11-7-07

Creator of Village Schools in Pakistan Speaks to Overflow Crowd in Bellows Falls

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Author of Best-Selling “Three Cups of Tea”

By Chuck and Sue Bingaman, Contributing Writers

            Greg Mortenson, a missionaries’ son from Minnesota and former mountaineer turned peace and education activist, spoke to over 350 people in Bellows Falls Tuesday evening about building 60 schools in mountain villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the past 12 years.

            Mortenson, who first visited Pakistan in 1993 on an expedition to climb the world’s second tallest mountain, K2, told about wandering into Korphe, an impoverished village, after getting lost on his descent. There he found his life’s work: building schools for children, especially girls who, until then, had been practically left out of any educational opportunities.

 “When I saw the 84 children sitting in the dirt behind Korphe village on a crisp autumn morning…writing with sticks in the sand, that was all it took—a Eureka moment—for me to decide to build a school,” he recently wrote.

            With no experience in construction and no funding, Mortenson started from scratch, raised funds, negotiated endlessly and learned new cultural ways and new languages to begin bringing education to isolated regions of the two countries in spite of war and earthquakes shaking the area.

            Now village schools Mortenson has helped communities build are teaching over 25,000 students, including over 14,000 girls.

            Mortenson’s 2006 book, “Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time” appeared on the New York Times bestseller list last January and has remained there ever since.  Merv Stevens of Walpole, a friend of Mortenson’s family, arranged his appearance in Bellows Falls through the Rockingham Town Library.  Because Mortenson’s story has been such a sensation, affecting readers throughout North America, his appearance attracted people from all New England states but Rhode Island despite less than a week’s notice.

            Illustrating his program with slides of students, parents and school buildings in the remote Karakorum Mountains in northern Pakistan near the Chinese border, Mortenson enthralled his audience with the possibilities of what an individual can accomplish with a vision and vast determination.

            “My goal is to get thousands of girls—and boys—in schools,” said Mortenson. “If we really want to fight terror, we need solutions.  Bombs are a Band-Aid in a hornet’s nest.  A major solution is girls’ education.  I’ve spent years talking with hardened Islamic clerics [there].  Without exception they tell me that Islam’s holy book, the Quran, does not prohibit girls’ education.  In fact, it values and encourages education for all people.”

            Mortenson, who was raised in Africa to age 15, quoted an African saying that, “if you educate a boy, you influence an individual, but if you educate a girl, you influence a village.”  That conviction and the area’s tradition of excluding most girls from any schooling are behind Mortenson’s efforts to gradually include more girls in all school projects that he promotes.  Educating girls, he noted, decreases infant mortality and better prepares mothers for guiding their sons who, traditionally, must get their mothers’ permission to engage in jihadist activities.

            “But,” explains Mortenson, “the Taliban have made it difficult for children to attend schools.  In illiterate areas, opportunistic Islamic mullahs control people by issuing edicts to illiterate people who do not know if the information is true.”

            Mortenson formed the Central Asian Institute in 1996 to promote and support community based education and literacy programs, especially for girls, in mountain regions of central Asia.  Its approach evolved through first hand trial and error to find what worked in the ancient cultures of the area.

 Now all school and related projects are locally initiated and involve full community cooperation.  Local people are fully engaged in all projects and are supervised by village committees.  While the Central Asia Institute—led by Mortenson—raises funds to support school building, communities that build schools must match CAI funds with equal amounts of resources and labor that ensures viability and long-term success. 

Mortenson proudly cited examples on Tuesday where some of the early graduates of CAI sponsored village schools are now completing higher education certificates and degrees and returning to their tribal areas to provide teaching and maternal health services all made possible by his school initiatives. Previously literacy rates in these areas have hovered in the single digits.

            Complete information about Greg Mortenson and the Central Asia Institute is available at www.ikat.org.