Three Cups of Tea

Greg Mortenson
In 1993, mountain climber Greg Mortenson got lost after failing to reach the
summit of K2, wound up in a small Pakistan village, and ended up discovering
his life. He founded the Central Asia Institute, which is responsible for
building 70-plus schools and teaching 26,000 children in Pakistan and
Afghanistan under the mission statement: “To promote peace by educating
children, especially girls, who, because of poverty, isolation, gender
discrimination, corrupt governments, and religious extremism are denied the
right to learn.” That experience led to his writing the book Three Cups of
Tea. I spoke on the phone with him recently for more than two hours.-
Howard B. Schiffer

You came down from K2 in 1993, emaciated, exhausted, and

disoriented after failing to reach the top, and were taken in by the
people of a remote village called Korphe [in Pakistan] who nursed
you back to health. After you recovered, you saw an outdoor school
with 84 children sitting in the dirt. A girl named Cho-cho asked you
to build a school and you immediately promised to do just that. The
power of that impulse, what some might consider a “rash decision,”
has had a profound impact on who you are today. What prompted
that conviction?

Greg Mortenson: I grew up on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania

from the time I was three months old until 14 years old [1958-1972]. So I had
seen abject poverty and disparity - this wasn’t new to me. My father started a
hospital and my mother started a school in Africa. It took my father a decade
to raise six million dollars in the 1960s to build Kilimanjaro Christian
Medical Center (KCMC).

Greg Mortenson in Afghanistan

When it came time to inaugurate KCMC, my father gave a speech and said that
in 10 years, all the department heads would be local Tanzanians. The ex-pats
and Westerners scoffed at my father for having the audacity to say that. My
father died in 1981, but a decade afterKCMC opened, all the department heads
were from Tanzania and still are today 35 years later.

When a brave girl named Cho-Cho, sitting in the dirt, writing with sticks in the
sand on a cold autumn day, asked for help to build a school, it was the most
natural thing in the world for me to promise her I would.

It has now been 15 years since you first arrived in Korphe. How has
the village changed?

The Braldu valley in the Karakoram mountain range has kept many of its
ancestral ways. There is still no electricity, internet, TV, or phones in Korphe,
but the community is not in a rush to get there. Wheat is still milled in
centuries-old water mills, and yak dung is dried on walls to use for fuel. The
communities have a deep sense of ecological harmony with their land. There is
no garbage other than a few candy wrappers and cigarette boxes that
Westerners have brought in. A newspaper does show up every few days, which
is the highlight of the week.

Health care has improved, especially through a nutrition, hygiene, and

sanitation program we introduced in the school about a decade ago. When I
first visited Korphe, one in three babies born died before the age of one. The
infant mortality rate now has been reduced by over 30 percent. The literacy
rate has gone from under 10 percent up to 40 percent.

There have also been a few unforeseen results over the last fifteen years. When
the children learn to read and write, they often teach their parents. We now
have adult literacy programs.

The second thing is that one of my elder mentors in Pakistan, Haji Ali, warned
me that when literacy increased, the people would lose their oral history. We
have oral history programs now in our schools where elders come in and share
their traditions, culture, and heritage with the grandchildren in school. This is
an incredibly popular class.

The third unexpected result is that women write letters to their maternal
families, which is a significant and empowering experience. Up until now,
once a woman got married she essentially had no contact with her family.

I sometimes see women who are returning home from the market carefully
unfold newspapers that their vegetables or produce are wrapped in and start
reading the news. Korphe has a good Iman [village mullah], but some of the
mullahs use illiteracy to control the people. When women have access to the
outside world, hear the news, and read opinions, they can see it sometimes
conflicts with what the mullah has told them.

Are you still in touch with Cho-cho?

Cho-cho is now married to Ibrahim, one of our first male graduates. He owns a
local store and she helps tutor children. They have three children and the
older one is in first grade at the Korphe School which we built.

Have the people there now read Three Cups of Tea?

I’m working on translations in Urdu, Pashto, and Farsi, so it can be printed
cheaply in Pakistan and Afghanistan so the masses can buy it to read. It’s a
slight challenge with legal releases, but it will happen.

The media in our country seems to focus on the “volatility” of this

region. What is your view on this concern from the village level in
Pakistan and Afghanistan?

Americans are largely naive and misinformed about what people in Pakistan
are like and how they think. If you ask a woman in a rural village about 9/11,
the Twin Towers, Iraq, TSA, Homeland Security, B52s, she will not know what
you are talking about. But she will be able to tell you that one in three babies
dies before the age of one and she wants her children to get an education.

We work in really remote areas, some places where the Taliban is still
operating. Our military is also there, the units are called FOB(Forward
Operating Bases). I get one to two dozen letters every month from military
people who are in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Lt. Col Chris Kolenda wrote me
and said, “Without education nothing will change.” Everyone who is in this
region knows that the most important thing for peace is building
relationships. Chris wrote saying, “The thirst for education here is palpable.
After 30 years of war, the people want a better future.”

What is amazing is that it is easy to get the Army to approve a $100,000 smart
bomb to try to kill four Taliban soldiers, but they’ll deny a $2,000 request for
a bridge that might serve an entire region and help make it much easier for the
people to get their goods to market.

Mortenson discusses matters with the village leaders.

I’ve been speaking for the past 16 months probably to about 150,000 people. I
always ask the same question: “Raise you hand if you are aware that today, in
2008, there are six million children going to school in Afghanistan and one-
third of them are girls, and that, in 2000, there were only about 800,000
children going to school and almost all of them were boys. This is a seven-time
increase in eight years.” And so far only about 35 to 40 people have raised
their hands.

The publisher pushed for your original book to be subtitled “One

Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations, One School at
a Time.” Is the fear of terrorism the only thing that sells
in America?

This was a big disagreement with my publisher. The original 2006 hardcover
did not do well and sold only about 25,000 books the first year. When it went
to paperback in 2007, the new editor Paul Slovak pushed for a subtitle change
to, “One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace, One School at a Time,” and won.
When the paperback book came out, it was immediately number four on
theNew York Times bestseller list and has stayed there ever since. This month
it is number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Everyone has been
surprised that it keeps selling. We haven’t really received much major TV, no
national NPR, or even book reviews in big city papers. It all make sense to me
though. It’s about people in this country who are hungry for peace, and new
solutions to the perpetual cycle of violence and “war on terror.”

After 9/11, you felt amazing sympathy throughout Pakistan - village

army commanders, village chiefs, children, and women embraced
you. You tell the story of meeting little old ladies who brought you
eggs to bring back to give to the widows whose husbands had died
in the World Trade Center. Then you returned to the States and
received death treats and hate mail. Were you shocked at the
contrast and the lack of information on who the terrorists
really are?

I was in Pakistan for three months before and after 9/11. After it happened,
the State Department and U.S. embassy advised me to go home immediately. I
called up my wife, Tara, and she encouraged me to stay. She said, “The people
love you, your work is important, and you need to stay.”
I finally came home on Halloween, October 31st. I landed in Denver airport
and there were American flags everywhere. I called Tara and said, “What’s
going on? It looks like the 4th of July?” She said, “Greg, our country has
changed. Be careful, take time to understand what has happened, and don’t
say much.”

I had never spoken out against the war, and only had said we should use
restraint instead of lashing out in retribution and retaliation without knowing
who we were striking at. This was a very complex situation that could not be
answered in six-second sound bites.

Someone called my house and spoke to my daughter, Amira, who was six at
the time and said. “I’m going to kill your Daddy.” It was upsetting for her. It
was the only time I thought about quitting this work.

The real enemy, whether it is in Afghanistan, Africa, or America, is ignorance.

And it is ignorance that breeds hatred. Fighting terrorism is based in fear.
Promoting peace is based in hope.

You were kidnapped in Pakistan in July 1996, held for eight days,
and were finally set free. The shocking thing to me is that you
returned to this tribe and showed them photos of your family. How
were you able to do this?

I made a mistake. I wandered into a tribal area, the Northwest Frontier

Province (NWFP) on the Afghan border, alone and without permission. I was
put in a dark earthen room and feared that I would be executed anytime with a
bullet through my head. Two men with AK-47s who were smoking hashish
guarded me day and night. After three days of getting depressed, I realized I
needed to befriend my captors, and asked them to read the Koran and teach
me about their Islamic faith.

After six days, I told them my wife was going to have our first baby - a son (not
accurate, it was really a daughter) - and they started to warm up to me, and
offer better food. The birth of a first born son is life’s greatest event for Pathan
tribal men and cause for great celebration. On the eighth day, they freed me.

A couple of years later, they wrote me, apologized, and asked me to come back
- they also wanted to build a school. I decided to revisit Waziristan, even
though it was a little frightening. Under centuries-old traditions, I returned
under their code of Nenawatay, or right of refuge. They lavished incredible
hospitality on me, and fired hundreds of rounds of bullets in the air to
celebrate when I showed them photos of my family. Even though they realized
I actually had a daughter, it was fine.

Greg Mortenson with students in Central Asia

Do your children travel with you in Pakistan?

My wife and children travel with me to Pakistan. They don’t go everywhere

with me, but they love it there. My daughter Amira teaches children in the
school, and my son is adept in local children’s games.

You are involved in long-term solutions. The United States talks

about “nation building,” but the real interest looks like a rush to
hang up the “Mission Accomplished” sign. What does the long-term
investment and commitment in these communities look like?

Ultimately, the only way to peace is to have dialogue and build relationships.
Politicians will never bring peace, but people will. Many Americans want to
briefly foray into Pakistan and Afghanistan and do a little good work. Unless
it’s a long term commitment, nothing changes on the ground in rural villages.

An example is that we helped an eye doctor and team come to Northern

Pakistan in 1998 to do about 60 cataract surgeries. It cost us about $26,000.
Then we realized there was the need for more surgeries and preventative care,
so slowly over the next four years we helped a local doctor, Niaz Ali, get
extensive opthamalogical and surgical training in Pakistan and Nepal. His
total training cost $4,000. Since 2002, he has done over 4,000 cataract
surgeries which cost less than $10 per procedure.

Did you have any heroes when you were growing up?

I grew up without TV or movies. Albert Schweitzer was my hero. At around

seven, I read about his philosophy called Reverence for Life, which says that
all living things are sacred. That really stuck with me.

Another childhood hero was Mother Theresa, who helped set up an orphanage
in Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania, which I once visited. I mostly admired her
humility and was blessed to touch her hand before she was buried in Calcutta
in 1998. What struck me most was how tiny her hand was, how such a small
person is one of the greatest visionaries and examples of our time.

What do you want to be written on your tombstone? What is your

hope for this world your children are growing up in and what do
you want your legacy to be?

I’ve told my wife Tara to put “He loved all beings, and died a happy man.”
What I want most for our children and the world is peace and that the
perpetual cycle of violence, wars, nuclear arsenals, terrorism, abuse, and
disregard for our planet will cease.