Greg Mortenson

The author of a popular book builds schools in remote areas

In the early days, the only way the people behind what is now the best-selling book “Three Cups of Tea” could fill a room was an offer of free booze.

Today, the book’s author is the literary equivalent of a rock star. People begin lining up hours before a speaking engagement and fill 18,000-seat arenas to hear Greg Mortenson talk about his quest to build peace in Afghanistan and Pakistan, one village school at a time.

Mortenson will speak this evening at McArthur Court on the University of Oregon campus, and again the appearance is a sellout. All the available free tickets have been scooped up, and the only hope for getting in will be waiting for any view-obstructed seats left over after ticket holders are seated.

Mortenson’s book has been on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list just short of two years, most of that time in the No. 1 slot, and has sold more than 2.5 million copies. “Three Cups of Tea” is the story of how his promise to help build a school for the Pakistani villagers who helped him after a failed attempt to climb the mountain K2 turned into a mission to bring peace through education.

UO geography professor Andrew Marcus is a friend of Mortenson and was one of his early supporters, serving as a founding board member for the Central Asian Institute the ex-mountaineer started a couple of years after he returned from that near-disastrous climbing trip. In those early days, Marcus remembers getting invited, along with another CAI board member, to speak at the Explorers Club in New York City, where they were surprised to find the place packed.

But Marcus said the crowd looked — and smelled — a little downtrodden. And as soon as there was an intermission, the room emptied.

“We realized what had happened is they had an open free bar at the Explorers Club, and all the street people had come in,” Marcus said. “There was one person left in the room that was interested in what we were talking about.”

Now people get turned away from Mortenson’s sold-out talks, and getting an interview on short notice is next to impossible. And that one school has been joined by almost 80 scattered through some of the roughest, most isolated — and sometimes most violent — country in the world. Fifty more have been set up in regional refugee camps.

That’s leaps and bounds beyond where the CAI and Mortenson were in 2002, when he made his first appearance on the UO campus. He was up to 28 schools then, but his talks were in lecture halls rather than arenas, and fundraising was slow.

But Marcus said his friend is no different for his fame, and his approach to his mission is unchanged. “It’s absolutely the same message he’s had all along, which is these are people who very much want to help themselves, and the way they see that happening is through education for their children,” Marcus said.

The title of Mortenson’s best-seller, co-authored with journalist David Oliver Relin, is taken from the lesson he learned from village chief Haji Ali as he struggled to build the first school. Ali said: “Here we say, take the time to have three cups of tea. The first cup you’re a stranger, the second cup you’re a friend, the third cup you’re family.”

What Mortenson learned as he tried to fulfil his promise and build that school is that peace happens at not just the state level or even the local level, but among individuals. He needed the help and support of the village officials and elders, and to get that he sat with them, talked, drank tea.

He still uses the same approach. He only goes into a village if he is invited, villagers must provide the land and manual labor for the school, and the institute provides the specialized material and skilled labor to complete the project.

That way the people are invested in the building. They get the school they want and decide how it will be run. And they support it, even in the face of war.

While government and religious schools have been destroyed by the hundreds in ongoing fighting, only one of the CAI-sponsored schools has been attacked. According to one report, when a CAI school in Afghanistan was closed by Taliban gunmen, a local militia leader with two daughters in another school brought 100 men to battle the Taliban, chased them off and reopened the school with 12 of his own men left behind as guards.

“Trying to knock down those schools is like trying to knock down their own villages,” Marcus said. “They don’t tolerate that.”

Mortenson has always put an emphasis on educating girls, and many of the schools are built just for them. He’s following the advice given by a senior United Nations official, who told him that educating girls reduces infant mortality, lowers the escalating birth rate and improves the health of the community.

That’s because girls will grow up and pass their knowledge to their children and send them to school to learn more. Mortenson often quotes an African saying: Educate a boy, and you educate an individual. Educate a girl, and you educate a community.

(c) The Register-Guard 2009

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