Summer 2004
Premier Issue
Changing the World One Girl at a Time
Central Asia Institute
His Heart
One Man’s Unlikely Mission to Change Lives a Half-World
Away
By Kelle Walsh
When does empathy turn into action? What makes one person
see possibility, even rearranging their life to help, when
even the best of us would only see difficulty?
For Greg Mortenson, co-founder f the Central Asia Institute
(CAI), a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving conditions
in the high-mountain villages of Afghanistan and Pakistan,
the choice to help has simply meant listening to his heart.
“The only way I’ve been able to do what I do is
to follow my heart rather than my logic or my goals,”
he says.
Making a Difference
CAI is lauded as an organization that has done important
work in an area known only to most Westerners as the breeding
ground for the Taliban, the fundamentalist Islamic fighters
who make up the ranks of Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.
It is an unlikely placed for an American, or for any outsider.
And Mortenson admits that it hasn’t always been easy;
defended his work against fundamentalist Islamic religious
leaders; and faced death more than once.
“You can hand out condoms, put in electricity and build
roads, but unless you educate the girls, society won’t
change.”
But adversity hasn’t deterred him from his mission
to fight the cycle of poverty and ignorance in the region.
His tool? Education, particularly for girls.
Mortenson’s belief, one shared by many scholars and
human-rights organizations, is that educating women is the
best investment for community sustainability. Studies have
shown that a fifth-grade education level for girls results
in decreased birth rates and infant mortality, and increases
the strength of the social structure.
The respect his work has earned among members of the United
States Congress and from prestigious think tanks crafting
rebuilding plans for the region, hints that Mortenson might
be a longtime scholar of Central Asia and an expert on the
region. But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Greg
Mortenson is that his singular dedication to the people in
this unlikely place came without preparation of any kind.
It was, ironically, failure that revealed his calling. Or
maybe it was as Joseph Campbell once said: “We must
let go of the life we had planned, so as to accept the one
that is waiting for us.”
A rude awakening
In the summer of 1993, Mortenson, an accomplished mountain
climber, set out to summit K2, the jewel of the Karakorum
mountain range that stretches between northern Pakistan and
Afghanistan. At 28,250 feet, K2 is the second highest peak
in the world and has lured adventure-seekers for almost 100
years. Yet few outsiders glimpse the life in the Braldu Valley
far below the mountain’s icy flanks: farmers who eke
out a living from unyielding land; communities without electricity,
safe drinking water, or schoolhouses; a rich social tapestry
of customs, languages and cultures; a singular Islamic faith
– and political warfare.
Mortenson’s determination to reach the mountaintop
was more than on athlete’s focus. He had dedicated the
climb to his sister, Christa, an epileptic who had died a
year earlier at the age of 21. He and Christa were close’
just a few years earlier he had moved to Minneapolis to live
with her while she adjusted to living independently for the
first time.
(Picture not shown) Greg Mortenson meets with a village elder,
or mullah.
Seventy-eight days into the climb, with only two of his team
reaching the summit, Mortenson was forced to retreat, weakened
from altitude sickness and fatigue. “Coming off K2,
I was emotionally exhausted, emaciated and physically wasted.
Most of all I was very disappointed that I hadn’t summitted
K2 in honor of Christa, that I hadn’t gone the extra
mile or whatever it was to get to the top,” he says.
“That bitter disappointment was very strong.”
As he was led down the mountain by two of the expedition’s
Balti porters, an extraordinary thing happened. “When
I went in, I was so focused on the summit I really failed
to view the panoramic beauty of the mountains. Coming out
it was like a cathedral: the sunset, the mountains, all of
the scenery. I almost want to use the word ‘orchestra.’
The beauty of the majesty of it all lifted my heart,”
he says.
Over the next three weeks, wrapped in the hospitality of
villagers of Korphe who nursed him back to health, Mortenson
says that the contrast of poverty in the village against this
natural splendor was a palpable clash. When he was finally
well enough to leave, he asked the village elder, or mullah,
how he could repay the kindness he was shown. He recalls being
taken to an outdoor lot where children drew with sticks in
the dirs. The village could not afford to build a proper school,
nor the equivalent of a $1-per-day teacher’s salary.
“These people are living at the fringes of civilization
and they are up against tremendous adversity,” Mortenson
says. “Despite all of this, the children’s spirits
soared (as did) their desire to go to this outdoor school.
I thought of Christa when I saw these kids in the dirs. One
of the girls was kind of slow and had some handicap. I was
awash in emotion.”
The mullah asked for financial help to build a school, Mortenson
recalls, as a handful of children stood around him, pulling
on his shirtsleeves. Yes, he said, he’d raise the money.
Give him a year, he said, and he’d be back.
“I realized that my real reason to come to Korphe was
not to climb a mountain for Christa, but to help these kids,”
he says.
(Picture not shown) Schoolgirls, Torghu Balla Community School
in Northern Pakistan, Summer 2003.
Making the choice
Greg Mortenson could have left that village and never returned,
or simply made a donation to an international aide organization
that would be far better equipped to provide help. Instead
he took it on himself to make a difference. What began with
a promise to build one school has changed the lives of thousands
of boys and girls, and has planted a seed that grows and promises
to feed an entire region with opportunity.
“I believe in the Greg Mortensons of the world, and
I particularly believe in him. His whole life has been shaped
by this, and he is doing it. And boy, is he good,” says
George McCown, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and chairman
of the World Business Academy, who has accompanied Mortenson
to Pakistan.
To date, CAI has built 34 schools, teaching 9,200 students,
including more than 3,800 girls. In addition to the schools
CAI has helped build, it has also funded four women’s
vocational centers and 15 potable water projects; sponsored
medical and health-education programs’ and provides
support to Afghan-refugee students. The organization also
plants trees, helping to preserve the indigenous knowledge
of native plants and te3aching farmers how to maximize their
crop production.
“Greg’s work brings people into the fold,”
says Congresswoman Mary Bono (R-CA), a longtime supporter
of CAI. “He has real love for these people. That’s
something bureaucracy will never have: genuine love and caring
for these people.”
A unique feeling of connection and understanding of people
living in poverty fuel Mortenson’s love for the people
of the Karakoram. “I think from his soul he is from
the Third World,” says his wife, Tara Bishop, Ph.D.
In fact, Mortenson and three sisters grew up in Tanzania,
West Africa, in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro, where his parents
were Lutheran missionaries. His late father, Irvin, founded
the first teaching hospital in the region, the Kilimanjaro
Christian Medical Center, and his mother, Jerene, started
the International School in Moshi.
Mortenson was shaped by their example.
Even as a child he possessed a capacity for compassion that
transcended cultural or social boundaries. In an article in
the Omaha World-Herald, Mortenson’s sister, Sonja Rauen,
recalls finding 7-year-old Greg sharing his cookies with a
cookie with a beggar on the dirt road that led to their village.
“He didn’t just give the beggar the cookie,”
she told the reporter, “he sat down and talked to him.”
When his family moved to Minneapolis when Mortenson was 15,
he was unfamiliar with American ways and relentlessly teased
for his accent and his ignorance of pop culture. He wanted
desperately to return to Africa, and dreamed of making a difference
like his father had, or like his idol, Albert Schweitzer,
M.D., the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physician and humanitarian
who dedicated his life to improving health care in East Africa.
“Greg’s work brings people into the fold,”
says Congresswoman Mary Bono (R-CA), a longtime supporter
of CAI. “He has real love for these people. That’s
something bureaucracy will never have: genuine love and caring
for these people.”
The following years were shaped by that goal: He joined the
Army, and trained as a medic while stationed in Germany, College
followed. He studied community rural medicine, and then went
on to graduate school. He had been accepted into Case Western
Medical School, but a week before classes were to start he
abruptly decided not to go. “I had dedicated so much
of my life getting into medical school, and I was looking
at another 10-years commitment, and I realized there was probably
no cure for epilepsy,” he recalls without any hint of
bitterness.
Such a drastic change of course doesn’t faze Mortenson;
rather, he credits it to what he calls being a “circular
person,” which, fittingly, serves him well in his work
in the Karakoram. “We often focus on the end product
or the destination,” he says. “In a circular society
it’s the journey and the process and the relationships
that matter. If something else comes up that is better, forget
the original plan.”
“I’ve never regretted any of my decisions,”
he adds.
A legacy of peace
As we speak, Mortenson is at the CAI headquarters in Bozeman,
Montana, preparing for another trip to Pakistan, where he
spends up to five months each year. He has two young children
now, and admits that the long absences are difficult. But
becoming a family man has also strengthened his resolve to
the people of Karakoram.
“When I look into the eyes of the children in Afghanistan
and Pakistan I see my own children,” he says. “I
think the greatest thing I can do is leave them a legacy of
peace.”
If education was Mortenson’s first inspiration, then
a commitment to cross-cultural understanding has become his
second passionate mission, especially in the wake of September
11. He was visiting CAI projects far north of the Pakistan-Afghanistan
border when the hijacked planes barrel down on their targets.
Mortenson recounts the kindness he encountered in the days
following.
“Everywhere I went, I was touched by the sympathy of
the people there,” he says. “The army helped with
my security, the religious clerics, Islamic scholars, sought
me out, and offered prayers of peace. They told me this was
not in accordance with Islam, and (those responsible for the
attack) were terrorists.”
That outpouring of compassion stood in sharp contrast to
the media reports Mortenson saw upon his return to the United
States. “The majority of media portrayed the people
over there as angry or hateful toward America. Contrary to
that, I see the great majority of people in awe and respect
of America,” he says. “The people who have gotten
in the media are a minority group of extremists. Our greatest
ally is the region of fragmented peace is the moderate Muslim
majority who are good people, hard working and who share the
values that we have of freedom and democracy.
“I realized how important it was for me to bring the
message to Americans that the people over there are like us:
they want jobs, family, health and security,” he adds.
Mortenson took his message to the media, which responded
with wide coverage of CAI’s work. Throughout, Mortenson
hasn’t hid his opposition to the United States’
War on Terror. He is especially concerned that
America honors its promise of $1.4 billion in aid to Afghanistan,
to help rebuild the country. Without it, he says, there’s
little hope to break the cycle of poverty that provides a
breeding ground for religious fanaticism. “I’m
frightened by the direction of our foreign policy, that we
are building walls instead of bridges,” he says. “Ultimately,
if our world is to be a sustainable and peaceful world, we
need to build bridges, and not wall.”
Sen. Bono calls Mortenson “the greatest ambassador
that we can ever have,” in the region.
“And its not isolated to Pakistan and Afghanistan,”
she continues, “throughout the world we need to build
these bridges and there is no better way than through person-to-person
contact.”
Navigating the terrain
Mortenson admits that he’s hit a few bumps along the
road. His initial fund-raising effort resulted in 16 unaccepted
grant proposals and almost 600 unanswered letters to celebrities.
(The one response, from NBC news anchorman Tom Brokaw, netted
$100.) A penny drive in a Wisconsin elementary school contributed
$623, and sparked the Pennies for Peace program. He sold his
car and all of his climbing gear worth about $2,000. But he
was far short of school-building capital.
His efforts were catalyzed by a call from Jean Hoerni, PH.D.,
a Swiss physicist and one of the pioneers of the Silicon Valley
microchip industry. Hoerni funded Mortenson’s first
two projects, the Korphe school and a bridge over the Braldu
River, and in 1996 established CAI with a $1 million grant.
Since Hoerni’s death, in 1997, Mortenson and the CAI
board of directors have carried out the organization’s
founding mission to “promote literacy, women’s
skill, and awareness of public health and environmental issues
through community-initiated education programs.”
(Picture not shown) Jahan with baby and Greg’s daughter,
Amira (age 4) in Korphe Village, North Pakistan, 2001.
Through the years he has also had to learn the customs and
traditions of the region. To not do so, as he found out, can
be a matter of life or death.
Once while traveling unannounced in an area in western Pakistan,
he was kidnapped and held for eight days. He later found out
he was being held as a bartering chip between two feuding
clans, and was released unharmed. But the lesson was learned:
“Whenever you go somewhere, get an invitation,”
he says.
Early on he came under scrutiny of a handful of despotic
Islamic mullahs who objected to the CAI schools. “The
see illiteracy as a way of controlling their people,”
Mortenson says. A group of those objectors tried to get a
fatwa, or religious ruling, to ban him from working. But Mortenson
had impressed Abbas Risvi, the head Shiite Islamic spiritual
leader in Northern Pakistan, who wrote a letter on his behalf
to the /Supreme Council of Ayatollahs in Iran, which sets
all Islamic law based upon its reading of the Koran.
Six months later Mortenson was called to Sardu, and ushered
into the inner sanctum of a mosque where a decree was read
aloud. “Basically it said that there’s nothing
in the Koran that prohibits education and in fact it supports
education for both boys and girls, (and) that (I) was working
in the highest order of Islam,” he says. “Then
they gave me their blessing and issued a fatwa that nobody
interfere with my work.”
Community focus
Mortenson says that the key to success of CAI’s programs
is its focus on community partnership's.
Each one of the institute’s projects is initiated and
overseen by a committee of community elders and experts from
local non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The committee
determines the community’s greatest need, which may
include building a portable-water system, health-care camps,
or in one case, planting fruit-bearing trees that would give
the community a commodity to sell in order to raise a teacher’s
salary before building a school. The community matches CAI
funds with in-kind donations of labor and local resources.
It also has to agree to 10-percent increase in female enrollment
each year.
“What I find is that the more communities get involved,
the value of education goes up significantly in the entire
area,” Mortenson says.
This community involvement also reduces the construction
costs significantly. Mortenson says that he can build a school
for a fraction of what it would cost for the Pakistani government
or an international NGO. “I think Greg is on the right
track, he’s a living example of what it is that is most
effective today: it’s people-to people, on the ground.
It cost Greg $15,000 to build a school. It costs the World
Bank $150,000,” says McCown.
CAI chooses to work in largely inaccessible villages that
haven’t benefited from outside help. Even in these places,
where the literacy rate hovers around 3 percent for men, maybe
one-tenth of one percent for women, Mortenson says that the
value of education is not lost. “We set up an education
committee in each village with the elders, who are mostly
illiterate but who recognize the importance of education for
the future,” he says. “They see education as a
buffer, or bridge, between our fast-paced society and their
society where they write with sticks in the dirt.”
CAI trains teachers and pays for their salaries. In addition
to a standard secular education of arithmetic, writing, reading
and science, the children are taught basic nutrition and hygiene.
Some of the teachers developed a workbook containing lessons
about cultural traditions and the region’s shared heritage,
including their political and religious history.
(Picture not shown) Children from CAI schools in Pakistan
average 72 percent on the standard fifth-grade entrance exam.
The national average is 44 percent.
The formula is working. Children from CAI schools in Pakistan
average 72 percent on the standard fifth-grade entrance exam.
The national average is 44 percent.
Mortenson also notes that while many NGO-funded schools have
closed, either from lack of funding or lack of community support,
CAI schools “are bursting at the seams.”
He now sifts through 100 requests for community projects
each year. His hope is to build 100 schools over the next
six to eight years, and eventually, to remove himself from
the community process and work as an advocate. “That’s
my goal: to work myself out of this job and let it run on
its own. Knowing that I can walk away and thousands of kids
are still going to be able to go to school,” he says.
He wants to move his family from Bozeman to East Africa while
his children are still young, and live there for a few years.
“I want my kids to have a Third World experience,”
he says.
Although Mortenson is proud of the work CAI has accomplished,
one gets the impression that he doesn’t view his journey
as extraordinary. “I don’t look at the things
that have happened as traumatic, but as necessary,”
he says.
“I just think he really believes in what he’s
doing, and he gets really excited with he sees those kids,
especially the girls,” Bishop says, “(The hardship
or physical danger) just doesn’t register. He never
says, ‘This sucks’ or ‘This is hard.’”
“There is a saying, ‘When your heart speaks,
take good notes,’” Mortenson says. “Anything
is possible if you follow your heart. I really believe that.”
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