Greg Mortenson

Greg Mortenson, registered nurse and author of the best selling book “Three Cups of Tea,” says that after building schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan for 16 years, he is now focusing on the training of health workers as well.

“It [healthcare] kept tugging at my heart,” Mortenson said in an interview with Nursing Spectrum/NurseWeek magazines after addressing nurses at Sigma Theta Tau’s 40th Biennial Convention in Indiana on Nov. 2. “One out of three children are dying” from lack of adequate health care.

Sigma Theta Tau awarded Mortenson with its Archon Award for demonstrating exceptional leadership in promoting health and welfare throughout the world. Mortenson was also nominated for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, which President Obama was recently awarded.

Mortenson began building schools after his sister Christa died from epilepsy in 1992 and he attempted to climb K2 in Pakistan, one of the world’s most treacherous mountains, in her memory. Mortenson’s attempt was unsuccessful. He became lost while descending the mountain and stumbled into the remote village of Korphe where he was cared for and befriended by villagers. When he left Korphe, he promised he would return to build a school. He did return to Korphe, built a school, and from there went on to construct dozens of other schools in first Pakistan and then Afghanistan.

Mortenson, who also cofounded the Central Asia Institute to carry out his work, said when he first started his humanitarian efforts in Pakistan he considered building clinics instead of schools. But he said he wanted to build something that would directly empower the local Pakistanis, projects more easily done with schools than clinics.

Mortenson recently started a maternal health training program teaching local women about the basics of good maternal-child health care. Afghanistan has one of the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the world.

“Many women die but not from difficult problems,” he said. Often mothers die from common complications of pregnancy such as cephalo-pelvic disproportion, placenta previa, or placenta abruptio because there are no obstetricians to perform cesarean sections.

One maternal health worker, Aziza, who works in the Charpusan Valley in Pakistan on the border of Afghanistan, was able to eliminate maternal mortality after she was educated, Mortenson said.

The remote region of central Asia has a high infant mortality rate from outbreaks of diseases such as diptheria, and from malnutrition. Babies in that part of Central Asia begin life nutritionally disadvantaged because women believe that colostrum is poison and do not let their infants nurse for the first three days after birth, Mortenson said.

Some women in Afghanistan and Pakistan are also malnourished because their husbands do not give them enough protein to eat and save the meat, poultry, and eggs for themselves. Mortenson did a study of women in Korphe and found the average hemoglobin level was 8 or 9. The women have so little body fat they stop menstruating and are infertile, he said.

When one villager complained to Mortenson that his wife was infertile, Mortenson told him he needed to fatten her up by giving her some meat and eggs. The man was a father the next time Mortenson saw him. The villager, he said. thanked God for his wife’s improved fertility.

In his book “Three Cups of Tea,” Mortenson mentions he is a nurse but it is not a central theme in his narrative. But nursing, he said, “has had a profound impact on my journey.”

Mortenson was a medic in the Army, an orderly, and then an ED nurse, often working to earn money to support his early humanitarian efforts in Pakistan. Nursing taught him to listen to people and to ask questions, he said.

In Pakistan and then Afghanistan Mortenson, asked people: “I want to help you. What do you want?” They answered, ‘We want our babies to stop dying and we want our children to go to school.”

Working the night shift gave Mortenson the stamina he needed to go without sleep. Consumed by the important work he is doing, Mortenson usually sleeps only four or five hours a day. He lives in Montana with his wife Tara Bishop, a clinical psychologist, and two young children but spends several months of the year in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Although Mortenson is beginning healthcare training programs, his school building efforts are not diminishing. “Education for girls has to be our top priority,” he said. “Unless they are empowered, nothing will change in the world.”

Mortenson said he also plans to send health workers to his schools to teach the teachers how to do rudimentary health screenings for children.

The education of girls in developing countries, such as Bangladesh, has proven to lower maternal and infant mortality, reduce population growth, and improve the basic quality of health, Mortenson said.

Mortenson’s book and his philosophy of listening to, respecting, and empowering indigienous populations, is also influencing military and political thinking regarding the U.S. role in Afghanistan. “Three Cups of Tea” is mandatory reading at the Pentagon and for commanders in Afghanistan and Iraq, Mortenson said. Army generals have also visited his schools.

Mortenson said that while Taliban militants are blowing up hundreds of girls schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, his schools have never been destroyed because they are run by the local villagers and not by governments our outside nongovernmental organizations.

Mortenson has gone into five new areas in Afghanistan to build schools, including the home of one the Taliban’s top leader, Mullah Muhammed Omar.

To learn more about Mortenson and his work in Afghanistan and Pakistan go to his Web site: www.gregmortenson.com

Janet Boivin, RN is a senior staff writer for Nursing Spectrum and NurseWeek magazines.

(c) Gannett Heathcare Group 2009

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