Colorado Springs
Independent
January
10, 2008
Making friends,
not enemies
In Pakistan and
Afghanistan, Greg Mortenson's building schools — and goodwill
By John Weiss
Save
the date: 7 p.m., Tuesday, Jan. 15. A phenomenon is coming to town.
Everywhere
Greg Mortenson travels, people flock to hear his story and his simple message
about how to change the world. He has spoken to 1,400 in
People
also are buying Mortenson's book, which has spent 47 weeks on the New York
Times best-sellers list. And the readers aren't just peaceniks — the Army is
requiring 5,000 officers attending the U.S. War College to read Three Cups of
Tea: One Man's
On
Tuesday in Colorado Springs, and then again in a closed February session at the
Air Force Academy, Mortenson will use photos and humor to explain why he has
been building coed and secular schools in isolated, mountainous areas of
Pakistan and Afghanistan: 64 so far, with as many as 100 more in the planning
stages.
It
started in 1993, after Mortenson failed to reach the 28,250-foot summit of
With
just hundreds of meters to go, weather and illness forced his climbing party to
descend. A devastated Mortenson got lost on the way down. Worn out and
emaciated, he wandered into Korphe, an isolated
Pakistani subsistence farming village, where locals nursed him back to health.
Mortenson,
a former Army medic, was nicknamed "Dr. Greg" by local villagers
after he used his knowledge and climbing medical kit to treat their broken
bones, infections and other illnesses.
But
Mortenson found his calling when he visited the local "school," where
he saw 84 children sitting outside, writing their lessons with sticks in the
sand. The students hungered for learning, but the
village could afford only to pay a teacher part-time, because his dollar-a-day
salary was just too dear.
"I
made a very rash promise that day to build a school for these kids,"
Mortenson recalls.
It
took him three years to raise the $12,000 needed to build a school for the kids
in Korphe. Before this school was
finished, nearby local villages clamored for their own.
Treacherous
roads make it challenging, if not impossible, for kids from remote areas of
The
requests have not stopped. Today, schools there cost about $60,000 each, with
ongoing teacher training, salaries, pencils and paper factored into the price
tag.
Over
the past decade, Mortenson has focused most of his efforts to ensure that girls
are educated. So far, his schools have taught 25,000 students, 14,000 of them
female. He often repeats an African proverb: "If you educate a boy, you
educate an individual.
But
if you educate a girl, you educate a community." Mortenson explains that
schooled rural boys often migrate to a city, while girls usually remain in
their villages, thereby recycling knowledge among children and neighbors.
Among
other things, Mortenson believes education is the best way to change the
tradition of child marriage. The United Nations reports that nearly 60 percent
of marriages in
In
December, Independent publisher John Weiss conducted a long telephone interview
with Mortenson, just before the author headed back to
Indy:
Where are you going next week? And why?
GM:
I'm leaving to
They
come in from the fields and mountains and their jobs in the cities, so it's a
good time to have a jurga, which is a tribal
community meeting, to discuss setting up schools in the coming year.
Indy:
How does the turmoil in
GM:
While there's a lot of political turmoil, especially in
Indy:
What do your schools teach?
GM:
Our main focus is on ensuring girls have access to education. It is often
extremely difficult to get parents to allow their daughter to enroll. I often
say we could drop bombs or build roads or put in electricity, but until the
girls are educated, a society won't change.
Reminders
of the region’s troubled past aren’t hard to find, as evidenced by this piece
of Soviet playground equipment.
If
you can educate a girl to at least a fifth-grade level, it does three important
things. First, it reduces infant mortality. Second, it reduces population
explosion. And third, it improves the quality of health and life itself. But it
takes one to two generations to reap the rewards.
One
is that we incorporate the storytelling tradition, where elders come in several
times a week. I've spoken at several hundred schools across America, and I
often ask the students, "How many of you have talked in great detail to
your grandparents or elders about World War II or the Depression or the Vietnam
War, or when your parents or grandparents came as immigrants to this
country?" About 5 or 10 percent of the hands come up. If you ask that same
question in
One
result of bringing in literacy and books is that folklore and heritage
tradition get eradicated. I think it's very important to keep our faith and
respect these parts of every culture.
A
second unique part of our curriculum is our ongoing hygiene, sanitation and nutrition
classes. And the third thing, which is perhaps the most controversial, is our
Islamic studies for about two or three hours every week. It's very tempered,
and we include in that learning the differences between Sunni and Shia. We've also added what you might call religion
studies, or learning about different faiths or religion.
Islamic
study is required by both the governments of
Indy:
About three decades ago, MIT researchers examined how to get more American
girls interested in studying science. They found that one needed change was in
the attitude of junior high boys toward girls studying technology; girls were
doing just fine in math and science until middle school, when there was a big
downturn. And the girls took their cues from the boys.
While
the circumstances are very different, how do Central Asian men and boys react
to your push for coed schools?
GM:
That MIT research is very interesting. In fact, my mother earned her Ph.D. in
the same kind of study, looking at when girls reach fifth, sixth or seventh
grade and start drifting away from the sciences and math. Part of that is the
attitude of the boys and what girls are expected to do — put on makeup — and
peer pressure.
Let
me tell you about Aziza, a young woman who graduated from high school in 1998.
She lives in a rural tribal valley, right on the Afghan border. It's quite a
conservative area.
When
Aziza first went to school, the boys threw pebbles at her to try to dissuade
her from attending. And then in high school, they stole her notebooks so she
couldn't study. But she did keep going and became the first female high school
graduate in her whole valley.
Today
she works as her region's first maternal health care worker, performing both
pre- and post-natal care, from deliveries to immunizations. In her valley,
there's no doctor, no medical, no clinic, no medicine.
Before
Aziza started working in 2000, between five and 25 women died in childbirth
every year. Since she's been working, not one woman has died in childbirth. Her
pay is about $1 a day, and it cost us about $800 for her to attend her medical
training after high school. She's now become a role model for more girls to go
to school.
Indy:
Twenty years ago, I spent several weeks in a small Nepali village about a
half-hour off the beaten path. I was amazed at how young the girls got married.
Does attending school impact when girls get married? And if so, is that impact
controversial or accepted?
GM:
When you bring in literacy or education for females, the marriage age
definitely gets pushed back. Traditionally, girls often marry at 12, or even
younger. When girls go to school, they and their families and communities often
make the decision to delay their marriage until they can get to fifth grade or
even 10th grade.
I
need to stress that it often takes us many years to get the first girl to
attend school. To help the process along, we bring in mullahs who support
girls' education. We have two ex-Taliban who are now teaching
in our girls' schools and have become some of our biggest proponents.
It's somewhat similar to an ex-smoker or an alcoholic who has changed and
becomes very against smoking or drinking.
We
even use good old-fashioned Western capitalism. We go and tell a mullah: If I
want to marry a girl in your village, how many goats do I owe you? He might say
five goats. If she has a fifth-grade education, how many goats would I then
have to pay you? And the answer would probably be 15 to 20 goats. A goat is
usually $30 to $40 each.
And
then we tell the mullah: If all the girls are educated, just think of how much
more wealth you'd have. Then you can see his eyes get bigger.
Now,
I'm saying that in a rather humorous way, but the reality is that even people who
are opposed to education, they see the financial incentive, which is really a
small part of the equation, but it's a way to convince some people to start
sending girls to school.
The
most important thing that can be done in a society as far as economical
development — and this is an impoverished, illiterate society — is if you
invest $1 in every female, that in one generation, the return rate on that is
about $52. There's no one single more effective investment that you can make.
Shaukat Ali served in
the Taliban. He now teaches at the Patika girls’
school.
Indy:
In some ways, the people with whom you are working are living in a different
century. What can we learn from them?
GM:
I have a quote on my bathroom mirror that I've had for probably 20 years by
Judith Campbell that says, "When your heart speaks, take good notes."
I'm
49 [and turned 50 on Dec. 27, the day of Bhutto's assassination], but having
grown up in rural Tanzania for 14 years, and I've now worked in Pakistan and
Afghanistan for 14 years, I've realized that societies in remote areas have
very strong intuitive sense. We are programmed from early childhood to be very
logical and linear. We wake up to an alarm clock.
Everything
is kind of "click on" and "off." We have a lot of control
of our environment. But I think that leads to somewhat of a
dissociation with our intuitive sense; whereas over there, they're much
more subject to the elements and the intuitive type of process.
One
reason that I think we've been effective over there in forging relationships
and getting things done — at least half of it is our intuitive sense, or
"When your heart speaks, take good notes." So what's just as
important as the summit is the climb; not the product, but the process. It's
about the relationships.
Hence the title of the book, Three Cups
of Tea.
The first cup, you're a stranger; the second cup, you become a friend; the
third cup, you become family. But the process takes several years.
Here
in
When
we set up a school, we provide the skill, labor and materials and, most important,
the teacher training. But the villages themselves have to come up with equal
amounts of sweat equity, subsidized or free labor, free land, free resources
and free wood, so we kind of have a 50-50 match so that they become invested in
the school.
Indy:
Let's say it's January 2009, and you're asked to give a five-minute briefing to
the incoming American president. What would you tell him or her?
GM:
First of all, it's important to have dialogue and diplomacy even with your
enemy, especially in tribal societies like
But
inferring that you're "either for us or against us,"
or that "we're not going to talk to you because we're against you" is
very American. We either hire an attorney, we step outside and duke it out, or
we don't talk to each other. It's important to have dialogue, and I've learned
that.
I've
had tea with the Taliban. And in many cases, we have several hundred girls of
the Taliban that are going to our schools. To me, that is the ultimate victory.
Mortenson
insists he’s a “shy, quiet kind of guy” who simply pushes himself to help fight
ignorance.
No. 2, to involve local communities and
provincial leaders in the reconstruction process. The most
important thing we can do is invest in education. Last year, we spent $94
billion in
So
I would say that we should put at least 10 percent, but even if we could put 1
percent of the money for the war on terror into education, we would have a
really big difference.
Indy:
How do you keep going?
GM:
I'm very blessed because I think I have the best job in the whole world. I love
my work. I'm actually kind of a quiet, shy kind of guy. What really happened
was I was in
When
I'd been in
When
I came back, I started getting death threats and hate mail from Americans,
which was a very big surprise for me. People called me a traitor. Others said I
should die a painful death because I was helping the enemy. What that made me
realize was that the real enemy is ignorance, and ignorance breeds hatred,
whether it's here in
It
was actually my wife who encouraged me to go out and talk about what I'm doing.
It was very difficult for me at first, because I felt somewhat threatened and
afraid. But what's happened as a result is that in the last year, I've been in
about 120 cities and I've talked to maybe 50,000 people. I find that Americans
are also good people. So are the people over there.
I've
been able to talk at the Pentagon and Capitol Hill and feminist groups in
Indy:
In February, you're returning to
GM:
I'm a military veteran, and I have great respect for the difficult and
dangerous assignments that our men and women in uniform have in
Ultimately,
a victory is not just capturing or killing terrorists, but it's changing the
hearts and the minds of people that they look up to. Education is a way to have
hope. We have two previous Taliban — they were trained in
At the Air Force Academy, part of my talk will be to read some of the
e-mails I have from people in the military who are serving in those difficult
areas. They all say that education is the only way to really bring hope, and
give those children an opportunity to get out of the cycle of violence and
terrorism.
http://www.csindy.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A22737
© 2008 Colorado Springs Independent. All Rights
Reserved.