Three Cups of Tea

by Greg Mortenson

  The women prepared rice and dal while the men skinned and butchered the ram. “We didn’t get anything else done that day,” Mortenson says. “In fact we hardly got anything else done that fall. Haji Ali was in a hurry to sanctify the school, but not to build it. We just had a massive feast. For people who may only get meat a few times a year, that meal was a much more serious business than a school.”

  Every resident of Korphe got a share of the meat. After the last bone had been beaten and the last strip of marrow sucked dry, Mortenson joined a group of men who built a fire by what would one day soon, he hoped, become the courtyard of a completed school. As the moon rose over Korphe K2, they danced around the fire and taught Mortenson verses from the great Himalayan Epic of Gezar, beloved across much of the roof of the world, and introduced him to their inexhaustible supply of Balti folk songs.

  Together, the Balti and the big American danced like dervishes and sang of feuding alpine kingdoms, of the savagery of Pathan warriors pouring in from Afghanistan, and battles between the Balti rajas and the strange European conquerors who came first from the West in the time of Alexander, and then, attended by their Gurkha hirelings, from British India to the south and east. Korphe’s women, accustomed by now to the infidel among them, stood at the edge of the firelight, their faces glowing, as they clapped and sang along with their men.

  The Balti had a history, a rich tradition, Mortenson realized. The fact that it wasn’t written down didn’t make it any less real. These faces ringing the fire didn’t need to be taught so much as they needed help. And the school was a place where they could help themselves. Mortenson studied the construction site. It was little more than a shallow ditch spattered with ram’s blood. He might not accomplish much more before returning home to Tara, but during that night of dancing, the school reached critical mass in his mind—it became real to him. He could see the completed building standing before him as clearly as Korphe K2, lit by the waxing moon. Mortenson turned back to face the fire.

  Tara Bishop’s landlord refused to let the couple move into her comfortable converted garage apartment, so Mortenson hauled the few of his wife’s possessions that would fit to his rented room at Dudzinski’s and filled his storage space with the rest of them. Seeing her books and lamps nestling against his father’s carved ebony elephants, Mortenson felt their lives intertwining as the elephants did—tusk to tail, lamp cord to milk crate.

  Tara withdrew enough from the small inheritance her father had left her to buy a queen-sized futon, which swallowed much of the floor space in their small bedroom. Mortenson marveled at the positive effects marriage had on his life. For the first time since coming to California, he moved out of his sleeping bag and into a bed. And for the first time in years, he had someone with whom he could discuss the odyssey he’d been on since he first set foot in Korphe.

  “The more Greg talked about his work, the more I realized how lucky I was,” Tara says. “He was so passionate about Pakistan, and that passion spilled over into everything else he did.”

  Jean Hoerni marveled at Mortenson’s passion for the people of the Karakoram, too. He invited Mortenson and Bishop to spend Thanksgiving in Seattle. Hoerni and his wife, Jennifer Wilson, served a meal so extravagant that it reminded Mortenson of the banquets he’d been fed in Baltistan, during the tug-of war for the school. Hoerni was keen to hear every detail and Mortenson described the abductions by jeep, the duplicate dinner in Khane, the entire yak Changazi had served in Kuardu, and then brought him up to the present. He left his own food untouched, describing the groundbreaking at the Korphe School, the slaughter of the chogo rabak, and the long night of fire and dancing.

  That Thanksgiving, Mortenson had much to be thankful for. “Listen,” Hoerni said, as they settled before a fire with oversized goblets of red wine. “You love what you’re doing in the Himalaya and it doesn’t sound like you’re too bad at it. Why don’t you make a career? The children of those other village that try to bribe you need schools, too. And no one in the mountaineering world is going to lift a finger to help the Muslims. They have too many Sherpa and Tibetans, too many Buddhists, on the brain. What if I endowed a foundation and made you the director? You could build a school every year. What do you say?”

  Mortenson squeezed his wife’s hand. The idea felt so right that he was afraid to say anything. Afraid Hoerni might change his mind. He sipped his wine.

  That winter, Tara Bishop became pregnant. With a child on the way, Witold Dudzinski’s smoke-filled apartment looked increasingly unsuitable. Tara’s mother, Lila Bishop, heard glowing reports about Mortenson’s character from her contacts in the mountaineering world and invited the couple to visit her graceful arts and crafts home in the historic heart of Bozeman, Montana. Mortenson took immediately to the rustic town, at the foot of the wild Gallatin Range. He felt that Berkeley belonged to the climbing life he’d already left behind. Lila Bishop offered to loan them enough money for a down payment to buy a small house nearby.

  In early spring, Mortenson closed the door on Berkeley Self-Storage stall 114 for the last time and drove to Montana with his wife in a U-Haul truck. They moved into a neat bungalow two blocks from Bishop’s mother. It had a deep, fenced yard where children could play, far from the secondhand smoke of Polish handymen and gangs of fourteen-year-olds wielding guns.

  In May 1996, when Mortenson filled out his arrival forms at the Islamabad airport, his pen hovered unfamiliarly over the box for “occupation.” For years he’d written “climber.” This time he scrawled in his messy block printing “Director, Central Asia Institute.” Hoerni had suggested the name. The scientist envisioned an operation that could grow as fast as one of his semiconductor companies, spreading to build schools and other humanitarian projects beyond Pakistan, across the multitude of “’stans” that spilled across the unraveling routes of the Silk Road. Mortenson wasn’t so sure. He’d had too much trouble getting one school off the ground to think on Hoerni’s scale. But he had a yearly salary of $21,798 he could count on and a mandate to start thinking long-term.

  From Skardu, Mortenson sent a message to Mouzafer’s village offering him steady wages if he’d come to Korphe and help with the school. He also visited Ghulam Parvi before he set off “upside.” Parvi lived in a lushly planted neighborhood in Skardu’s southern hills. His walled compound sat next to an ornate mosque he had helped to build on land his father had donated. Over tea in Parvi’s courtyard, surrounded by blooming apple and apricot trees, Mortenson laid out his modest plan for the future—finish the Korphe School and build another school somewhere in Baltistan the following year—and asked Parvi to be part of it. As authorized by Hoerni, he offered Parvi a small salary to supplement his income as an accountant. “I could see the greatness of Greg’s heart right away,” Parvi says. “We both wanted the same things for Baltistan’s children. How could I refuse such a man?”

  With Makhmal, a skilled mason whom Parvi introduced him to in Skardu, Mortenson arrived at Korphe on a Friday afternoon. Walking over the new bridge to the village, Mortenson was surprised to see a dozen Korphe women strolling toward him turned out in their finest shawls and the dress shoes they wore only on special occasions. They bowed to him in welcome, before hurrying on to visit their families in neighboring villages for Juma, the holy day. “Now that they could be back in the same afternoon, Korphe’s women started regular Friday visits to their families,” Mortenson explains. “The bridge strengthened the village’s maternal ties, and made the women feel a whole lot happier and less isolated. Who knew that something as simple as a bridge could empower women?”

  On the far bank of the Braldu, Haji Ali stood, sculpted as always, to the highest point on the precipice. Flanked by Twaha and Jahan, he welcomed his American son back with a bear hug and warmly greeted the guest he’d brought from the big city.

  Mortenson was delighted to see his old friend Mouzafer standing shyly behind Haji Ali. He too hugged Mortenson, then held his hand to his heart in respect as they pulled apart
to look at each other. Mouzafer appeared to have aged dramatically since Mortenson had seen him last and looked unwell.

  “Yong chiina yot?” Mortenson said, concerned, offering the traditional Balti greeting. “How are you?”

  “I was fine that day, all thanks to Allah,” Mouzafer says, speaking a decade later, in the soft cadences of an old man going deaf. “Just a little tired.” As Mortenson learned that night over a meal of dal and rice at Haji Ali’s, Mouzafer had just completed a heroic eighteen days. A landslide had once again blocked the only track from Skardu to Korphe, and Mouzafer, freshly returned from a 130-mile round trip on the Baltoro with a Japanese expedition, had led a small party of porters, carrying ninety-pound bags of cement eighteen miles upriver to Korphe. A slight man then in his mid-sixties, Mouzafer had made more than twenty trips bearing his heavy load, skipping meals and walking day and night so that the cement would be at the building site in time for Mortenson’s arrival.

  “When I first met Mr. Greg Mortenson on the Baltoro, he was a very friendly talking lad,” Mouzafer says, “always joking and sharing his heart with the poor person like the porters. When I lost him and thought he might die out on the ice, I was awake all night, praying to Allah that I might be allowed to save him. And when I found him again, I promised to protect him forever with all my strength. Since then he has given much to the Balti. I am poor, and can only offer him my prayer. Also the strength of my back. This I gladly gave so he could build his school. Later, when I returned to my home village after the time carrying concrete, my wife looked at my small face and said, ‘What happened to you? Were you in prison?’” Mouzafer says with a rasping laugh.

  The next morning, before first light, Mortenson paced back and forth on Haji Ali’s roof. He was here as the director of an organization now. He had wider responsibilities than just one school in one isolated village. The faith Jean Hoerni had invested in him lay heavy on his broad shoulders, and he was determined that there would be no more interminable meetings and banquets; he would drive the construction swiftly to completion.

  When the village gathered by the construction site, Mortenson met them, plumb line, level, and ledger in hand. “Getting the construction going was like conducting an orchestra,” Mortenson says. “First we used dynamite to blast the large boulders into smaller stones. Then we had dozens of people snaking through the chaos like a melody, carrying the stones to the masons. Then Makhmal the mason would form the stones into amazingly regular bricks with just a few blows from his chisel. Groups of women carried water from the river, which they mixed with cement in large holes we’d dug in the ground. Then masons would trowel on cement, and lay the bricks in slowly rising rows. Finally, dozens of village children would dart in, wedging slivers of stone into the chinks between bricks.”

  “We were all very excited to help,” says Hussein the teacher’s daughter Tahira, who was then ten years old. “My father told me the school would be something very special, but I had no idea then what a school was, so I came to see what everyone was so excited about, and to help. Everyone in my family helped.”

  “Doctor Greg brought books from his country,” says Haji Ali’s granddaughter Jahan, then nine, who would one day graduate with Tahira in the Korphe School’s first class. “And they had pictures of schools in them, so I had some idea what we were hoping to build. I thought Doctor Greg was very distinguished with his clean clothes. And the children in the pictures looked very clean also. And I remember thinking, if I go to his school, maybe one day I can become distinguished, too.”

  All through June, the school walls rose steadily, but with half the construction crew missing on any given day as they left to tend their crops and animals, it progressed too slowly for Mortenson’s liking. “I tried to be a tough but fair taskmaster,” Mortenson says. “I spent all day at the construction site, from sunrise to sunset, using my level to make sure the walls were even and my plumb line to check that they were standing straight. I always had my notebook in my hand, and kept my eyes on everyone, anxious to account for every rupee. I didn’t want to disappoint Jean Hoerni, so I drove people hard.”

  One clear afternoon at the beginning of August, Haji Ali tapped Mortenson on the shoulder at the construction site and asked him to take a walk. The old man led the former climber uphill for an hour, on legs still strong enough to humble the much younger man. Mortenson felt precious time slipping away, and by the time Haji Ali halted on a narrow ledge high above the village, Mortenson was panting, as much from the thought of all the tasks he was failing to supervise as from his exertion.

  Haji Ali waited until Mortenson caught his breath, then instructed him to look at the view. The air had the fresh-scrubbed clarity that only comes with altitude. Beyond Korphe K2, the ice peaks of the inner Karakoram knifed relentlessly into a defenseless blue sky. A thousand feet below, Korphe, green with ripening barley fields, looked small and vulnerable, a life raft adrift on a sea of stone.

  Haji Ali reached up and laid his hand on Mortenson’s shoulder. “These mountains have been here a long time,” he said. “And so have we.” He reached for his rich brown lambswool topi, the only symbol of authority Korphe’s nurmadhar ever wore, and centered it on his silver hair. “You can’t tell the mountains what to do,” he said, with an air of gravity that transfixed Mortenson as much as the view. “You must learn to listen to them. So now I am asking you to listen to me. By the mercy of Almighty Allah, you have done much for my people, and we appreciate it. But now you must do one more thing for me.”

  “Anything,” Mortenson said.

  “Sit down. And shut your mouth,” Haji Ali said. “You’re making everyone crazy.”

  “Then he reached out and took my plumb line, and my level and my account book, and he walked back down to Korphe,” Mortenson says. “I followed him all the way to his house, worrying about what he was doing. He took the key he always kept around his neck on a leather thong, opened a cabinet decorated with faded Buddhist wood carvings, and locked my things in there, alongside a shank of curing ibex, his prayer beads, and his old British musket gun. Then he asked Sakina to bring us tea.”

  Mortenson waited nervously for half an hour while Sakina brewed the paiyu cha. Haji Ali ran his fingers along the text of the Koran that he cherished above all his belongings, turning pages randomly and mouthing almost silent Arabic prayer as he stared out into inward space.

  When the porcelain bowls of scalding butter tea steamed in their hands, Haji Ali spoke. “If you want to thrive in Baltistan, you must respect our ways,” Haji Ali said, blowing on his bowl. “The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die,” he said, laying his hand warmly on Mortenson’s own. “Doctor Greg, you must make time to share three cups of tea. We may be uneducated. But we are not stupid. We have lived and survived here for a long time.”

  “That day, Haji Ali taught me the most important lesson I’ve ever learned in my life,” Mortenson says. “We Americans think you have to accomplish everything quickly. We’re the country of thirty-minute power lunches and two-minute football drills. Our leaders thought their ‘shock and awe’ campaign could end the war in Iraq before it even started. Haji Ali taught me to share three cups of tea, to slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects. He taught me that I had more to learn from the people I work with than I could ever hope to teach them.”

  Three weeks later, with Mortenson demoted from foreman to spectator, the walls of the school had risen higher than the American’s head and all that remained was putting on the roof. The roof beams Changazi pilfered were never recovered, and Mortenson returned to Skardu, where he and Parvi supervised the purchase and construction of wood beams strong enough to support the snows that mummified Korphe throughout deepest winter.

  Predictably, the jeeps carrying the wood up to Korphe were halted
by another landslide that cut the track, eighteen miles shy of their destination. “The next morning, while Parvi and I were discussing what to do, we saw this great big dust cloud coming down the valley,” Mortenson says. “Haji Ali somehow heard about our problem, and the men of Korphe had walked all night. They arrived clapping and singing and in incredible spirits for people who hadn’t slept. And then the most amazing thing of all happened. Sher Takhi had come with them and he insisted on carrying the first load.

  “The holy men of the villages aren’t supposed to degrade themselves with physical labor. But he wouldn’t back down, and he led our column of thirty-five men carrying roof beams all the way, all eighteen miles to Korphe. Sher Takhi had polio as a child, and he walked with a limp, so it must have been agony for him. But he led us up the Braldu Valley, grinning under his load. It was this conservative mullah’s way of showing his support for educating all the children of Korphe, even the girls.”

  Not all the people of the Braldu shared Sher Takhi’s view. A week later, Mortenson stood with his arm over Twaha’s shoulder, admiring the skillful way Makhmal and his crew were fitting the roof beams into place, when a cry went up from the boys scattered across Korphe’s rooftops. A band of strangers was crossing the bridge, they warned, and on their way up to the village.

  Mortenson followed Haji Ali to his lookout on the bluff high over the bridge. He saw five men approaching. One, who appeared to be the leader, walked at the head of the procession. The four burly men walking behind carried clubs made of poplar branches that they smacked against their palms in time with their steps. The leader was a thin, unhealthy looking older man who leaned on his cane as he climbed to Korphe. He stopped, rudely, fifty yards from Haji Ali, and made Korphe’s nurmadhar walk out to greet him.