Greg Mortenson

Greg Mortenson was once kidnapped by the Taliban for eight days and had two fatwas issued against him.

The fatwas were later rescinded by a sharia court. But the episodes would have had many people thinking of new career options.

They didn’t deter Mortenson from his work building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan -a peace mission chronicled in the bestselling book he co-wrote, ThreeCupsof Tea.

“We can drop bombs, we can surge troops, we can put in electricity, we can build roads, we can put in computers, but if girls are not educated, a society will never, never change,” Mortenson said in a keynote address yesterday to the Rotary International Convention at Montreal’s Bell Centre.

The Central Asia Institute, the nonprofit organization that Mortenson cofounded in 1996, has built more than 130 schools in rural Afghanistan and northeastern Pakistan.

Ten years ago at the height of the Taliban, there were 800,000 children in school in Afghanistan, Mortenson said. Today that figure is 9.2 million with 2.8 million of them female, he said.

“This is the greatest increase in school enrolment in any country in modern history,” Mortenson told the Rotarians who applauded loudly.

He also shared a sobering statistic. In the last three years, the Taliban and other groups have bombed, burned, destroyed or shut down more than 2,100 schools in rural Afghanistan and Pakistan -90 per cent of them girls’ schools, said Mortenson, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee.

The Taliban have only attacked one of the Central Asia Institute’s schools, Mortenson said. A group of 14 attacked a school south of Kabul in 2007, beating up the night watchman. “They basically paralyzed him,” he said.

The reason Mortenson said he believes their schools haven’t been attacked -along with others spearheaded by non-governmental organizations, for example -is because of heavy community involvement in the projects.

“We provide the teacher training, the materials and skilled labour but the community has to give free land, free resources, like wood, and free manual labour. So they have the local buy-in.”

Mortenson, who will speak to students at a few Montreal schools today, has also founded Pennies for Peace, a service learning program designed to help students learn about their capacities as philanthropists. “More and more my focus is on educating and empowering children,” he said.

Born in the United States, Mortenson grew up in Tanzania where his father co-founded a teaching hospital. Mortenson said he learned a proverb in Africa that he never forgot: “If you educate a boy, you educate an individual. But if you can educate a girl, you can educate a community.”

There are few academic reasons why educating girls is so important such as its role in reducing infant mortality, Mortenson said. But he has his own beliefs about why it is so key. One of them is that when girls learn how to read and write, they generally teach their mothers to do so. “Boys don’t do that as much,” he said.

The Taliban’s primary recruiting grounds are illiterate and impoverished society, Mortenson said, adding that when a woman has an education she is much less likely to encourage her son to get involved in violence or terrorism.

After kidnapping him in 1996, Mortenson said the Taliban released him after they found out what he was doing.

His greatest fear for his personal safety -”I hate to say it,” he says -is in the U.S. where he and his family live. Mortenson says he has received death threats and hate mail from both the far right and far left. The former is angry because he’s helping Muslim children in schools and the latter because he helps the military. For instance, Mortenson volunteers his time visiting military bases every year to help troops bound for Afghanistan better understand cultural issues in that country. (The afterword in Three Cups of Tea notes the book is required reading for senior U.S. military commanders deploying to Afghanistan.)

“The key is listening to the shura – the elders. The real integrity in that country are the elders. It’s important to work with the government. But the (Afghan) government there also needs to listen to their elders.”

Listening is something Mortenson says he tries to do as much as he can. “If you ask the women, ‘What do you want?’ You’d think most of them would say ‘I want a good husband or a big house or prosperity.’

“But women say: ‘We don’t want our babies to die. We want our children to go to school.’ ”

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/todays-paper/Peace+missionary+uses+education+weapon/3184911/story.html

© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette