Greg Mortenson

Greg Mortenson’s teacup is half full, at least. Maybe heading toward three-quarters. His heart is in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he helps local villages build schools. He leads with the geometric growth in the number of children in Afghanistan who are in school — a curve that spiked upward after 9/11 and the coming of U.S. and NATO troops.

It has increased from fewer than 1 million students at the beginning of the century to more than 8 million today, he said, despite the Taliban’s war on secular education. “It’s the biggest increase in school enrollment in a country in modern history,” he told us.

It’s music to our ears. “Education is something that can bring us all together,” he says. That may be why Mortenson, author of the bestselling “Three Cups of Tea” and a second book, “Stones into Schools,” is a widely admired figure. To spend a couple of hours with him, as we did last week, is to begin to appreciate the difficulty of working in an isolated, tribal culture, and to understand the imperative of listening to local leaders before plunging in with “improvements.”

“Peace through humility and listening,” Mortenson calls it.

He is a big guy, 6-foot-4, and in his book-cover pictures he towers over the schoolgirls at the center of his work. He has ties to Minnesota; he was born in St. Cloud, went to Ramsey High School in Roseville and worked at St. Joseph’s and United hospitals in St. Paul. His home is in Bozeman, Mont., but his mother and

Other relatives live here, including his cousin, Pioneer Press photographer Jean Pieri.

Pieri recalled that Mortenson sat at her kitchen table after his unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world’s second-tallest peak, in 1993, and described the commitment to build a school that a young Pakistani village girl had extracted from him.

That commitment led to all that followed, now numbering 131 permanent schools and several dozen more in temporary sites such as refugee camps. And to the Central Asia Institute, which he co-founded, whose mission is “community-based education, especially for girls, in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

“Community-based” is an Americanization of the kind of listening that Mortenson, a soft-spoken guy with a crooked, engaging smile, does a lot of. He began his work long before 9/11, a time when few Americans knew or cared about this region. (In the news business, the term “Afghanistanism” once referred to stories or concerns that were so far off that no American reader would care about them.)

Mortensen said he learned to work through village elders and tribal leaders so that the project was theirs, not his. He came to appreciate the hospitality and safe-transport ethic that allowed him to move safely among warring clans. He learned that mothers in poor villages wanted two things: for their babies to live, and for their children to go to school. He grew to mistrust imposed solutions, such as billions in foreign aid, and to prefer the local solution that needed help but not direction.

The U.S. surge in Afghanistan ordered by President Obama would not have been his first choice, because he believes it will increase the overall level of violence. But he said he is heartened that a large percentage of the new troops will be “trainer troops” focused on helping Afghanis rebuild their country. His message of intense, direct engagement with local leaders has gained popularity with U.S. military leaders.

One of the encouraging things about the “Three Cups” phenomenon is Mortenson’s acceptance of the military role — and the military’s acceptance of his. Americans were bitterly divided over President Bush’s invasion of Iraq and remain so over Obama’s surge in Afghanistan. But in both cases, the military role includes security, diplomacy and redevelopment, and those figures for children in school should make our soldiers proud.

So when we start to despair about world events, think of those percentages. And how far Mortenson got following the traditional saying he learned from one of his early Pakistani mentors, Haji Ali, as described in “Stones to Schools.”

“‘The first cup of tea you share with us, you are a stranger,’ he intoned. ‘The second cup, you are a friend. But with the third cup, you become family — and for our families we are willing to do anything, even die.’” Mortenson’s example is evidence that even in a world of violent dispute, “humility and listening” have a power all their own.

(c) St. Paul Pioneer Press 2009
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