American building schools and relations in Northern Areas

Daily Times, Pakistan ^ | 3/9/06

[Valin]

WASHINGTON: An American mountaineer who fell ill while attempting to climb K2 in 1993 and spent seven weeks recovering in the Northern Areas village of Korphe promised to return and build the area’s fist school when he left - and he did.

Ultimately, this led to the formation of the Central Asia Institute which has already built 55 schools across the remoter areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mortenson narrates this extraordinary story in a book just published here that he calls ‘Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations - One School at a Time.’ He co-authored the book with David Oliver Relin.

The Korphe village is said to be the last human habitation before the Baltoro Glacier. One man who flew him around the area is identified as Brigadier Bhangoo, who is said to have been President Pervez Musharraf’s pilot. The book said, “Illiterate high-altitude porters in Pakistan’s Karakoram have put down their packs to make paltry wages with him so their children can have the education they were forced to do without. A taxi driver who chanced to pick Mortenson up at the Islamabad airport sold his cab and became his fiercely dedicated ‘fixer.’ Former Taliban fighters renounced violence and the oppression of women after meeting Mortenson and went to work with him peacefully building schools for girls. He has drawn volunteers and admirers from every stratum of Pakistan’s society and from all the warring sects of Islam.” Relin, Mortenson’s co-author writes, “The accounts I’d heard about Mortenson’s adventures building schools for girls in the remote mountain regions of Pakistan sounded too dramatic to believe before I left home. The story I found, with ibex hunters in the high valleys of the Karakoram, in nomad settlements at the wild edge of Afghanistan, around conference tables with Pakistan’s military elite, and over endless cups of paiyu cha in tearooms so smoky I had to squint to see my notebook, was even more remarkable than I’d imagined. At Korphe and every other Pakistani village where I was welcomed like long-lost family, because another American had taken the time to forge ties there, I saw the story of the last ten years of Greg Mortenson’s existence branch and fork with a richness and complexity far beyond what most of us achieve over the course of a full-length life.”

Relin goes on to record, “And as I found in Pakistan, Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute does, irrefutably, have the results. In a part of the world where Americans are, at best, misunderstood, and more often feared and loathed, this soft-spoken, six-foot-four former mountaineer from Montana has put together a string of improbable successes. Though he would never say so himself, he has single-handedly changed the lives of tens of thousands of children, and independently won more hearts and minds than all the official American propaganda flooding the region. Slamming over the so-called Karakoram ‘Highway’ in his old Land Cruiser, taking great personal risks to seed the region that gave birth to the Taliban with schools, Mortenson goes to war with the root causes of terror every time he offers a student a chance to receive a balanced education, rather than attend an extremist madrassa.”

[Valin]

Central Asia Institute
http://www.ikat.org/

[trubluolyguy]

promised to return and build the area’s fist school when he left - and he did.

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Fist school?


Just teasin'.....good story.

[Mind-numbed Robot]

Now that it has been publicized, I wonder how long the schools will last until the Taliban thugs reenter the villages. I hope that never happens but tyrannical cults can't brook opposition and outside knowledge.

[Valin]

From what I understand they've already tried to kill him.