Greg Mortenson

The Korphe village headman, Hadji Ali, looked at the American climber, Greg Mortenson, and said, “My home is your home. Take any land you want and build a school.” So a ram was sacrificed according to Muslim tradition, and the school is being built. Health-care and water purification programs have been established, and in the past few months a modern bridge has been built across the Braldu River to replace the former rope-and-pulley contraption and provide transportation to the once-isolated Himalayan village.

Mortenson says he was inspired to begin a project of this magnitude because he wanted to leave a monument to his sister, Christa, who suffered from epilepsy and lived only to the age of 21. He had begun his climbing career when he was 11 by climbing Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro mountain, or most of it- a porter carried him the last thousand or so feet of the 19, 340-foot ascent.

Twenty-two years later, in 1993, he was attempting the world’s toughest peak, K2, in the Karakoram range of the Pakistani Himalayas. Mortenson spent 78 days on K2 and came within 400 meters of the top. It was an agonizing attempt both physical ly and mentally. He remembers thinking it would be a fair trade to lose his fingers and toes to frostbite in exchange for a successful summit, though now he shudders to think he was ever in that state of mind. Two members of his multi-national expedition were successful, one being the first Briton to reach the top of K2.

What Mortenson saw in the villages of the Hushe Valley near K2 -the poverty and the lack of health-care and education-would lead him to begin the assault of his life. Armed with little more than iron will and a degree in nursing, he set out to found a school and health-care services for these impoverished people.

His parents had founded a hospital in Tanzania, so he understood something about the problems he faced. But his original efforts to raise funding and awareness were unsuccessful, and he began to doubt his ability to succeed. He lost a nursing job because he was gone too often, working on his dream. And his fiancee left him. (He has since married another woman.)

But Mortenson likes to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson: “When it’s dark you can see the stars.” His fund-raising efforts eventually led to generous support from a retired Swiss millionaire and mountain enthusiast, Jean Hoerni. He has also received s upport from the Patagonia Company, The American Himalayan Foundation, news anchor Tom Brokaw, venture capitalist George McCown and hundreds of average folks who donated $5 here or $20 there.

Mortenson has recently returned to his home and his new wife in Berkeley, Calif., after spending the fall on the building project in Korphe, his monument to Christa nearly complete. He thinks that the long-term solution to ending poverty in th e area is in the education of the women.

“Educate the women and you educate the whole community,” he says, “because they teach the children.”

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© 2000 The Wichita Eagle