Greg Mortenson Interview (page: 2 / 6) Best-Selling Author, Three Cups of Tea	Print Interview

Of all the things you could have done for the people of Korphe, why did you focus on a school, rather than a hospital or food supplies? Why a school?

Greg Mortenson: Part of that is how my ancestors have been steeped into education. My mother, my grandmother, my great grandparents, all were in education. So that is a value I see, having been brought up that way. Originally, I didn't set out to promote education or build a school. I wanted to fulfill my promise first to Christa. And then number two, to Cho Cho and the kids in that school. My original objectives were, "I'm going to build the school no matter what." I was focused on getting the school built, but first we had to get a bridge built. Finally, two years later, the bridge got built. And I went back in '96. This is three years later. We were working on the school.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I spent six months in Pakistan working at the school site. My wife was pregnant. I was completely broke. But things weren't going very well. And the main problem was because I was doing something that we call micromanagement. I have my plumb line, receipts and records. And I was determined. I'm going to get the school built no matter what. One day, Haji Ali, the very wise elderly man -- it was a beautiful day in the fall, and this was three years after I had first promised to build a school -- he took me aside. And he led me to the bluff of the Braldu River, which is looking over the Karakoram Mountains. And he sat me down, and I thought, "This is a time to learn a lesson, I guess." And in very poetic words, but also in quite a harsh demeanor, he said, "We've been here for hundreds of years, and we're so grateful for what you're doing. But Son, you need to sit down and be quiet and let us do the work." And he said it in a lot harsher words than I could probably repeat here. And then he took my plumb line, receipts and records. And he locked them up in this little earthen locker, along with his prayer beads and his Koran and his British musket gun, which were his most valuable possessions. And then he came back, and he said, "There. Everything will be just fine. Don't you worry." Of course, I was horrified. And guess what happened? A few weeks later, the school got built. And it was an important lesson. I had to let go, let the communities be empowered. Let them do the work.

So the Korphe school, the reason it worked was because the communities rallied behind it and did it themselves. They were empowered. And that's on a microscale. It's a little village in a distant mountain valley in rural Pakistan. But I think you can also apply that lesson on a national level. That's one of my main criticisms of the U.S. policy in Afghanistan, which is actually starting to get better, I think, as we learn from our mistakes.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. After 9/11, the reconstruction policy in Afghanistan was centralized and deprovincialized. If you look back in history at the Marshall Plan, which I think was a brilliant plan -- it was after World War II -- the architects who designed it, who were from the U.K. and the U.S., I think they were genius. Because the main component of the Marshall Plan was that it was provincialized and decentralized. So in Italy and Japan, it worked really well, because provincial regions were empowered to really have autonomy and responsibility for their own well-being. Had we originally looked at the Marshall Plan and also seen Afghanistan as a multi-ethnic and pluralistic type of society and plugged in more components of a provincially based plan, I think we'd have been way far ahead of where we are today, as we're just starting to learn now.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I love to talk to children and students in America. This is kindergarten all the way through university students and grad students, the U.S. Air Force Academy. And one of the questions I ask the students is, "How many of you have talked in great detail to your grandparents or your elders about World War II or the Depression or the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement?" And in the States, unfortunately, only about ten percent of the kids or students put their hands up. If you ask that same question in Africa or Afghanistan or Pakistan, about 90 percent of the hands come up. And I think it's a tragedy in our society we don't have that oral tradition, or the tradition where we learn from our grandparents. And often some of our core values about our heritage, our folklore, our faith, our tradition, come from our second generation. Perhaps some of that is because we're such a transient society, now that many people are single-parent families, and we don't have more of the extended family type of dwelling. But I think there's still a possibility we could have elder people come into elementary schools and just talk a little bit every week. In our schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, we have the elders come in about two, three hours a week, and they do the story-telling tradition. It's the kids' favorite class, where they can really learn about their folklore and their heritage and their culture.

After you built that first school in Korphe, you had fulfilled your promise. How did you decide what to do next?

After the first school got built, I was married. I had a daughter named Amira, and a school built, and a bridge.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I decided at that point that I'd like to dedicate my life to promoting education and literacy, and building schools in Pakistan, Afghanistan. And so, with the blessings of my wife, I decided to start building more schools and getting education started. Our main focus is not in numbers of schools. Today (2008), we have 74 schools. About 26,000 students. We're mainly working with girls' education. But we're not trying to get a lot of numbers. What we're focusing on is where there is no education, and there's usually three reasons why girls aren't getting an education. One is because of physical isolation, they're in such remote areas. Number two, they're in areas of conflict where there's a war, like the India-Pakistan line of control, the border. There are also turbulent areas in Afghanistan. And number three, where there's religious extremism, where Islamic clerics are really opposed to education. So we work very gently by building relationships. Sometimes it takes many, many years. Last year, we started a girls school in a little village called Chunda. It took us eight years to convince the mullah there to start a girls school there. When we started school last year, there were 72 girls in school. Today, there's 340 girls going to school in Chunda Village with the complete blessing of the Imam or the village mullah who was so opposed to it in the beginning.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

Why are you pushing so hard to educate girls in this region?

Greg Mortenson: As a child in Africa, I learned the proverb, "If you educate a boy, you educate an individual. But if you educate a girl, you educate a community." And that has resonance in many ways. That's a simple proverb, but there are several global studies that have been done: Amartya Sen, who was the Nobel Prize economics winner in 1998 -- he wrote a book called Development as Freedom -- he previously was at Cambridge, and now he's at Harvard; Jeffrey Sachs, who's an economist who wrote The End of Poverty; Nabu Pak, a Pakistani economist in the '50s. They all say this...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. If you can educate a girl to at least a fifth grade level, it does three important things. Number one, reduce infant mortality. Number two, reduce the population explosion. And number three, improve the basic quality of health and of life itself. And just little examples of those -- number one, reduce the population explosion. Bangladesh is a great example. In about the '70s, the female literacy rate was under 20 percent. There was a massive push to get all the females, and the males, educated in Bangladesh. Today, the literacy rate is three times higher in Bangladesh. And if you look at a demographic curve, a population graph, you can see the population in Bangladesh now is just starting to reach an apex, and the population is being stabilized. In Pakistan, the growth rate is just going out the roof. Pakistan has a doubling rate of 26.4 years. It's the fourth fastest growing country in the world. The female literacy rate is still under about 30 or 35 percent, and especially in the rural areas, it's about 10 percent. And unless they have a national initiative to really promote education for girls, the population in Pakistan is just going to continue to skyrocket and double within the next 26 years to 320 million people.

Greg Mortenson Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6