A few months ago, I was telling Rupali that I want to set up a school somewhere in the rural interiors of India. This will happen when I have retired, which I plan to do in my late forties. I will take 100 students only. Whereas my thinking on how they will be brought up and funded may differ from normal such schools, the model is already followed, I learnt later, by a few organizations. Anyways, this write up is not about me or my dreams of a school, it is about Greg Mortenson. It is a write up dedicated to a man whom I met through a book, who tells people like me two things – don’t just dream, do it and one man can really change thousands of lives.
It is difficult to say where Greg Mortenson was from. Though an American by nationality, most of his childhood was spent in Africa. Later the family moved to Montana, US, and when Greg was old enough, he joined the army and later moved to the west coast to earn his living as a nurse and spend the rest of his time doing what he loved, mountaineering. The story starts with an attempt to mount the K2, second highest peak of the world in northern Pakistan, in which he failed to reach the summit after making very close to it. On his way back, lost, tired, exhausted and near death, he arrived at this small obscure village named Korphe. The villagers fed him and kept him warm. He realized how poor they were and yet they offered him the best they had. During the next few weeks, as he gained strength, he made friends with them and treated their small and big medical ills with his experience of a nurse and the expedition’s medical kit.
One day he asked the headman to take him to the village school. He was led up a steep path to a vast open ledge on a high altitude. Though the view was exquisite, Mortenson was appalled to see eighty two children – seventy eight boys and four girls, kneeling on the frosty ground, in the open. The village had no school and the government did not provide a teacher. Teacher cost equivalent to one dollar a day which the village could not afford so they shared a teacher from the neighboring village. The rest of the time, children were left alone to practice. This sight changed Greg’s life forever. While he admired the grit of the students to be studying in the open in a wintry atmosphere, he was wretched to see what they had to undergo to get education. He was so moved that he promised to return some day and build them a school.
Back in the US, Mortenson wrote 580 letters to people he knew, to celebrities and the millionaires including names such as Oprah Winfrey, Susan Sarandon and every US senator. Here is what he wrote, “I plan to build a five-room school to educate 100 students up to the fifth grade. While I was in Pakistan I consulted with local experts. Using local materials, labor and craftsmen, I feel sure I can complete the school for $12,000”. To save money, he decided not to rent an apartment. He lived in his car. On most days he ate a 99 cent breakfast and skipped lunch. After a while, he got a letter from his mother who was a principal at a school in Montana. Her students had launched a “Pennies for Pakistan” campaign collecting 62,345 pennies. One friend of his sent him a check of $100. That was all he received after speaking to several people, months of follow-up and those 580 letters. Subsequently he met Dr. Jean Hoerni, an eccentric millionaire, who agreed to sponsor his school, for the whole $12,000. As a consequence started the effort of building the first school in 1994.
Since then Greg and a tireless team of locals, built more than 60 schools in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan which have provided education to over 25,000 children including 14,000 girls through Central Asia Institute (www.ikat.org), the foundation formed by Hoerni’s funds. Greg has had fatwa issued against him twice and was abducted a couple of times by the militia. During these years, the Americans have not exactly been loved in these parts of the world but Greg continued to work towards the cause. While he received several death threats and hate mails cursing him and his cause after 9/11, sadly most from Americans, he was loved by the locals. He has been able to accomplish this with the support of the local Pakistanis and Afghans, many of them being mullahs, tribes and militia.
During these years, Greg has tried to argue that the war with terrorism in the Islamic countries cannot be won with weapons, but with education and awareness. During one session addressing the Congress at the Capitol, he was interrupted by a Congressman midsentence, “Building schools for kids is just fine and dandy. But our primary need as a nation is security. What does all this matter without security?” Mortenson replied, “Fighting terror is perhaps seventh or eighth on my list of priorities…I have learnt that terror does not happen because a group of people in Pakistan or Afghanistan decide to hate us…It happens because children aren’t being offered a bright enough future that they have a reason to choose life over death” He spoke about the impoverished public schools and the wahhabi madrassas sprouting like cancerous cells and billions of dollars of Saudi sheiks carried into region to fuel the factories of jihad. The only way to counter these was to build schools, he argued. The government or foreign aid has done little to support education. Terror cannot be fought with weapons or poverty with grants. The solution is to fight ignorance. To overcome the fear of terror, we need to build awareness. To overcome the poverty of India or Pakistan or anywhere else, we need schools.
One part of me questions, “Are you not an Indian? How could you donate to Pakistanis? India is poor and needs funding as well?” My answer to myself is, “Yes, I am an Indian and Pakistan is definitely not one of my favorite countries. But I can make out the difference between hostility between nations and fighting for a common cause. I am donating for a cause and would do so for any country. And as I said, some day, I will open a school. It would be in India”,
If you want to know more read the book “3 cups of tea” written by Mortenson and David Relin, an Oregon based reporter. It is an engaging read.
If you want to donate:
• Buy the book online from www.threecupsoftea.com, 7% of the proceeds go to education
• You could start with a penny. It can buy a pencil. A dollar can fund a child’s education for a month! You can make a tax deductible contribution to Central Asia Institute, P.O.Box 7209, Bozeman, MT 59771 or from their website https://www.ikat.org/make-a-donation/
• And some day I will send you a link when you can make donations to my school as well!
