Greg Mortenson’s Global Impact

Some people travel through life interacting with different cultures yet never opening up their minds fully to the nuances and the potential learning that interaction represents.

Others are instilled with a truly global mind-set from early on. This can be a product of conditioning, both the exposure to other cultures and the disposition to let that exposure sink in.

Greg Mortenson is a global citizen. He has been from early on.

Mortenson has gained international acclaim as the co-author of Three Cups of Tea, One man’s Mission to Promote Peace….One School at a Time. The book is an account of Mortenson’s resolve to make education a possibility for kids in the remotest regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Greg Mortenson was born in the United States, but moved to Tanzania for the first 15 years of his life, where he lived in the shadows of Mount Kilimanjaro. His parents were both educators who left lasting legacies in Tanzania; his father by founding the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center, a teaching hospital, and his mother through founding the International School Moshi.

While conditioned to give back from an early age, Mortenson’s resolve to bring education to remote areas stemmed more specifically from one well-intended promise he made.

Mortenson was returning down the glacier from a failed attempt on K2 in 1993. He had undertaken this challenge as a way of honoring the life of his sister, Christa, who had struggled with epilepsy her whole life, and was lost to a seizure in 1992.

During his descent, Mortenson became disoriented, lost his way, and wound up in the mountain village of Korphe, a remote outpost at the base of the Karakoram mountain range in Northeastern Pakistan.

He had spent over 70 grueling days on the mountain, which culminated in he and a fellow team member helping to evacuate one of the climbers who had succumbed to pulmonary edema.

As fate would have it, stumbling in error upon Korphe changed the direction of Mortenson’s life from then on, a shift that has impacted the lives of close to 30,000 people in this formidable region. This series of events is documented through Three Cups of Tea, a book that has spent over 116 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List.

As it turns out, the series of events that followed created an even more lasting and sustainable legacy to honor his sister’s life.

While recovering from exhaustion in the village of Korphe, Mortenson was shown a level of hospitality that he struggled to come to terms with how best to repay. These people had, for all intents and purposes, saved his life.

As he came to know the people of the village, Mortenson was struck by the fact that there was no school. The children were forced to learn outdoors, and often under their own supervision. This region either had been overlooked by the Pakistani Government, or any funds designated for educational infrastructure had never made it to their intended use.

So, Mortenson made a promise.....

.......to Haji Ali, the village elder who has also served as a mentor to Mortenson, that he would return to Korphe and build a school for them. This became a way for him to demonstrate his gratitude and to leave a lasting legacy much as his parents had.

The importance of education and the positive social impact it can have of had been evident to Mortenson through his entire life. “Education is the key to making the world a better place.”

Mortenson often refers to a Tanzanian proverb when speaking publicly about his efforts.  “If you educate a boy, you educate an individual. If you educate a girl, you educate a community.”

Several endemic challenges were obvious to Mortenson as he pursued making his promise to build that first school a reality, and in the subsequent and sustained efforts to have an even broader impact on the region.

Firstly, as there were a dearth of state run schools, and resources were scarce at these, education had been used as a tool to promote extremism through fundamentalist madrassas. In a way, these were parents’ only alternative to educate their children.

Secondly, girls were being left behind in this culture which was becoming more and more influenced by fundamentalist values and religious extremism.

Mortenson saw a clear opportunity to make a positive impact by providing non-sectarian educational opportunities to both boys and girls.

When your heart speaks, take good notes!

From the well documented challenges of building his first schools, Mortenson, through the Central Asian Institute which he co-founded with Jean Hoerni, has gone on to build 78 schools and to run another four-dozen.

And the impact has been very real. Mortenson’s efforts have directly impacted close to 30,000 children, of whom 18,000 are girls.

His efforts have had an indirect impact as well. In 2000, there were only 800,000 Afghan children from the ages of 5-15 in schools. Only 35,000 of these were girls. As of 2008, there are 6.4 million students of the same age, and 2 million of these are girls.

Mortenson has focused the efforts of the Institute on “extreme areas with no access to secular education. These are areas that are impacted by religious extremism, are areas of conflict, or are physically isolated.”

Much of Mortenson’s success has been a result of building strong relationships with the people of the region, as well as among those who have come forward to help elsewhere around the world.

The title of the book, Three Cups of Tea, is a testament to his learning. Mortenson learned from Haji Ali early on in the process that many things can be accomplished if you take the time to have “three cups of tea. The first cup you have as strangers. The second cup you become friends. With the third cup you become family, and for family you are prepared to do anything.”

Most people would have turned back from the obstacles that Mortenson has encountered. From his failed attempt at K2, to the challenges and opposition that he has encountered along the way, Mortenson has maintained his resolve.

Every ounce of it has been necessary.

Over the past year, 480 schools have been bombed or destroyed by the Taliban, almost all of which were girls’ schools. One of Mortenson’s schools was impacted. Mortenson for his part has had two fatwehs issued against him as a response to his efforts to educate girls. Both have since been revoked. He has been kidnapped and repeatedly threatened.

Mortenson has also received praise and awards for his work, including the Star of Pakistan, Pakistan’s highest civilian award.

If you take the time to explore Mortenson’s story more fully in the pages of Three Cups of Tea, it’s easy to see that he is not one to be easily deviated from his heart’s path.