PRINTLearning from students
Mizzou Reads' 2008 pick, Three Cups of Tea, tells the story of Greg Mortenson, a man who has dedicated his life to improving a region where most Americans wouldn't be caught dead.
Courtesy of Central Asia Institute
August 14, 2008 | 12:00 a.m. CST
What does a burly, soft-spoken mountain climber have to teach a bunch of fresh-faced college kids about diplomacy?
Quite a lot, actually. Like how education can beget tolerance, and how, sometimes, one person can do more to move diplomatic mountains than a thousand deep-pocketed statesmen.
What: Greg Mortenson lecture and Q&A
When: 7:30 p.m. Sept. 16
Where: Jesse Auditorium, MU
Cost: Free for students; $10 for general public
Visit: ikat.org, threecupsoftea.com
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When it comes to nation building, they say the pen is mightier than the sword.
Greg Mortenson’s hands were certainly strong enough to brandish a weapon. He’d served in the Army during the Cold War. And he could’ve wielded a pen. He’d pursued graduate studies in neurophysiology, after all. But when the 6-foot-4-inch American stumbled into the a Pakistani village, it didn’t matter either way. He came bearing little more than the clothes on his back.
It was September 1993. Heartsick and deliriously weak from a failed journey to the K2 summit, Mortenson had wandered off the trail. Instead of a hot meal and a Jeep ride back to civilization, he found the village of Korphe and the Balti people within it.
The miscalculation would delay the mountaineer/night nurse for weeks as he recovered in the home of village chief Haji Ali. There he rested, swaddled in the family’s finest possession, a maroon silk quilt covered in tiny mirrors. Much later, this unexpected change of course would also come to alter tens of thousands of lives.
Here in Columbia, far from the impoverished villages of Central and South Asia where Mortenson has spent so much of his adult life, more than 5,000 incoming MU freshmen will gather before class begins during Fall Welcome Week to discuss Three Cups of Tea, a book about Mortenson’s quest to build schools for some of the world’s poorest children. Then, they’ll hear him discuss his experiences in person when he speaks at MU Sept. 16.
The events fall under the umbrella of the Mizzou Reads program, a 5-year-old endeavor that aims to create a common experience for new college students by assigning a summer reading book with a socially relevant theme, says David Rielley, senior coordinator for new student programs at MU and founder of Mizzou Reads. “There’s an opportunity for them through this transition to take a broader worldview, to think about the world beyond their high school,” he says.
Each year, a small committee of MU faculty, staff and students holds a series of meetings to choose an appropriate book. Together, committee members create a large list of contemporary works, then they narrow it down to a single book over the course of several months.
Previous selections have included Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, the tale of an undercover journalist attempting to survive on the wages of the working poor; and T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain, which examines issues of illegal immigration, poverty and environmentalism.
This year, Three Cups of Tea beat Into the Wild, a biographical account of a young man who died in the Alaskan wilderness; Ishmael, a novel about a telepathic gorilla who discusses modern mythology and ethics with his human student; and Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, the story of a journalist who spends a year working as a correctional officer in New York state.
Why serving tea made sense
Three Cups of Tea fit the bill for many reasons.
“There was a growing consensus that something about Islam would be important,” says Mizzou Reads committee member Robert Baum, associate professor and chair of religious studies at MU. “Something that would challenge ideas they might have of the Middle East, Islam and Central Asia.”
In the minds of many Americans, the area is one of the world’s mysterious places. It’s a mountainous, isolated region where many villages cannot afford the dollar-a-day cost of running a school, where the Taliban multiplies, where territorial Indian and Pakistani armies lob bombs at each other atop the Siachen Glacier, the world’s highest battleground.
Ignorance is a word more often attached to the youth of the poorest corners of the earth, but the lack of cultural, political and religious literacy of many young Americans is increasingly deemed a weakness of the U.S. educational system.
More than four in 10 Americans ages 18 to 24 don’t know that Pakistan is in Asia, according to a National Geographic-Roper Public Affairs Geographic Literacy Study conducted in 2006. Knowledge of Islam is equally scant. A 2006 Council on American-Islamic Relations study found that approximately one in four Americans sees Islam as a religion of hatred and violence, and only 2 percent of respondents felt they were “very knowledgeable” about Islam. However, the study also found that the younger and the more educated a person was, the less likely he or she was to harbor prejudices.
Such misunderstandings are deeply rooted in Western culture, Baum says. He teaches courses in Islam, and his students, he says, are often “shocked to find out how much of a shared history Islam has with Judaism and Christianity.”
No doubt, there’s been a surge of attention focused on Islam in America since Sept. 11, says Ronald Smith Jr., director of religious affairs at the Islamic Center of Central Missouri. But Smith says much of the attention the religion attracts is negative, and many Americans erroneously interpret the politics of Muslim countries as synonymous with the religion itself. “There are a lot of militant Muslims, but that doesn’t mean that’s what Islam has taught them,” Smith says. “Affiliations to militant organizations aren’t religious, they’re political.”
The committee hopes Three Cups of Tea will broaden students’ perspectives about cultures, religions and parts of the world they’ve heard about but will probably never see, says committee member Dave Roberts, MU’s senior coordinator for leadership development and community involvement. “It’s about opening yourself up to learning about these places,” Roberts says. “People need to be willing to challenge themselves not to stereotype.”
Discussion leaders in the program encourage a casual atmosphere that bridges the high school and college experiences, says Jennifer Rowe, the 2008 Mizzou Reads committee chair and an associate professor of journalism at MU.
This year, Mortenson’s message — that anyone willing to respond to life’s unexpected challenges with tolerance and persistence can make a difference — hit home with committee members.
Three Cups of Tea humanizes Islam and the Muslim inhabitants of Central and South Asia, and this also appealed to the committee. “We’re hoping students will get a … better understanding of what life is like in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” Rielley says. “So much of our understanding is influenced by what we see on the nightly news or the sound bit you get about the war, terrorists, the Taliban. You don’t see anything else about what the average person who lives there’s life is like.”
Baum notes the importance of being introduced to individuals in Islamic areas and he sees educating young Americans about these issues as vital. “Issues about America’s relationship with the Islamic world are the central questions of the early part of the 21st century,” Baum says.
The commitee was also drawn to Mortenson’s message that anyone with enough tolerance and determination can make a difference.
“He asks questions, and he’s welcomed into the circle,” Roberts says. “He didn’t change his religion. He just said, ‘Let me try walking in your shoes and see what it’s like.’”
Baum agrees: “This is a wonderful book in the sense that it starts with someone with no particular interest in the region, who ... gradually transforms into a firm and passionate advocate for that region’s well-being.” Three Cups of Tea illustrates the idea that “the shared humanity, regardless of culture, religion or nationality, that unites us as people outweighs what divides us,” he adds.
Programs similar to Mizzou Reads have sprouted up at universities across the country. Each year, San Diego State University runs a freshman Common Experience program based around the theme of mapping the world and sharing the future. It, too, will use Three Cups of Tea this year. Liane Bryson, a professor of rhetoric and writing at SDSU will be teaching the book in her classes this fall. Before losing out to The Whistling Season in June, Three Cups of Tea was also considered for Columbia’s One Read program.
Finding support
Greg Mortenson never intended to become a humanitarian. According to his book, it just sort of happened. In that remote outpost of northern Pakistan’s Karakoram region, the Balti villagers had nursed Mortenson back to health with flatbread and rancid yak butter tea. He’d warmed himself at the hearths of their yak dung fires. He’d picked up bits of the Balti language. Mortenson was the first foreigner they’d ever seen, and he towered awesomely over their slight frames.
His hands were powerful, but it was his heart that helped them. Mortenson doled out his possessions — camping supplies, jackets, medicine. He set broken bones and drained long-festering wounds. They nicknamed him Dr. Greg. But it didn’t feel like enough. So when he discovered 82 of Korphe’s children scratching their lessons into the frozen dirt one morning, Mortenson made Haji Ali a promise. He’d return, and he’d build them a school.
His hands were big enough. He could’ve used force. Instead, Mortenson has spent the past 15 years assembling a different kind of militia. It includes a vast army of benefactors and advocates who provide the funds for his humanitarian projects; a loyal, overworked staff at home in Bozeman, Mont.; and a swarm of local protectors and fixers scattered across Central and Southern Asia who fiercely dedicate themselves to aiding and protecting Mortenson.
He also could have just forgotten them. When Mortenson made his promise, locals were skeptical. The history of foreign efforts in this part of the world is largely a history of abandoned promises. Pledged aid that never seems to arrive. Impoverished tribes swept into the thick of superpower standoffs and forgotten when the embers of conflict cool. And the vows of assistance from giddy adventurers drawn to Karakoram’s K2, the world’s second highest mountain, that vaporized faster than oxygen in the high, thin air when they returned to Europe, America, Canada.
And, indeed, a year passed before Mortenson mustered the funds to return to Pakistan to fulfill his promise.
It was not a promise kept easily. Gathering money for the Korphe school was like threading the proverbial camel. Wielding his pen, Mortenson mailed 580 letters to every senator, celebrity and musician he could think of. He received a single check, for $100, signed by television journalist Tom Brokaw. He labored over 16 grant applications, all rejected. He worked nights as a nurse and slept in his car as he squirreled away cash.
Mortenson’s big break came with the financial and moral support of an eccentric benefactor and former mountaineer, Dr. Jean Hoerni. Armed with a sack containing $12,000 in cash, Mortenson returned to Korphe to begin work on the school. He’d planned to make good on his promise and resume his life again, but the vast need he encountered stopped him cold. Hundreds of villages just like Korphe lay scattered about the region. And within them, thousands of children, especially girls, went without education. He couldn’t turn away. He’d have to keep building.
In 1996, at Hoerni’s urging, Mortenson turned his efforts into a nonprofit organization, the Central Asia Institute. Twelve years later, CAI has fully or partially supported 64 such schools, 520 teachers and a variety of vocational training programs and scholarships. More than 25,000 children, among them 14,300 girls, have been educated.
CAI takes a backdoor approach to diplomacy building in its humanitarian efforts. Mortenson has honed this approach through a process of trial and error in regions of the world where misunderstandings are often silenced by bullets. He’s survived an eight-day kidnapping. He’s also dodged two declarations of fatwah from angry Muslims and the dubious affections of an elderly potential donor in a transparent negligee. He’s emerged from these struggles with a disarmingly simple philosophy: Ignorance breeds extremist views. Extremist views breed terrorism. Find a way to combat ignorance, then, and you’re a step closer to silencing the drums of radicalism.
Nipping the problem at the source means getting to children while they’re young. And how better than through education? According to its Web site, CAI is a “nonprofit organization with the mission to promote and support community-based education, especially for girls, in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
The emphasis on educating girls is central to Mortenson’s message. “You can drop bombs, hand out condoms, build roads or put in electricity, but until the girls are educated, a society won’t change,” Mortenson is quoted as saying on his book’s Web site. He believes that educated women — who are more likely to remain in their native villages after finishing school than their male counterparts — are a bastion against terrorism because of their ability to educate their children against extremist views.
Mortenson earns the trust and praise of the people he serves by eschewing agendas. When he’s working in the field, Mortenson dons a shalwar kamiz, a traditional regional garment. He prays with the villagers. He learns their languages. He also lives simply. He receives a bare-bones salary from the institution, and he seeks out inexpensive lodging and simple food when he travels. Thus, the lion’s share of CAI funds is poured directly into projects.
And Mortenson aims for sustainability by insisting on local collaboration. Cooperation with governmental, political and religious groups, as well as local nongovernmental organizations, is a top priority in each project. Recipients must provide local labor for projects, which are overseen by committees of village elders. Such local engagement, the thinking goes, contributes to the long-term empowerment of the communities CAI serves. CAI schools follow local curriculum guidelines, and the foundation doesn’t accept governmental donations.
In 2006, with the help of co-author David Oliver Relin, Mortenson published Three Cups of Tea. The accolades have been numerous, and as of Aug. 17 the book had spent 79 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. This week, it is No. 1.
Continuing his mission
They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but in a world where battles are waged and won on the trinity of bombs, guns and dollars, such conceits often read as naive.
By the end of 2006, the U.S. had given more than $83 billion in development aid to Afghanistan, according to the United Nations Development Programme. The Bush Administration alone has provided more than $10 billion in aid to Pakistan. With the same amount of money, CAI could have built almost 20,000 schools: $50,000 covers the construction and full support of a CAI school for five years.
CAI continues to expand its efforts. The institute funds potable water and sanitation projects, supports vocational centers for adults and has provided more than 3,000 eye cataract surgeries. CAI has also completed projects in Kyrgyzstan and the steppes of Mongolia.
And Mortenson continues to spend half of each year in Central and South Asia, where he oversees projects directly.
Perhaps, then, what matters more than the instrument chosen, pen or sword, is the reach of the hand that holds it.
In the end, Greg Mortenson’s hands were larger than anyone could’ve imagined.
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