented, Mortenson stumbled into the town of Korphe, where the villagers took him in, wrapped him in their finest blankets and nourished him with Yak butter tea. Mortenson did what he could to repay them, offering his coats and equipment, using his nursing skills to provide some medical aid.
Then he saw the village school. Eighty-two kids knelt on the ground, writing in the dust. There was no teacher — the $1 a day salary was more than they could afford, so they shared the teacher with the neighboring village.
So Mortenson made a rash promise. I will build a school, he told them.
Back home, Mortenson began figuring out how to raise $12,000. He sent 580 letters to celebrities. Tom Brokaw sent him a check for $100 and a note wishing him luck.
He sold the Buick he inherited from his grandmother and his climbing gear. That got him $2,000.
Finally, Jean Hoerni, a multi-millionaire pioneer of computer chips, sent Mortenson a check for $12,000.
A year after his promise, Mortenson returned to Korphe with $12,000 and a plumb line, ready to build the school he’d promised.
Haji Ali, the village elder who had welcomed him the year before, explained that before he could build a school, he would need to build a bridge over a 200-foot gorge in order to carry the supplies.
So Mortenson went home, again having failed in his goal.
He raised another $10,000, and in 1996 returned to Korphe, ready to build a bridge and a school.
The title of Mortenson’s book comes from a lesson he learned from Haji Ali while struggling to build his first school:
“If you want to thrive in Baltistan, you must respect our ways,” Ali told him. “The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die.”
Mortenson recently returned from a six-week trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan, his 32nd since 1993. In spite of his brushes with danger, he doesn’t feel at risk when he’s there.
The experience that he said really rattled him came after Sept. 11, 2001.
He was in Pakistan when he heard about the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. The State Department urged him to leave the country, but he was determined to stay until he had finished his project. He said he was touched by the empathy of the Pakistanis, including an elderly woman who gave him five eggs to bring “to the widows in New York.”
Then he came home to Bozeman on Halloween and went to his office, where his e-mail box was full of hate mail and death threats from people who called him a traitor.
Since then, he worries more about his wife and kids when he is away than about himself overseas. This summer, he plans to bring them along.
After 13 years, he is family.
“Politics won’t bring peace,” he said. “People will bring peace.”
Aamir Ali wrote on Jan 23, 2007 6:13 PM: