Greg Mortenson

To honor his sister after her death in 1992, Greg Mortenson climbed a mountain. A big one — K2 the second highest mountain in Pakistan’s Karakoram range.

He didn’t reach the summit.

Instead, he and three fellow climbers saved a fifth climber and exhausted, he recovered in a small village called Korphe where he saw children sitting in the dirt writing with sticks in the sand. He made a promise that would change his life and the lives of hundreds of thousands of others. He promised to help them build a school. Now, after 17 years in Pakistan and Afghanistan, for Greg Mortenson, there is no mountain high enough to keep him from building those schools in some of the remotest areas in the world.

Mortenson will journey to The Music Hall in Portsmouth on Friday, Dec. 4 for two sold-out presentations as part of the Writers on a New England Stage series.

He is the co-founder of the nonprofit Central Asia Institute, Pennies For Peace and the co-author of New York Times bestseller “Three Cups of Tea,” which has sold 3 million copies, been published in 39 countries, been a New York Times best seller for 142 weeks since its January 2007 release, and Time Magazine Asia’s Book of The Year. Now, in his new book, “Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books Not Bombs, In Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he talks about another promise, to build a school in one of the remotest areas in Afghanistan. His dramatic book is filled with harrowing and traumatic stories of a devastating earthquake and poverty, but also of triumph and possibility, especially for Afghan girls.

“People always ask me if it’s safe over there but I spend a significant amount of time trying to understand the subtleties of the culture, what they call the ‘style.’ You’re held in high esteem if you even try to understand their style.”

Mortenson says that while Afghan families are patriarchial, behind closed doors it’s not quite the way it seems and educating women is helping the country take care of itself.

“Although in public women are seen as oppressed and demure, if you go into the household you’ll find that there the women are very powerful. The woman is at the helm in the household. If the main childbearing woman dies, the household often disintegrates. Another thing is that there are many things that happen when the girls are educated. The infant mortality rate drops, the population explosion decreases and the women are empowered, they come back and help the community,” he says.

“When the men are educated — it’s like here — they go out and get the Corvettes and the Mustangs and the TV sets, the men tend to think about themselves. Women tend to pool their resources. I’ve seen very dramatic changes when they have some resources. They get together and plan an endeavor that will benefit the whole community. We provide the skill labor and materials but the community has to provide the free manual labor. The women will start a community fund. They create their own money and resources to start poultry farms, vocational centers, poplar tree farms. They become profitable and the men just scratch their heads. It causes friction and I try to be conscious of that. We do not try to impose Western values in the educational system.”

Mortenson’s organization has built and opened 131 schools, educating 58,000 students, 40,000 of them girls. While in Afghanistan in 2000, there were 800,000 children in school, nearly all boys, today, there are 8.4 million children in school, including 2.5 million girls. Still, there are many hurdles to cross, including religious ones.

“There’s nothing in the Koran that says girls can’t go to school. It says, “Iqrah” which means, ‘read’ it says ‘all people have a quest for knowledge.’ The Mullahs (community Islamic leader) will say ‘you cannot teach Arabic in schools’ but the kids need to learn to read Arabic but also what they are reading. The Mullahs try to keep them from understanding what the Koran says.”

Mortenson says that giving the people the tools to help themselves is key to their success.

“In Afghanistan over the last eight years we set up 17 women’s vocational centers. They’re quite successful. They set up their own co-op and now there are 137 women’s vocational centers and they did it on their own. I told them, ‘Next year you can set up your own nonprofit!’ They said, next year they’ll have 1000 centers! So, the brighter girls help teach literacy, they learn about how education can decrease the population explosion. They learn to keep nursing to avoid getting pregnant again for example. When the women themselves are empowered they can do five times more than what I can do.”

He says that when the people take charge of their own provinces, real progress can be made and he has concerns about the $5 billion the Japanese have recently pledged to aid Afghanistan.

“It’s what’s been done historically, again. There’s no agreement for any reciprocal contribution from Pakistan or the Provinces. It’s imperative that you get the community to contribute. In Afghanistan you drive by these beautiful schools and they’re empty then you drive further and see 1,200 kids sitting in the dirt. When I ask why I’m told they didn’t get orders from the district officer and then I find out the contractor didn’t get paid so they won’t turn over the keys. The local communities are never involved. One of my main criticisms is that it’s set up as a centralized system and not a provincialized one.”

Now that Mortenson is on his book tour, he’s been seeing some opposition to his influence and work in Afghanistan.

“After 9/11, I started getting hate mail from Americans saying, ‘You’re a traitor — you’re helping Muslim children go to school.’ Then when ‘Three Cups of Tea’ came out we started getting people on the far right saying, ‘We need to help here.’ But we live in a global society … Now we’re getting the white supremacists and people from Afghanistan protesting.”

But, Mortenson says, we have a responsibility to help the Afghan people rebuild.

“With relation to Afghanistan, we helped during the ’80s, we were spending millions a year to fight the Soviets but in ’89-90 the U.S. gave less than a milliion. Then after 9/11 we were off to Iraq and in the past six years the Afghanis have taken a back seat. I’m kind of hard pressed to say if we should have more troops there but at these meetings, these Situation Rooms, the meetings held in secrecy I’m very concerned about. You can’t run a democracy in secrecy. I think that there should be testimony on Capitol Hill with generals and people like me testifying but the main voice that’s lacking is from the Shura — the elders of the community. Every province has 10, 20 Shura. They’re not voted in but they’ve been in power for the past 2000 years. General McChrystal who submitted his report on Afghanistan to Obama and Congress, well a lot of that report was based on meetings with the Afghan Shura.”

In the 66-page report, Gen. Stanley McChrystal talks about troops’ involvement but also criticizes the current Afghan government. “The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and ISAF’s own errors, have given Afghans little reason to support their government,” he says.

While his book tour can be grueling, he says it’s important to educate people about what’s happening in Afghanistan.

“The reason I go out and talk about this, the reason I’m coming to Portsmouth, it’s that I’ve found that everywhere I go in the U.S. Americans are very compassionate. Fighting terrorism is based in fear. Promoting peace is based in hope. The real enemy’s face, is ignorance. Most Americans aren’t aware of all the good things going on.

But for now, and until he goes back to Afghanistan in January, Mortenson gets some time to be with his family, his wife, Dr. Tara Bishop, a clinical psychologist, and his two children, son Khyber and daughter Amira who rounded up thousands of jump ropes for the Afghan children and was the instigator in a project to build playground to accompany new schools.

“I’m very blessed by my family. My wife should be promoted to sainthood. It’s hard when we get letters that say, ‘You’re a bad Dad, You’re never there.’ But the kids are involved. I do think it does take a toll but we have a close family and a close community and they all help. When I’m gone a lot my wife says she’s basically a single parent and when I’m gone, we both know I might never come back so when I come home I keep a really low profile. Every Tuesday is our date night, we go out and take a walk, have dinner and every Saturday it’s “Kids’ Day”. No matter what, they know they have me.

(c) Seacoast Media Group

http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/20091122-ENTERTAIN-1010525