Greg Mortenson

A Bozeman man is traveling halfway around the world this week to check on his handiwork.

Mountaineer-turned-philanthropist Greg Mortenson left Wednesday for the isolated Baltistan region in northern Pakistan, where he will visit the 11 rural schools he built to shelter Pakistani children from the bitter mountain cold.

Mortenson will spend six weeks determining whether schools built with funds from his Central Asia Institute are being run according to the wishes of resident parents and teachers.

We will also check on the welfare of some of the 12,000 refugees relocated to Skardu, the regions largest city.

He is traveling to Pakistan to talk to people now, during the winter, because most of the adults — who work largely as farmers and as porters for international climbing expeditions — are staying put.

“Everybody’s home, trying to stay warm,” Mortenson said Tuesday.

Mortenson, 42, says he is the only foreigner with a year-round presence in the isolated Baltistan area, a 2,000-square-mile region with some of the highest mountains in the world, where Pakistan, India and China meet.

He became acquainted with the Balti people and their problems after climbing to the 27,000 foot level of K2, the second highest mountain in the world, in 1993.

The refugees he will check on were caught in a crossfire last year during a conflict over the Kashmir region of India. Fighting broke out when Islamic insurgents — the mujahadeen battling for Kashmir’s independence — began fighting the Indian Army. Many people were killed or injured. Those who could, fled to Skardu.

Mortenson and local workers dug a large well, pump house and water system that supplies drinkable water to thousands of refugees.

On arrival in Pakistan, Mortenson first plans to visit the schools that he funded and helped build in the Karakoram mountain villages over the past seven years.

So far, 1,920 students, ages raging from 5 to 15, have been educated, and the teachers are apparently doing a good job. Fifth-graders who have been attending the first school Mortenson built took a standard Pakistani test just over a year ago and scored almost double the country’s average for that group he said.

His financial supporters are planning to add two or three additional structures each year as funds allow, but they can’t build them fast enough.

“We have 83 proposals for (new) schools from villagers,” he said.

Before Mortenson and his supporters focused on the remote areas, villagers had no structures in which to educate children.

The kids wrote in dirt with mud-coated twigs,” Mortenson said.

Girls were not schooled at all. Now girls make up a majority of students.

Porters attending schools started by Mortenson and Brent Bishop, his brother-in-law and owner of Barrel Mountaineering, spread the news that new schools were being built in the Karakoram mountains. The government has funded some schools in the region, but not in the remote villages, Mortenson said.

The village leaders commit as much as possible to the school projects.

“We find out how much they’re willing to jive in village resources — labor and land,” he said.

Because much of the labor and material are donated, Mortenson said he and his supporters are able to build structures for $12,000 to $15,000, about half the Pakistani government’s cost.

Most of the teachers are from local villages or the surrounding area, a strategy that works well because local teachers are “willing to stay,” Mortenson said.

In addition to having financial support from members of the Central Asia Institute, which he founded, Mortenson’s efforts in Pakistan are recognized by his mountaineering friends.

Tom Hornbein of Seattle likes Mortenson’s style of aid — “To let people who live there figure out what their need are, to empower the people,” he said Tuesday in a phone interview.

“It’s community-based development as opposed to the top-down stuff that a lot of philanthropic organizations do,” said Hornbein, who is a new board member of the Central Asia Institute. Hornbein was on the first American team to summit Mount Everest in 1963 and has climbed in the Karakoram mountains

“I got bonded to the project partly because I was so admiring of the kind of commitment Greg was making,” Hornbein said.

Louis Reichardt of San Francisco said he is amazed by Mortenson’s ability to get things done in a complicated political and social climate. Reichardt was the first American to climb K2, with Jim Wickwire, in 1978.

“For Greg to go into that society and do something for the Baltis and to negotiate the tricky political issues is quite remarkable,” Reichardt said.

Although he works in an area where war occasionally breaks out, Mortenson said he does not feat danger there.

“The mujahadeen support what I’m doing,” Mortenson said. “they would never harm me.”

Copyright (c) 1998 Bozeman Chronicle