HERO
GREG MORTENSON
MOUNTAIN CLIMBER, BUILDER OF SCHOOLS

For months Anita urged me to read Three Cups of Tea, but I procrastinated. I told her I would get around to it after I finished a number of other books including Luther by Richard Marius, a Harvard scholar whom we heard speak at a writer’s convention in Chicago. Marius (who died recently) was an excellent speaker who engaged his audience with humorous stories.

When I finally finished Luther, I picked up Three Cups of Tea, co-authored by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. The title did not excite me—until I read its subtitle: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace. . . One School at a Time. Intrigued by that subtitle, I started to read the book and could not put it down.

Mortensen is the son of Lutheran missionaries from Minnesota. When his father heard they needed teachers in Africa, he and his family moved to a region near Mount Kilimanjaro. When Greg was eleven years old, he scaled that mountain and admits that he “puked” all the way to the top. But when he reached the top and viewed the beauty of the savannah below, he was hooked on mountain climbing.

When he was older he decided to try to climb K-2, the second highest mountain in the world, which is in Pakistan and overlooks Afghanistan. His climb of K -2, however, was not successful. He and his companions could not reach the top. On the way down K-2 he became separated from his fellow climbers and accidentally stumbled into a remote village in the mountain where none of the villagers had ever seen an American.

He found these Muslim people gracious and welcoming and very interested in the education of their children, who sat on the ground to do their writing assignments and arithmetic problems, not with pens and pencils but with sticks. Mortensen fell in love with these simple people and they were very much attracted to him.

The parents begged him to come back and build a school for their children especially their young girls whom the Taliban did not want to be educated. Mortensen promised the villagers he would be back and that he would build a school for their children. When he got back to the base camp, he estimated that he could build a school for $12,000.

When Mortensen returned to America, he typed out over 500 letters asking friends and corporations for donations. He received only one check in the mail. Greg’s mother, a teacher, told her class in Minnesota what her son was trying to do. She showed them pictures of Pakistani children sitting outside in the cold doing their writing assignments and arithmetic problems with sticks because they had no papers or pencils. A little boy in her class said that he would give all the money in his piggy bank for the building of the school. Soon the students began the project “Pennies for Pakistan.” The children collected 62, 345 pennies. When Mortensen deposited a check for $623.45 in the bank, he felt his luck was changing. Tom Brokaw of television fame and Mortensen were alumni of the University of South Dakota, and Brokaw sent him a check for one hundred dollars.

Living very frugally, Mortensen eventually raised the $12,000 and went back to Pakistan where he bought material for the school and hired porters with mules to carry the tools, lumber and bags of cement across dangerous valleys and ravines until they reached the village where the school was to be built.

Eventually Mortensen, overcoming great obstacles and dangers, built not only that school but over 50 schools for Pakistani children in that wild and remote region of the world. Mortensen said the Taliban does not fear guns but fears pencils because it realizes that an educated population is the force that can defeat them.

If ever there is a book that can be called a page turner, Three Cups of Tea is certainly that book. So don’t procrastinate as I did. Go to a library and take out a copy or go to a bookstore and buy two copies, one for yourself and the other as a gift for someone. And tell your children or grandchildren what a piggy bank can do.

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