Greg Mortenson

Written by David Relin, the book chronicles the life of a man named Greg Mortenson and offers, in the words of Tom Brokaw, “Thrilling proof that one ordinary person, with the right combination of character and determination, really can change the world.”

The story of Mortenson’s efforts to build schools in the war-torn mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan is, in itself, riveting. But readers here in Echoland will find an extra dimension of interest in the fact that Mortenson’s father, Irwin, was born and raised in Pequot Lakes.

“Well over six feet,” writes Relin, “and a raw-boned athlete like his son, Irwin Mortenson was nicknamed ‘Dempsey’ as an unusually stout baby, and the boxer’s name blotted out his given name for the rest of his life.

His athletic prowess – he was an all-state quarterback on his high school football team and an all-state guard on the basketball team – got him out of Pequot Lakes, a tiny fish-crazy town in northern Minnesota, and sent him on a path to the wider world.”

After attending the University of Minnesota on a football scholarship and serving a stint in the Army, Dempsey met and married a gal named Jerene. “He came home one day while I was pregnant with Greg and said, ‘They need teachers in Tanganyika. Let’s go to Africa.’ I couldn’t say no.”

Thus it was that Greg Mortenson spent his childhood years in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. When he was 11, he and his father climbed it together – and Greg got hooked on mountain climbing. It was this fascination that later propelled him to the wild reaches of Pakistan, where in 1993 he undertook to climb K2, the world’s second highest mountain.

As fate would have it, he got to within 600 meters of the summit – and then had to turn back, to help carry an exhausted fellow climber down to safety.

He’d come to K2 with the dream of placing a necklace on the peak; a necklace that belonged to his younger sister, Christa, who had died a few years earlier at age 23. As a tribute to her, he would scale the mountain most alpinists consider the toughest climb on Earth, and leave her necklace on the top, at 28,267 feet.

But it was not to be. Instead, exhausted from the rescue efforts and suffering from altitude sickness and oxygen deprivation, he got separated from his fellow climbers and wandered, dazed, down the mountain to a tiny, impoverished village named Korphe. There he was given shelter and a place to sleep, and, when he awoke, a cup of tea and something to eat.

As it turned out, no foreigner had ever been to Korphe before. Mortenson, a Christian and an American, had reason to feel uneasy, surrounded as he was by an entire village of Pakistani Muslims. But his fears proved groundless, and in short order he found himself overwhelmed by the care and kindness shown him.

“Here,” explained the village headman, Haji Ali, “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.”

As days passed and the villagers nursed Mortenson back to health, selflessly sharing their meager supplies of food to give him plenty of nourishment, he began thinking about a way to repay their generosity.

When he asked them to show him the village school, they took him to a bare plot of land where young students knelt in a ring around the teacher, scratching their lessons into the hard-packed dirt with sticks.

And so it was that Mortenson came to a life-changing vow: somehow, someway, he would find a way to return to Korphe and build the village a school.

“Three Cups of Tea” is the story of that promise and its extraordinary outcome.

http://www.pineandlakes.com/stories/122607/opinion_20071226023.shtml

Copyright 2007 by Craig Nagel. All Rights Reserved.