Three Cups of Tea

by Greg Mortenson

  Mortenson confided about his crush on Marina and Syed strate-gized endlessly, inventing ways his friend could ask her out. “Listen to Kish,” he counseled. “You’re getting old and you need to start a family. What are you waiting for?”

  Mortenson found himself tongue-tied whenever he tried to ask Marina out. But during down time at the UCSF Medical Center, he started telling Marina stories about the Karakoram, and his plans for the school. Trying not to lose himself in this woman’s eyes, Mortenson retreated into his memories as he talked. But when he’d look up, after chronicling Etienne’s rescue, or his lost days on the Baltoro, or his time in Korphe under the care of Haji Ali, Marina’s eyes would be shining. And after two months of these conversations, she ended Mortenson’s agony by asking him out on a date.

  Mortenson had lived with monkish frugality since his return from Pakistan. Most days he breakfasted on the ninety-nine-cent special— coffee and a cruller—at a Cambodian doughnut shop on MacArthur Avenue. Often, he didn’t eat again until dinner, when he’d fill up on a three-dollar burrito at one of downtown Berkeley’s taquerias.

  For their first date, Mortenson drove Marina to a seafood restaurant on the water in Sausalito and ordered a bottle of white wine, gritting his teeth at the cost. He threw himself into Marina’s life vertiginously, jumping in with both feet. Marina had two girls from a previous marriage, Blaise, five, and Dana, three. And Mortenson soon felt almost as attached to them as he did to their mother.

  On some weekends when the girls stayed with their father, he and Marina would drive to Yosemite, sleep in La Bamba, and climb peaks like Cathedral Spire all weekend. When the girls were home, Mortenson took them to Indian Rock, a scenic outcropping in the breathtaking Berkeley Hills, where he taught them the fundamentals of rock climbing. “It felt like I suddenly had my own family,” Mortenson says, “which I realized I really wanted. And if the fundraising for the school had been going better I might have been completely happy.”

  Jerene Mortenson had been anxiously following her son’s odyssey from her new home in River Falls, Wisconsin. After finishing her Ph.D., she had been hired as principal of the Westside Elementary School. Jerene convinced her son to visit, and to give a slide show and speech to six hundred students in her school. “I’d been having a really hard time explaining to adults why I wanted to help students in Pakistan,” Mortenson says. “But the kids got it right away. When they saw the pictures, they couldn’t believe that there was a place where children sat outside in cold weather and tried to hold classes without teachers. They decided to do something about it.”

  A month after returning to Berkeley, Mortenson got a letter from his mother. She explained that her students had spontaneously launched a “Pennies for Pakistan” drive. Filling two forty-gallon trash cans, they collected 62,345 pennies. When he deposited the check his mother sent along for $623.45 Mortenson felt like his luck was finally changing. “Children had taken the first step toward building the school,” Mortenson says. “And they did it with something that’s basically worthless in our society—pennies. But overseas, pennies can move mountains.”

  Other steps came all too slowly. Six months had passed since Mortenson had sent the first of the 580 letters and finally he got his one and only response. Tom Brokaw, like Mortenson, was an alumnus of the University of South Dakota. As football players they had both been coached by Lars Overskei, a fact Mortenson’s note made clear. Brokaw sent a check for one hundred dollars and a note wishing him luck. And one by one, letters arrived from foundations like hammer blows to his hopes, notifying Mortenson that all sixteen grant applications had been rejected.

  Mortenson showed Brokaw’s note to Tom Vaughan and admitted how poorly his efforts at fundraising were progressing. Vaughan supported the American Himalayan Foundation and decided to see if the organization could help. He wrote a short item about Mortenson’s K2 climb, and his efforts to build a school for Korphe, that was published in the AHF’s national newsletter. And he reminded the AHF’s members, many of whom were America’s elite mountaineers, of Sir Edmund Hillary’s legacy in Nepal.

  After conquering Mount Everest with Tenzing Norgay in 1954, Hillary returned often to the Khumbu Valley. And he set himself a task that he described as more difficult than summiting the world’s tallest peak—building schools for the impoverished Sherpa communities whose porters had made his climb possible.

  In his 1964 book about his humanitarian efforts, Schoolhouse in the Clouds, Hillary spoke with remarkable foresight about the need for aid projects in the world’s poorest and most remote places. Places like Khumbu, and Korphe. “Slowly and painfully, we are seeing worldwide acceptance of the fact that the wealthier and more technologically advanced countries have a responsibility to help the undeveloped ones,” he wrote. “Not only through a sense of charity, but also because only in this way can we ever hope to see any permanent peace and security for ourselves.”

  But in one sense, Hillary’s path was far easier than Mortenson’s quixotic quest. Having conquered the planet’s tallest peak, Hillary had become one of the world’s most famous men. When he approached corporate donors for help funding his effort to build schools, they fell over themselves competing to support his “Himalayan Schoolhouse Expedition.” World Book Encyclopedia signed on as the chief sponsor, bankrolling Hillary with fifty-two thousand 1963 dollars. And Sears Roebuck, which had recently started selling Sir Edmund Hillary brand tents and sleeping bags, outfitted the expedition and sent a film crew to document Hillary’s work. Further funds piled up as Hillary’s representatives sold European film and press rights and obtained an advance for a book about the expedition before Hillary left for Nepal.

  Mortenson not only had failed to summit K2, he had returned home broke. And because he was anxious about spoiling things by leaning too heavily on Marina, he still spent the majority of his nights in La Bamba. He had become known to the police. And they roused him in the middle of the night with flashlights and made him trace sleepy orbits of the Berkeley Flats, half awake at the wheel, searching for parking spots where they wouldn’t find him before morning.

  Lately, Mortenson had felt a rift developing with Marina about money. Sleeping in La Bamba on their weekend climbing trips had clearly lost its charm for her. He handled it poorly when, one cold afternoon in early spring, on their way to Yosemite, she suggested they splurge and stay at the historic Ahwahnee Hotel, a grand WPA-era jewel of rustic western architecture. A single weekend in the Ahwahnee would cost the rough equivalent of all the money he’d raised for the school so far. And after Mortenson bluntly refused, their weekend in the damp car simmered with unspoken tension.

  One typically cold, foggy day of San Francisco summer, Mortenson arrived for a shift of work and Tom Vaughan handed him a page torn from his prescription pad. “This guy read the piece about you in the newsletter and called me,” Vaughan said. “He’s a climber and some kind of scientist. He also sounded, frankly, like a piece of work. He asked me if you were a drug fiend who would waste his money. But I think he’s rich. You should give him a call.” Mortenson looked at the paper. It said “Dr. Jean Hoerni” next to a Seattle number. He thanked Vaughan and tucked it into his pocket on his way into the ER.

  The next day, in the Berkeley Public Library, Mortenson looked up Dr. Jean Hoerni. He was surprised to find hundreds of references, mostly in newspaper clippings about the semiconductor industry.

  Hoerni was a Swiss-born physicist with a degree from Cambridge. With a group of California scientists who dubbed themselves the “Traitorous Eight,” after defecting from the laboratory of infamously tempestuous Nobel laureate William Shockley, he had invented a type of integrated circuit that paved the way for the silicon chip. One day while showering, Hoerni solved the problem of how to pack information onto a circuit. Watching the water run in rivulets over his hands, he theorized that silicon could be layered in a similar fashion onto a circuit, dramatically increasing its surface area and capacity. He called this the “planar process
” and patented it.

  Hoerni, whose brilliance was equaled only by his orneryness, jumped jobs every few years, repeatedly butting heads with his business partners. But along his remarkable career path, he founded half a dozen companies that would eventually, after his departure, grow into industry behemoths like Fairchild Semiconductors, Teledyne, and Intel. By the time Hoerni called Tom Vaughan trying to track down Mortenson, he was seventy, and his personal fortune had grown into the hundreds of millions.

  Hoerni was also a climber. As a younger man, he had attempted Everest and scaled peaks on five continents. As physically tough as he was tough-minded, he once survived a cold night at high altitude by stuffing his sleeping bag with newspaper. He then wrote a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, praising it as “by far the warmest paper published.”

  Hoerni had a special fondness for the Karakoram, where he’d gone trekking, and told friends he had come away struck by the discrepancy between the exquisite mountain scenery and the brutal lives of the Balti porters.

  Mortenson changed ten dollars into quarters and called Hoerni at his home in Seattle from the library’s pay phone. “Hi,” he said, after several expensive minutes passed and Hoerni finally came to the phone. “This is Greg Mortenson. Tom Vaughan gave me your number and I’m calling because—”

  “I know what you’re after,” a sharp voice with a French accent interrupted. “Tell me, if I give you fund for your school, you’re not going to piss off to some beach somewhere in Mexico, smoke dope, and screw your girlfriend, are you?”

  “I…” Mortenson said.

  “What do you say?”

  “No sir, of course not. I just want to educate children.” He pronounced “educate” with the guileless midwestern cadence with which he always flavored his favorite word. “Eh-jew-kate.” “In the Karakoram. They really need our help. They have it pretty rough there.”

  “I know,” Hoerni said. “I am there in ‘74. On my way to the Baltoro.”

  “Were you there for a trek, or with a—”

  “So. What, exactly, will your school cost?” Hoerni barked. Mortenson fed more quarters into the phone.

  “I met with an architect and a contractor in Skardu, and priced out all the materials,” Mortenson said. “I want it to have five rooms, four for classes, and one common room for—”

  “A number!” Hoerni snapped.

  “Twelve thousand dollars,” Mortenson said nervously, “but whatever you’d like to contribute toward—”

  “Is that all?” Hoerni asked, incredulous. “You’re not bullshitting? You can really build your school for twelve grand?”

  “Yes sir,” Mortenson said. He could hear his own heartbeat in his ears. “I’m sure of it.”

  “What is your address?” Hoerni demanded.

  “Uh, that’s an interesting question.”

  Mortenson walked giddily through the crowd of students on Shattuck Avenue toward his car. He figured this was one night he had a rock-solid excuse for not sleeping in La Bamba.

  A week later, Mortenson opened his PO box. Inside was an envelope containing a receipt for a twelve-thousand-dollar check Hoerni had sent, in Mortenson’s name, to the AHF and a brief note scrawled on a piece of folded graph paper: “Don’t screw up. Regards, J.H.”

  The first editions went first. Mortenson had spent years prowling Berkeley’s Black Oak Books, especially the back room, where he’d found hundreds of historical books about mountaineering. He carried six crates of them in from the car. Combined with several of his father’s rare books from Tanzania, they brought just under six hundred dollars from the buyer.

  While he waited for Hoerni’s check to clear, Mortenson converted everything else he owned into enough cash to buy his plane ticket and pay his expenses for however long he’d have to be in Pakistan. He told Marina that he was going to follow this path he’d been on since he met her all the way to the end—until he fulfilled the promise he made to the children of Korphe. When he came back, he promised her, things would be different. He’d work full-time, find a real place to live, and lead a less haphazard life.

  He took his climbing gear to the Wilderness Exchange on San Pablo Avenue, a place where much of his disposable income had vanished in the years since he’d become a devoted climber. It was only a four-minute drive to the shop from his storage space, but Mortenson remembers the passage as indelibly as a cross-country road trip. “I felt like I was driving away from a life I’d led ever since I’d come to California,” he says. He left with almost fifteen hundred dollars more in his pocket.

  The morning before his flight, Mortenson drove Marina to work, then made his most difficult divestment. At a used-car lot in Oakland, he backed La Bamba into a space and sold it for five hundred dollars. The gas guzzler had carried him faithfully from the Midwest to his new existence as a climber in California. It had housed him for a year while he struggled to find his way through the fundraising wilderness. Now, the proceeds from the car would help send him to the other side of the Earth. He patted the big burgundy hood, pocketed the money, and carried his duffel bag toward the taxi waiting to take him to the next chapter of his life.

  Chapter 6

  Rawalpindi’s Rooftops At Dusk

  Prayer is better than sleep.

  —from the hazzan, or call to worship

  HE WOKE, CURLED around the money, drenched in sweat. Twelve thousand eight hundred dollars in well-thumbed hundreds were stacked in a worn green nylon stuff sack. Twelve thousand for the school. Eight hundred to see him through the next several months. The room was so spartan there was no place to hide the pouch except under his clothes. He patted the money reflexively as he’d taken to doing ever since he’d left San Francisco and swung his legs off the wobbly charpoy and onto the sweating cement floor.

  Mortenson pushed a curtain aside and was rewarded with a wedge of sky, bisected by the green-tiled minaret from the nearby Government Transport Service Mosque. The sky had a violet cast that could mean dawn or dusk. He tried to rub the sleep out of his face, considering. Dusk, definitely. He had arrived in Islamabad at dawn and must have slept all day.

  He had stitched together half of the globe, on a fifty-six-hour itinerary dictated by his cut-rate ticket, from SFO to Atlanta, to Frankfurt to Abu Dhabi to Dubai and, finally, out of this tunnel of time zones and airless departure lounges to the swelter and frenzy of Islamabad airport. And here he was in leafy Islamabad’s teeming twin city, low-rent Rawalpindi, in what the manager of the Khyaban Hotel assured him was his “cheapliest” room.

  Every rupee counted now. Every wasted dollar stole bricks or books from the school. For eighty rupees a night, or about two dollars, Mortenson inhabited this afterthought, an eight-by-eight-foot glassed-in cubicle on the hotel’s roof that seemed more like a garden shed than a guest room. He pulled on his pants, unglued his shalwar shirt from his chest, and opened the door. The early evening air was no cooler, but at least it had the mercy to move.

  Squatting on his heels, in a soiled baby-blue shalwar kamiz, the hotel’s chokidar Abdul Shah regarded Mortenson through his one unclouded eye. “Salaam Alaaikum, Sahib, Greg Sahib,” the watchman said, as if he’d been waiting all afternoon just in case Mortenson stirred, then rose to run for tea.

  In a rusted folding chair on the roof, next to a pile of cement blocks hinting at the hotel’s future ambitions, Mortenson accepted a chipped porcelain pot of sticky sweet milk tea and tried to clear his head enough to come up with a plan,

  When he’d stayed at the Khyaban a year earlier, he’d been a member of a meticulously planned expedition. Every moment of every day had been filled with tasks, from packing and sorting sacks of flour and freeze-dried food, to procuring permits and arranging plane tickets, to hiring porters and mules.

  “Mister Greg, Sahib,” Abdul said, as if anticipating his train of thought, “may I ask why you are coming back?”

  “I’ve come to build a school, Inshallah,” Mortenson said.

  “Here in ‘Pind
i, Greg Sahib?”

  As he worked his way through the pot of tea, Mortenson told Abdul the story of his failure on K2, his wanderings on the glacier, and the way the people of Korphe had cared for the stranger who wandered into their village.

  Sitting on his heels, Abdul sucked his teeth and scratched his generous belly, considering. “You are the rich man?” he asked, looking doubtfully at Mortenson’s frayed running shoes and worn mud-colored shalwar.

  “No,” Mortenson said. He couldn’t think of any way to put the past year of fumbling effort into words. “Many people in America gave a little money for the school, even children,” Mortenson said, finally. He took out the green nylon pouch from under his shirt and showed the money to Abdul. “This is exactly enough for one school, if I’m very careful.”

  Abdul rose with a sense of resolve. “By the merciful light of Allah Almighty, tomorrow we make much bargain. We must bargain very well,” he said, sweeping the tea things into his arms and taking his leave.

  From his folding chair, Mortenson heard the electronic crackle of wires being twisted together in the minaret of the GTS Mosque, before the amplified wail of the hazzan implored the faithful to evening prayer. Mortenson watched a flock of swallows rise all at once, still in the shape of the tamarind tree where they’d been perched in the hotel garden, before wheeling away across the rooftops.

  Across Rawalpindi, muezzins’ cries from half a dozen other mosques flavored the darkening air with exhortations. Mortenson had been on this roof a year earlier, and had heard the texture of dusk in Rawalpindi as part of the exotic soundtrack to his expedition. But now, alone on the roof, the muezzins seemed to be speaking directly to him. Their ancient voices, tinged with a centuries-old advocacy of faith and duty, sounded like calls to action. He swept aside the doubts about his ability to build the school that had nagged at him for the last year, as Abdul had briskly cleared the tea tray. Tomorrow it was time to begin.