The Power of One
Tea and Empathy
In the rural villages of Pakistan and Afghanistan where Greg Mortenson, RN, has been quietly building schools for more than 15 years, the local people whom he has helped to empower call him Dr. Greg. His work in Pakistan first became known to Americans in his best-selling book “Three Cups of Tea.” The book turned Mortenson into a minor celebrity who is sought as a motivational speaker and to whom leading politicians and U.S. military generals turn for advice about the terrorism-ravaged countries.
When he is not in Pakistan or Afghanistan, Mortenson maintains a speaking schedule that would rival that of politicians during the height of a campaign season. Last year he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by several U.S. congressmen. He and the other nominees lost to President Barack Obama, but Obama donated $100,000 to Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute.
Few people know that Dr. Greg is actually an emergency nurse and former Army medic who used money from working night shifts in California hospitals to fund the first of his many schools for girls. He vowed to build the first school when he found sustenance and refuge in a rural village after becoming lost in some of the world’s tallest mountains in Pakistan during a climbing trip. The work has become his passion and singular vision.
Last November, Sigma Theta Tau International, the Indianapolis-based honor society of nursing, awarded Mortenson its Archon Award for demonstrating exceptional leadership in promoting health and welfare throughout the world during its 40th Biennial Convention in Indianapolis. Mortenson recently was in Chicago for his annual Central Asia Institute fundraising event, which was attended by more than 1,000 supporters. Nursing Spectrum spoke with Mortenson in Indianapolis and then again in Chicago about his work.
In “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.”
Nursing taught him to listen to people and to ask questions, he says. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, Mortenson went in saying, “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 as a nurse 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 Bozeman, Mont., with his wife Tara Bishop, a clinical psychologist, and two young children, but spends several months a year in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Mortenson says that after building schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan for 16 years, he is now focusing on the training of healthcare workers, as well, although it has proved difficult because of the lack of basic resources in the remote villages where he locates his schools.
“[Healthcare] kept tugging at my heart,” Mortenson says. “One out of three children are dying.”
Mortenson, who co-founded the Central Asia Institute (with Jean Hoerni, a silicon transistor pioneer who died in 1997) 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 Pakistanis, a goal more easily achieved with schools than clinics.
Mortenson recently started a maternal health training program, teaching local women about the basics of good maternal-child healthcare. 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 cephalopelvic disproportion, placenta previa or placenta abruptio because there are no obstetricians to perform cesarean sections.
The remote region of central Asia has a high infant-mortality rate from outbreaks of diseases such as diphtheria, 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 also are 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 eight or nine. The women have so little body fat they stop menstruating and are infertile, he said.
Mortenson said he also plans to send health workers to his schools to teach the teachers how to do rudimentary health screenings for children.
(c) Nurseweek, Gannett Healthcare Group 2010
http://news.nurse.com/article/20100503/NATIONAL01/105030019/-1/frontpage
