River Falls Journal (WI)

River Falls Journal (WI)

February 1, 2008

Like mother, like son
Phil Pfuehler

Growing up in the shadow of Africa’s Mt. Kilimanjaro, humanitarian Greg Mortenson learned from his missionary parents how to help people in need: Build schools and hospitals for them.

From 1958 to 1973, Greg watched as his father, Dempsey Mortenson, founded and became development director of the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center. His mother, Dr. Jerene Mortenson, founded the International School Moshi.

Later, she also headed up schools in this country, specifically here in River Falls, Wisc.

Jerene was principal at Westside Elementary School from December 1986 until the late fall of 1998. She left to become administrator at Shawano Indian Reservation in Shawano.

Time passed and the family returned to Minnesota where Greg attended high school, joined the Army (serving as a medic in Germany), played football at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., and finally earned degrees in chemistry and nursing from the University of South Dakota.

Unbeknownst to him, all this was preparation for the real challenge of his life, which began in 1993 with a failed attempt to climb K2, the world’s second-highest mountain.

Wandering alone and without food and shelter on the Himalaya mountain’s flanks, Greg was rescued by people from the tiny village of Korphe. While recovering, he saw the village’s 84 children sitting outside, scratching their lessons in the dirt with sticks. The village was too poor to hire a teacher. In gratitude, when he left he promised to build them a school.

From that rash, but heartfelt promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time: Greg’s one-man mission to promote peace by building schools.

While Jerene was supervising the education of her young American charges in Shawano, Greg was living in his car in California, saving every penny he could to try and fulfill his impulsive promise.

Having used every trick he knew to raise money and come up essentially empty-handed, Greg stopped by his mother’s school here in town to talk to students about his goal.

What had started in his mind as a generous offer to people he genuinely cared about, was by now a huge frustration.

Down but not out, Greg hid his disappointment and let his passion for the children in a little village half a world away show through.

His talk inspired that fourth-grade audience and one young man thought perhaps Westside students could help out by collecting spare change. Sixty-two thousand, three hundred pennies later, the children’s response to his appeal raised not only a little cash, but also Greg’s spirits and the belief in his mission.

“Pennies for Pakistan” was just what the doctor ordered to breathe new life into the capital campaign. The school receives a prominent mention in the book.

All this was no surprise to Jerene, who had watched Greg evolve into an individual who deeply respected other cultures, was no stranger to deep poverty, and had a sincere compassion for disenfranchised people about whom few others know or care.

When Greg was three months old, his parents had packed him up in Minnesota and taken him around the world, to the East African country of Tanzania, where they would spend the next 14 years as Lutheran missionaries. It was there Greg learned to appreciate what he could discover from people who were unlike himself. He also learned how to make a lasting connection.

“When he was two or three years old, one day I couldn’t find him,” said his mother in a recent interview in the Bozeman, Mont., Daily Chronicle. “And I looked outside and there he sat in the pathway with an old beggar and the cookie jar.

“Greg was handing the old beggar cookies and the two of them were having this conversation. He didn’t just give him something. They were talking. And that just sums up how Greg has been all his life,” she said.

Now, at 50, Greg heads the Bozeman-based Central Asia Institute, a non-profit organization he founded to finance his goal of delivering education to some of the most isolated and volatile places in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Although devoting a large part of his time to fundraising and speaking engagements, Greg still spends many months each year in that land where Americans are not always welcome, working to bring peace to the area one school at a time.

His mother is very proud of him. She will be on hand Tuesday, Feb. 12, when he receives one of the first-ever awards from the U.S. Center for Citizen Diplomacy at a ceremony to be held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Mortensen will talk more about her son’s work this Monday evening at the public library as part of the start of River Falls Reads.

http://www.riverfallsjournal.com/articles/index.cfm?id=85891