Changing the world, Costco members are doing their part
A near-mountain top experience
For 16 years, Greg Mortenson, a Costco member in Bozeman, Montana, and co-author of New York Times best seller Three Cups of Tea, has been working for peace in Afghanistan and Pakistan. His battleground has been the classroom.
“The real enemy, whether you’re in Pakistan or Africa or the United States, is ignorance, because it is ignorance that breeds hatred,” he recently told The Connection in a phone interview.
Three Cups of Tea documents how Mortenson, 51, a former mountain climber and emergency room nurse, stumbled into the remote Himalayan village of Korphe, lost and sick, following a 1993 failed attempt to summit K2, the second-highest peak in the Himalayas. As the villagers cared for him out of their meager resources, he noticed that there was no school for the children.
A teacher visited three days a week, but the children met every day outdoors on a patch of bare ground where many scratched out their lessons with sticks in the dirt. “The fierce resolve in the children to learn impressed me. When one of the kids asked me to help build a school, I realized that was the real reason I had come to the village,” Mortenson says.
To date, Central Asia Institute (www.ikat.org), the foundation he established, has built more than 78 permanent schools and 48 temporary schools in remote and often volatile areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan- places where few opportunities for education existed before. The foundation has trained hundreds of teachers who have changed the lives of more than 30,000 children.
These schools have come at tremendous personal cost to Mortenson. To raise money for the first school in Korphe, which opened in 1997, he worked double shifts as a nurse, briefly lived in his car to save money and gave up a relationship with a woman he loved. He has endured death threats and an eight-day kidnapping due to the fact that he insists girls be allowed to attend his schools. He believes that educating girls, an idea often met with violent resistance in this part of the world, is extremely important for sustained change.
Mortenson says that global studies show that educating women significantly decreases infant mortality rates and helps to decrease population explosion, and educated mothers are more apt to deter their sons from joining terrorist groups.
“To see a child first start writing (his or her) name is rewarding,” Mortenson says. “Then, all of a sudden, that child has identity in the world. It is profound.”
(c) Costco Connection 2009
http://www.costcoconnection.com/connection/200907/?u1=texterity
