by Cate Montana

BOZEMAN, MT - KORPHE, Pakistan – For 600 years the tiny village of Korphe remained isolated from the rest of the world, perched high on a cliff over the Braldu River deep in the inaccessible reaches of northern Pakistan’s Karakoram mountain range. The people of Korphe toiled for a meager existence, channeling melt waters from the glaciers into rocky fields and apricot orchards. The nearest doctor was a week’s walk away. The village children suffered from a form of malnutrition, and one in three babies died before reaching their first birthday.

In September 1993, the world of Korphe changed, and so did the life of an exhausted American mountain climber. Separated from his team after a failed summit attempt on K2, the world’s second highest mountain known to climbers as “The Savage Peak,” Greg Mortenson was lost and didn’t even know it.

At the end of his descent and his strength, he wandered near the tiny village. By the time he reached its walls he was surrounded by at least fifty wide-eyed children. No foreigner had been there before, but the nurmadhar, or village chief, stood at the outskirts gate and welcomed him.

The days spent slowly recuperating as an honored guest in Haji Ali’s primitive but gracious household impacted Mortenson deeply. But it was his eventual visit to the village’s school that changed his life. On a vast open ledge eight hundred feet above the Braldu, eighty-two children, four of them girls, knelt on the frosty ground, scratching multiplication tables in the half-frozen dirt with sticks.

Watching the children studying with no supervision, getting an education through sheer will, on the spot Mortenson made an equally tough commitment. He told Haji Ali he would come back to Korphe and build a school for them, no matter what.

Promises and lessons

The ‘no matter what’ part of Mortenson’s promise has had enough adventures in it to fill a book – and it did: Three Cups of Tea.

Sleeping in his old burgundy Buick as a way to save rent money for a return to Pakistan, Mortenson threw himself into fundraising the estimated $12,000 it would take to build the Korphe school. Over the course of a year he contacted 580 U.S. celebrities and philanthropists and filed for 16 grants. All the grants were refused, Tom Brokaw sent a check for $100, and a group of elementary school students at one school raised $623.45. Finally a former climber and businessman heard about his cause and cut him a check for the full $12,000.

As an American in Pakistan, language barriers, custom barriers, and religious barriers blocked Mortenson every step of the way. Korphe was cut off from the world by the Braldu and there was no bridge to get building supplies across. Finding reliable contractors and suppliers was a nightmare. Determined to milk every penny of his funds, Mortenson micromanaged everything. Three years later Korphe’s school was only four walls constructed to the roofline, perched on the high plateau.

“One day Haji Ali approached me with a ‘Son we need to talk look,’ and pulled me aside,” says Mortenson. “Often when an elder is admonishing you or trying to teach you a lesson it kind of becomes like a proverb. So he used a very poetic and yet very harsh language with me and he said, ‘We've been here for hundreds of years and we’re grateful to Allah for what you're doing to bring the candle of light to our people. But you need to do one thing. You need to sit down and be quiet and let us do the work.’ And then he took my plumb line, my receipts, and my records and everything I had. He had a latchkey around his neck and he locked it all up in an earthen locker in his house along with his prayer beads and British musket gun. Then he came back and said, ‘Everything will be just fine.’ And of course I was horrified. But in six weeks the school got built.”

The Central Asia Institute

In that six weeks, Mortenson learned what the U.S. government, USAID and other world relief organizations have yet to really grasp. Good intentions and money are great, but it is partnerships and personal relationships at the grass roots level that get things done in third world countries. Despite the millions poured into Pakistan in U.S. aid, perhaps more has been accomplished for rural education in Pakistan and Afghanistan over three cups of tea and yak butter served in a windowless, smoke-filled hut filled with local fathers, builders, elders and one humble American mountain climber than all the meetings in high-rise government buildings put together.

After the Korphe school, Mortenson went on to found the 501(c)3 Central Asia Institute based in Boseman, MT with a $1 million donation from his original donor, Dr. Jean Hoerni. To date, Mortenson and CAI, which depends solely upon donations for its work, have built 58 schools in the most remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. These schools support more than 520 teachers and currently serve some 24,000 students. Approximately 14,300 of these students are girls. CAI also conducts teacher training workshops, has opened women’s vocational centers, assisted women with NGO training, and developed maternal and other health care projects.

Each school costs an estimated $50,000 to construct and support for five years. Some schools get on their feet more quickly than others, but all are expected to take over their own running costs within that five year time frame. All schools are built on land donated by the village and built with local donated labor. All hired labor and supplies come from local contractors and suppliers which are known and recommended by the village nurmadhar and other villagers. Because Mortenson relies totally upon local input and supervision, expenses are kept to a minimum, and graft is non-existent on CAI projects.

Such is not the case with massive government aid projects. “I've driven past dozens of schools in northern Afghanistan that have been set up by the Conservation Corps or USAID (United States Agency for International Development) or other organizations, and you see a beautiful school building but no one in it,” says Mortenson. “One example is on the road to Faizabad. There's a beautiful new school there - empty. And if you walk a hundred meters down the road there are five or 600 kids going to school in a shabby UNICEF refugee tent. And you wonder ‘what's the matter?’ And then you find out that the contractor is holding out because they haven't been paid adequately. Or there's been money siphoned, or there are kickbacks with the government officials. It's a huge tragedy.”

Sometimes these schools don’t open for years – sometimes they never open. The same thing happens in Pakistan. Mortenson reports that in1998-99 USAID started an $18 million program to refurbish 147, mostly girls, schools in the tribal areas of the Northwest Frontier Province near the western Pakistan / Afghan border. Some of the schools just needed latrines or some plastering to overhaul them. Some needed more extensive repair. Yet the end result of $18 million dollars spent was eight (8) schools refurbished and opened

“We can build 40 schools for a million dollars if it's just the physical building you're talking about,” says Mortenson. “So that's an astronomical amount of money. The U.S. Congress works very hard to get appropriations over there. But they don’t contract with the tiny local builders. There’s very little follow-up and the money that doesn't get used ends up going back to the federal treasury. Very few people are aware of the large failure of a lot of these big projects.”

The refusal, or inability, of large governmental organizations to build relationships deep down at the rural local level and trust communities to help themselves contributes to the distance between the West and these middle-Eastern peoples. And such policies bear bitter fruit in other ways. Mortenson, who has spent six months out of every year living in the most rural areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan since 1994, and who has won the support of the Council of Ayatollahs and the highest Shariat Court in Pakistan for his educational work says that when local people are given no opportunity to get an education for their children, they often reluctantly accept the help of extremist religious organizations that are all to happy to set up religious schools, or madrassas, that are also a hotbed for jihadi and terrorist teachings.

A perfect example, Mortenson says, followed the massive October 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. UNESCO estimates 9200 schools were destroyed, placing over half a million children out of school. Now, 18 months later, foreign aid has dropped about 70% and hundreds of refugee camps run by jihadi organizations have been set up. “It's tragic,” admits Mortenson. “ Musharraf is getting criticized for not shutting down those terrorist camps. But the government is totally broke. They don't have the resources, aid has plummeted and if you shut those camps the same thing will just be repeated elsewhere.

“If we really wanted to do something, we could set up refugee camps across the street from those camps. If we had a dollar per month per child, we could send those kids to school. But somehow it doesn't resonate in the States. It's extremely frustrating and extremely alarming that we spend billions of dollars to capture or kill a few hundred terrorists, and in the meantime tens if not hundreds of thousands of kids are left with no choice when it comes to getting an education.”

Currently on a book tour around the U.S. for the soft cover edition of Three Cups of Tea, Mortenson speaks out about all of these topics, trying to light a candle of knowledge in his own home country. “The real enemy is ignorance,” he says. “It's ignorance that breeds hatred, whether it's fear in America or in Afghanistan. …We’re trying so hard to plug in democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq. But you can't do that. You’ve got to build democracy. And if you want to build democracy it starts with education, especially for the women.

“Unfortunately education is very ambiguous. It's not tangible, and so it's very hard to sell versus the guy who says, ‘I can design a daisy cutter bomb that can kill 20 terrorists,’ or ‘I have this laptop gizmo for a hundred dollars that I can send to a million kids in Pakistan.’ Literacy is difficult to sell to people because it takes one or two generations to see results. But it definitely has the biggest impact to really help societies, not only economically, but to empower people, which is integral to the democratic process.”

For more information threecupsoftea.com. To reach The Central Asia Institute ikat.org PO Box 7209, Bozeman, MT59771; 877.585.7841; Phone: 406.585.7841