Greg Mortenson

One of Webster dictionary’s definitions of the word hero, is “one who shows great courage.” In our culture heroes are often identified for their athletic exploits or their cinematic swashbuckling, but rarely is the heroism of everyday life venerated. This past winter children from the Montessori School of Evergreen exemplified the heroism of everyday life by collecting enough pennies (only), in conjunction with 17 other Montessori schools, to build a school in Pakistan for children who had never had a school before.

Their drive was called Pennies for Peace, and was inspired by the work of Greg Mortenson, a true hero of our age. Greg is the visionary behind the incomparable work of the Central Asia Institute (CAI), a small but vibrant non-profit that builds schools for children in northern Pakistan and in Afghanistan. For the past ten years, Greg has quietly built schools in the remote tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan –since he observed determined Pakistani children scribing their school lessons in the dirt with sticks for pencils, as they had no other resources.

Last November, Montessori School of Evergreen moms Liz Little, and Angelica Sorge (also a teacher at the school) heard Greg Mortenson speak in Evergreen. They were moved by how much one human can make a difference in the world, and wanted to share that lesson with their children. CAI has a program called Pennies for Peace, born out of the most significant (and one of the first) donations Greg ever received – the contents of the piggy bank from a little boy in an elementary school in Minnesota. While a penny has no real value in the USA, it can buy a pencil in Pakistan. With a pencil, a child can learn to write and then read and can open their mind to the world. So Liz and Angelica decided to get as many Montessori schools as possible together in a 12 state region to try and raise 2 million pennies ($20,000); enough money to build and endow a school in Pakistan.

The children and the community were inspired by Pennies for Peace. Liz Little’s own daughter solemnly told her, “I’m going to build a school Mommy. I have never built a school before!” At the school, children’s lessons revolved around Pennies for Peace – math lessons included different ways to measure the number of pennies being gathered, cultural studies incorporated lessons on Pakistan, and language instruction included stories about Pakistan.

The Montessori School of Evergreen students found ingenious ways to collect pennies: A child, whose family was celebrating a wedding, asked if cards could be placed into the invitation asking guests to bring pennies to the ceremony, and explaining why; another child placed a jar on the counter at a south Evergreen deli so patrons could leave their pennies, this child carefully kept patrons apprised of the number of pennies collected by placing a card next to the jar and updating it regularly; a 2nd grade girl invited members of her church to bring their pennies. As the community learned of the drive they arrived at the school with boxes and bags of pennies to share their penny wealth.
What is remarkable about this effort is that it is children directly helping children.

Children as young as three years old were contributing to the drive, and they learned that no matter how small nor how many pennies a child brought, they were making a difference for other children a world away.
Maria Montessori once said, “Free the child’s potential and you will transform both the child and the world.”
That is the vision behind Central Asia Institute’s work – transformation through education. Over the last 10 yeas CAI has built 43 schools, 15 water projects and four women’s vocational centers. When CAI builds a school for a community the community must commit that at least 10% of the children being educated are girls.

Why girls? Because research in developing nations shows that educating girls to a 5th grade level or higher will do more for the long-term development of a nation than building roads or bringing in electricity.
The piles of pennies at the Montessori school of Evergreen kept growing. The school needed bigger and bigger containers to hold the mountain of pennies that was growing. Finally an enormous plastic bin was placed near the entrance and by the end of the Pennies for Peace drive it was full to the brim.

On April 22, Earth Day, the Pennies for Peace drive ended. A week later on April 29 armored car from the Loomis Fargo company pulled up to the doors of the Montessori School of Evergreen and the children, from youngest to oldest, labored while they carried bag after bag filled with pennies into the waiting armored car. The children loaded 1,400 pounds of pennies into the armored car. Once the armored car was loaded a few of the children followed it to Community First Bank, and then once again they unloaded the pennies and watched as the long process of putting the pennies into counters began.

A few days later Jack Devereux, president of Community First Bank, visited the school with an oversized check and let the children know that their efforts in the Pennies for Peace drive had netted $2,919.84! The total dollar amount in pennies gathered by all 18 schools was over $9,000!
While perhaps these children weren’t able to reach the goal of building a school, they ended up building something much more important – they built a bridge of friendship and understanding with children on the opposite side of the world. In our insular culture it is easy to hide behind walls, but it is only by building bridges of understanding that other people will become friends and not foes. The children at the Montessori School of Evergreen and the community as a whole learned a fundamental lesson from this drive. And it’s not over, penny stashing is occurring all over Evergreen as children and adults await next year’s Pennies for Peace drive.

More information about the Central Asia Institute is on website www.ikat.org.

© 2004 Evergreen Living