Three cups of tea

ow many people in Pakistan know that there is a lone American by the name of Greg Mortenson who has been building schools for children, girls in particular, in the remotest corners of our Northern Areas for the last fifteen years? At last count, he had built forty-five of them. Ten have been built in Afghanistan. While some of his countrymen make war, he makes peace – and peace that will last. Greg Mortenson, like the most venerable Abdul Sattar Edhi, is a hero. He has his Pakistani helpers and the government has been cooperative and understanding; but his greatest assets and his most crucial friends, without whom this admirable humanitarian enterprise would not have got off the ground, have been the people of the areas where he has been working. They are his mainstay.

Mortensen I have met once, at an event in Washington marking the publication of his book Three Cups of Tea: one man’s mission to promote peace … one school at a time . How did it all begin? In Mortenson’s own words, “I had a sister named Christa, who struggled with severe epilepsy from early childhood, but she never once complained and inspired all of us. She had always wanted to go to Dyersville, Iowa, to see the “Field of Dreams,” where the baseball movie was filmed. Her bags were packed and she was ready to go when my mother went down to wake her up, but she had died in her sleep. To honour Christa’s memory, I decided to climb Pakistan’s K2, the world second highest mountain, and one of the most difficult to climb. After 78 days on the mountain, I did not quite reach the summit, and was exhausted, emaciated and emotionally spent. On the five-day way back to civilisation, I stumbled into a local village named Korphe, where the Balti villagers helped nurse me back to health. When I went to see the local school, I saw 84 children sitting in the dirt doing their school lessons. Most were writing with sticks in the dirt, and they shared only seven slate boards. Yet, despite abject poverty, I felt their fierce desire to have an education, and saw their spirits soar. At that moment, I realised that I had not come to Pakistan to climb a mountain, but to help the children build a school to honour Christa.”

Haji Ali, the headman of Korphe village, said to Mortensen, “Here we drink three cups of tea to do business; the first you are a stranger, the second you become a friend, and the third, you join our family, and for our family we are prepared to do anything – even die.” Haji Ali also taught him to slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects. He taught him that he had more to learn from the people he was working with than he could ever hope to teach them. When Mortensen returned to the States after his failed K2 attempt, having already decided to build a school at Korphe, he estimated that he would need $12,000. He didn’t have the money, so he went to the local library and looked up the names and addresses of hundreds of wealthy people, including celebrities. He did not have a computer and would not have known how to use one even if he had had it, so he hand-typed 580 letters asking for help. Only one person out of the 580, the TV news anchor Tom Brokaw, answered with a $100 cheque. Motenson applied to 16 institutions asking for grants and was turned down by each one of them. But he did not give up. He sold all he had, including his climbing gear and his car. He also cashed in his retirement policy. “For the first two years, I was essentially homeless and gave up everything I had to get this off the ground,” he says. By the spring of 1994, he had raised only $3,000 and was in a state of near despair. His mother, a school principal, asked him to come and spend a day with her 600 students. A kid named Jeffrey and two teachers started a “Pennies for Pakistan” drive after he had left. Within six weeks, they had collected 62,340 pennies, which eventually inspired adults to contribute. But it was a children’s crusade that started it.

A Pakistani also lent a helping hand when Mortenson most needed it. His name was Kishwar Syed and he ran a copying outlet in Berkeley, California. Mortenson walked into his place trying to rent a typewriter because the IBM Selectric he had he could not quite get used to. “This is 1993,” Kishwar Syed told him, “why don’t you rent a computer?” “I don’t know how to use one,” Mortenson replied. When Syed learnt what his visitor was trying to do, he lent him a computer and taught him how to use it. Mortenson said later, “It was pretty interesting. Someone from Pakistan helping me become computer literate so I could help Pakistani kids get literate.” Mortensen said once that when he sees the first girl walking into a new school in her village, it is like man first walking on the moon. He says it only takes one dollar a month to educate a child in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Among those he admires is our own Dr Mahbub ul Haq.

His life in Pakistan and Afghanistan was not without its hazardous moments. In July 1996, Mortenson was kidnapped in Waziristan. For eight days he was kept locked up in a room with only a tiny window and a dim oil lamp. He told his kidnappers that back home his wife Tara was seven months pregnant and expecting a son. That must have helped. On the eighth day, he was driven to Peshawar and released. He was also given a wad of 100 rupee bills and an apology. In Baltistan, one Shi’a cleric issued a fatwa against him, but when he wrote to Qom for approval, the fatwa was rescinded. The charge against Mortenson was that he was educating girls, which was against Islam. He also survived another fatwa based on his being an “infidel” and opening schools, especially for girls. He later learnt that the second fatwa was an attempt to get some money out of him. It had nothing to do with Islam.

Mortenson sums it all up in one memorable line. “Here in America, we have two minute football drills, 30-minute power lunches, and ‘shock and awe’, but that does not work in Pakistan or Afghanistan.”

I hope the new government in Islamabad will confer a high state honour on Greg Mortenson, who is a true hero.