“Cups” author shares story

Greg Mortenson grew up in the shadows of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.There he learned the skills that would lead him to experience both his largest defeat and his greatest success — the result of his attempt to climb K2, the world’s second highest mountain.

As a child, Mortenson learned to climb mountains and observed the example of his parents, first as they taught at a girls’ school, and later as his father founded and operated Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center. These early experiences would lay the foundation for his life’s work.

In 1993, Mortenson attempted to climb K2, which is located in the Karakoram range in Pakistan. Although Mortenson had been a climber since his youth, this climb had special significance for him.

His younger sister Christa, who suffered from severe epilepsy, had passed away in her sleep during the previous year. She was 23 years old.

Mortenson’s climb of K2 was to be a commemoration of Christa. He had planned to place an amber necklace that had belonged to her on the summit of the mountain.

But Mortenson and the group of friends who climbed with him were ill-prepared for the task that lay before them — one member of the so-called “Dirty Dozen” admitted to bringing a tent with him that was meant for camping in the Sahara.

The group was unable to complete their climb, and the failure hit Mortenson especially hard because of his commitment to his sister. He wandered through the mountains of Pakistan before happening upon the village of Korphe, tired, hungry and thirsty. When he arrived, he hadn’t bathed in 84 days.

The Greg Mortenson who arrived in that remote village 16 years-ago is a far cry from the jovial, charismatic (and healthy) Greg Mortenson who addressed an overwhelming crowd of university students in Mitchell Hall on Thursday.

Among the many pieces of advice he dispensed to the audience: “To succeed, you must fail sometimes.”

These words are true for no one if not for Mortenson. In 2006, Mortenson and journalist David Oliver Relin published “Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time.” The book is a chronicle of Mortenson’s climb and perhaps more significantly, his efforts to open and operate schools in the most remote and poorest areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This year, for the first time, all members of the class of 2013 — except for those in select programs including honors and nursing —  are required to read “Three Cups of Tea” as part of their First Year Experience (FYE).

Avron Abraham, director of the University Studies Program, says he believes a required reading assignment helps foster a sense of community among the incoming freshmen.

“A book does a couple of things,” Abraham says. “It gives people an opportunity to communicate, to share with each other. It’s an opportunity for our first-year students to share with each other.”

The reaction to the book among the freshman class has been positive, if the attendance at Thursday’s events is any indication.

Many freshmen, including Kameron Conforti, found Mortenson’s story interesting and enlightening.

“The best part about it for me was opening my eyes to the issue of overseas education and how something as simple as installing a school somewhere can start this huge series of events where educated people resist terrorism and start to make their own decisions,” Conforti says.

After seeing the children of Korphe learning their lessons by drawing in the dirt with sticks, Mortenson says he felt compelled to help. It was not the poverty these children lived in that motivated him — he had seen lots of poverty as a child in Tanzania — rather their fierce desire for an education. Despite many obstacles, including constructing a 283-foot bridge across a gorge, the first school was completed in 1996.

Since then, Mortenson has founded the Central Asia Institute, an organization that brings community-based education to children particularly girls in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to the organization’s Web site. The CAI has constructed over 90 schools.

Between serving as the executive director of CAI and visiting approximately 200 schools a year, Mortenson says he spends nearly half the year away from his wife Tara and their children, Mira and Khyber.

Although dedication to his work has caused him to miss some important milestones in his children’s lives, including the first time Khyber was able to read, Mortenson has been able to experience those milestones with the students in the CAI schools. He says learning to read and write is magical for a child.

“The first time a child writes their name, it’s very empowering,” Mortenson says. “All of a sudden, that child has an identity. They become somebody.”

Mortenson says his family is very supportive of his mission. Mira even created a rap to explain the idea behind the phrase “three cups of tea.”

The family also spends their summers together in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mortenson says he is thankful that his children have the opportunity to see the world.
Mira may explain the concept of three cups of tea through rap, but Mortenson has another method for explaining many of his beliefs and for rationalizing his experiences: proverbs.

“I hate to keep going back to proverbs and quotes, but that’s kind of how I live my life,” he said during his speech.
One of the proverbs he cited comes from Afghanistan, “If you educate a boy, you educate an individual. If you educate a girl, you educate a community.”

Educating girls to a fifth-grade level reduces infant mortality and population growth while improving the basic qualities of health and life itself. Education is also the most effective defense against the Taliban, which still has a significant presence in the region, Mortenson says.

“Most of these men got out of the Taliban because their mothers said, ‘Son, shape up,’” Mortenson says. “The Taliban have nothing to offer the people.”

The Taliban is responsible for perpetrating a significant amount of violence in the region. A 2007 UNICEF report states that the Taliban has destroyed 800 schools in Afghanistan and 650 schools in Pakistan. Eighty to 90 percent of these schools were girls’ schools.

In 2000, 800,000 children were in school in Afghanistan, and most were boys, Mortenson says. By 2009, that number had skyrocketed to 8.4 million — the biggest increase worldwide.

Mortenson champions education both abroad and in the United States.

“In my little home state of Montana, I’m kind of a squeaky wheel for education,” he says. “I can’t do that much, but I do whatever I can for education.”

When Mortenson’s efforts to raise funds to build a school in Korphe failed to pay off, he sold most of his possessions, including his car and his climbing gear. While he realizes not everyone is willing or able to make such an enormous financial contribution to education, he believes it is within everyone’s power to help.

“I think it should be our top priority that every child in the world should go to school,” Mortenson says. “99 pennies should stay here in the U.S. but we should be sending at least one percent of our money to help kids around the world. If we could just do one percent, it would be quite profound.”