Three Cups of Tea

by Greg Mortenson

  Twaha remembers being surprised by how easily Mortenson adapted to cold weather in Korphe. “We were all worried about Dr. Greg sleeping inside with the smoke and the animals, but he seemed to take no notice of these things,” Twaha says. “We saw he had peculiar habits, very different from other Europeans. He made no demands for good food and environment. He ate whatever my mother put before him and slept together with us in the smoke like a Balti. Due to Dr. Greg’s excellent manners and he never tells a lie, my parents and I came to love him very much.”

  One evening, sheepishly, Mortenson confessed the story of his kidnapping to Haji Ali just after the chief had taken his mouthful of after-dinner naswar. The nurmadhar spat the plug of tobacco he’d been chewing into the fire so he could speak more clearly.

  “You went alone!” Haji Ali accused him. “You didn’t seek the hospitality of a village chief! If you learn only one thing from me, learn this lesson well: Never go anywhere in Pakistan alone. Promise me that.”

  “I promise,” Mortenson said, adding the burden of another vow to the weighty collection of oaths old men kept making him take.

  Haji Ali tore off a fresh plug of naswar, and softened it inside his cheek, thinking. “Where will you build your next school,” he asked.

  “I thought I’d travel to the Hushe Valley,” Mortenson said. “Visit a few villages and see who—”

  “Can I give you some more advice,” Haji Ali interrupted.

  “Sure.”

  “Why don’t you leave it to us? I’ll call a meeting of all the elders of the Braldu and see what village is ready to donate free land and labor for a school. That way you don’t have to flap all over Baltistan like a crow again, eating here and there,” Haji Ali said, laughing.

  “So once again, an illiterate old Balti taught a Westerner how to best go about developing his ‘backward’ area,” Mortenson says. “Ever since then, with all the schools I’ve built, I’ve remembered Haji Ali’s advice and expanded slowly, from village to village and valley to valley, going where we’d already built relationships, instead of trying to hopscotch to places I had no contacts, like Waziristan.”

  By early December, all the Korphe School’s windows had been calked and blackboards had been installed in each of the four classrooms. All that remained was nailing the sheets of corrugated metal roofing in place. The aluminum sheets were sharp-edged and could be dangerous when the wind whistling down the gorge whipped them about like saw blades. Mortenson kept his medical kit close by as he worked, having already treated half a dozen wounds inflicted by flying metal.

  Ibrahim, one of the construction crew, called Mortenson down from the roof with an urgent request for medical attention. Mortenson studied this large, handsome porter, looking for slash marks, but Ibrahim clutched Mortenson’s wrist and led him toward his home. “It’s my wife, Doctor Sahib,” he said, nervously. “Her baby is not good.”

  Ibrahim kept Korphe’s only store, a spare room in his house where villagers could buy tea, soap, cigarettes, and other necessities. In the ground-floor stable beneath Ibrahim’s living quarters, Mortenson found the man’s wife, Rhokia, surrounded by restless sheep and frantic family members. Rhokia had given birth to a baby girl two days earlier, Mortenson learned, and had never recovered. “The smell of putrid flesh was overwhelming,” Mortenson says. By the light of an oil lantern, he examined Rhokia, who lay on a blood-slick bed of hay. With Ibrahim’s permission he took Rhokia’s pulse, which was alarmingly high. “She was gray-faced and unconscious,” Mortenson says. “Her placenta hadn’t come out after the birth and she was in danger of dying from septic shock.”

  Rhokia’s grief-stricken sister held the barely conscious baby girl. The infant, too, was near death, Mortenson realized. Since the family believed Rhokia had been poisoned, they hadn’t given the baby to its mother to nurse. “Nursing stimulates the uterus, triggering it to expel the placenta,” Mortenson says. “So I insisted they let the baby nurse, and I gave Rhokia an antibiotic to treat the shock.” But all day, even as the infant began to regain her strength, Rhokia lay on the straw, moaning in pain when she slipped into consciousness.

  “I knew what I had to do,” Mortenson says. “But I was very worried about how Ibrahim would take it.” Mortenson pulled the porter aside. Ibrahim was among the most worldly of Korphe’s men. He wore his hair long and shaved his face smooth, styling himself after the foreign mountaineers whose loads he carried. But he was still a Balti. Mortenson explained, quietly, that he needed to reach inside Ibrahim’s wife and remove the substance that was making her sick.

  Ibrahim clapped his hands warmly on Mortenson’s shoulders and told him to do what he must. While Ibrahim held a kerosene lantern, Mortenson washed his hands with a kettle of hot water, then reached into Rhokia’s uterus and pulled the decomposing placenta out.

  The next day, from the roof of the school, Mortenson saw Rhokia up and walking around the village, cooing to the healthy baby girl she carried bundled in a blanket. “I was happy that I’d been able to help Ibrahim’s family,” Mortenson says. “For a Balti to let a foreign man, an infidel, have that kind of intimate contact with your wife took an incredible leap of faith. I felt humbled by how much they’d come to trust me.”

  From that day on, Mortenson noticed the women of Korphe describing circles in the air with their outstretched hands as he walked by their homes, blessing his passage.

  On the afternoon of December 10,1996, Greg Mortenson crouched on the roof of the Korphe School with Twaha, Hussein, and a gleeful construction crew, and pounded the final nail into the completed building just as the season’s first snowflakes swirled around his raw, red hands. Haji Ali cheered the accomplishment from the courtyard. “I asked Almighty Allah to delay the snow until you were done,” he said, grinning, “and in his infinite wisdom he did. Now come down and take some tea!”

  That evening, by the light of a fire that burned in his balti, Haji Ali unlocked his cupboard and returned Mortenson’s level, plumb line, and account book. Then he handed him a ledger. Mortenson leafed through it and was amazed to see neat columns of figures spanning page after page. It was something he could display proudly to Jean Hoerni. “The village had accounted for every rupee spent on the school, adding up the cost of every brick, nail, and board, and the wages paid to put them together. They used the old British colonial accounting method,” he says. “And they did a much better job of it than I ever could have.”

  Down the Braldu Valley, heading for Skardu, Islamabad, and home, Mortenson’s jeep crawled through a snowstorm that announced winter had hit the Karakoram full force. The driver, an elderly man with one opaque eye, reached out the window every few minutes to knock loose the ice obscuring the wiperless windshield. As the jeep skidded along an icy ledge, high over the ravine where the Braldu was whited out, the passengers clung to each other for comfort every time the driver took his hands off the wheel and raised them up, offering panicky prayers to Allah that he help them survive the storm.

  Snow blowing sideways at fifty miles an hour obscured the road. Mortenson squeezed the wheel between his big hands and tried to keep the Volvo on the invisible pavement. The drive from Bozeman to the hospital where Jean Hoerni had been admitted in Hailey, Idaho, should have taken no more than seven hours. They had left home twelve hours earlier, with a few gentle flakes drifting down through Bozeman’s bare branches. And now, at 10:00 p.m., in the full fury of the blizzard, they were still seventy miles from their destination.

  Mortenson stole a glance from the snow to the child seat behind him where Amira slept. Driving through a storm by himself in Baltistan was an acceptable risk, Mortenson thought. But dragging his wife and child through this desolate, snowswept place just so he could deliver a photo to a dying man was unforgivable, especially since they were only a few miles from the site of the car crash that had killed Tara’s father.

  In the shelter of a billboard announcing they were entering Craters of the Moon National Park, where he could see the shoulder, Mor
tenson backed the old Volvo off the road and parked with the rear of the vehicle facing the wind to wait out the whiteout. In his rush to reach Hoerni, Mortenson had forgotten to put antifreeze in the radiator, and if he turned the Volvo off he was afraid it wouldn’t start. For two hours, he watched Tara and Amira sleep, keeping his eye on the dipping gas gauge, before the storm calmed enough for them to continue.

  After dropping his drowsy wife and daughter at Hoerni’s home in Hailey, Mortenson found the Blaine County Medical Center. The hospital, constructed to treat the orthopedic injuries of visitors to the nearby Sun Valley ski resort, had only eight rooms and this early in the ski season seven of them were vacant. Mortenson tiptoed past a night nurse sleeping behind the reception desk and walked toward the light spilling into the hall from the last doorway on the right.

  He found Hoerni sitting up in bed. It was 2:00 a.m.

  “You’re late,” Hoerni said. “Again.”

  Mortenson shifted awkwardly in the doorway. He was shocked by how quickly Hoerni’s illness had progressed. The lean intensity of his face had been winnowed down to bone. And Mortenson felt he was speaking with a skull. “How are you feeling, Jean?” he said, stepping in to rest his hand on Hoerni’s shoulder.

  “Do you have this damn picture?” Hoerni said.

  Mortenson put his pack down on the bed, careful not to jar Hoerni’s brittle-looking legs, mountaineer’s legs that had carried him on a circuit around Mount Kailash in Tibet only a year earlier. He placed a manila envelope into a pair of gnarled hands and watched Hoerni’s face as he opened it.

  Jean Hoerni pulled out the eight-by-ten print Mortenson had made in Bozeman and held it up tremblingly. He squinted to study the picture of the Korphe School Mortenson had taken the morning he left. “Magnifique!” Hoerni said, nodding approvingly at the sturdy butter-colored structure, at the freshly painted crimson trim, and traced his finger along a line of seventy raggedy, smiling students who were about to begin their formal education in the building.

  Hoerni picked up the phone by his bed and summoned the night nurse. When she stood in the doorway, he asked her to bring a hammer and nail.

  “What for, honey?” she asked sleepily.

  “So I can put up a picture of the school I am building in Pakistan.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” she said with a soothing voice meant to placate the overmedicated. “Regulations.”

  “I’ll buy this whole hospital if I have to!” Hoerni barked, sitting up in bed and scaring her into action. “Bring me a damn hammer!”

  The nurse returned a moment later carrying a stapler. “This is the heaviest thing I could find,” she said.

  “Take that off the wall and put this up,” Hoerni ordered. Mortenson pulled a watercolor of two kittens playing with a ball of yarn from its hook, pried loose the nail it hung from, and pounded the picture of the Korphe School into Hoerni’s line of sight with the stapler, scattering plaster with each blow.

  He turned back to Hoerni and saw him hunched over the phone, ordering an overseas operator to locate a certain number for him in Switzerland. “Salut,” Hoerni said finally, to a childhood friend from Geneva. “C’est moi, Jean. I built a school in the Karakoram Himalaya, “ he boasted. “What have you done for the last fifty years?”

  Hoerni had homes in Switzerland and Sun Valley. But he chose to die in Seattle. By Christmas, Hoerni had been moved to the Virginia Mason Hospital, high atop Seattle’s Pill Hill. From his private room, when the weather was clear, Hoerni had a view of Elliot Bay and the sharp peaks of the Olympic Peninsula. But Hoerni, his health rapidly fading, spent most of his time staring at the legal document he kept continually at hand on his bedside table.

  “Jean spent the last weeks of his life revising his will,” Mortenson says. “Whenever he got angry at someone, and there was usually someone Jean was mad at, he’d take this big black magic marker and cross them out of the will. Then he’d call his estate attorney, Franklin Montgomery, at any time, day or night, and make sure he cut off their inheritance.”

  For the last time in his life, Mortenson served as a night nurse. He left his family in Montana and stayed with Hoerni round the clock, bathing him, changing his bedpans, and adjusting his catheter, glad he had the skills to make Hoerni’s last days comfortable.

  Mortenson had another eight-by-ten of the Korphe School framed and hung it over the hospital bed. And he hooked the video camera Hoerni had given him before the last trip to Pakistan to the hospital television and showed him footage he’d taken of village life in Korphe. “Jean didn’t go quietly. He was angry about dying,” Mortenson says. But lying in bed, holding Mortenson’s hand, watching a video of Korphe’s children sweetly singing, “Mary, Mary, had a, had a, little lamb, little lamb,” in their imperfect English, his fury drained away.

  Hoerni squeezed Mortenson’s hand with the surprising strength of the dying. “He told me, ‘I love you like a son,’” Mortenson says. “Jean’s breath had the sweet ketone smell people often get when they’re about to die, and I knew he didn’t have long.”

  “Jean was known for his scientific accomplishments,” his widow, Jennifer Wilson, says. “But I think he cared just as much about that little school in Korphe. He felt he was really leaving something behind.”

  Hoerni also wanted to insure that the Central Asia Institute was on ground as solid as the Korphe School. He endowed the CAI with a million dollars before entering the hospital.

  On New Year’s Day 1997, Mortenson came back from the cafeteria to find Hoerni wearing a cashmere blazer and trousers and tugging at the IV in his arm. “I need to go to my apartment for a few hours,” he said. “Call a limousine.”

  Mortenson convinced a startled staff physician to release Hoerni into his care, and ordered a black Lincoln that drove them to the penthouse apartment on the shore of Lake Washington. Too weak to hold a phone, Hoerni leafed through a leather-bound address book and asked, Mortenson says, to have flowers sent to several long-lost friends.

  “Bon,” he said, after the final bouquet was ordered. “Now I can die. Take me back to hospital.”

  On January 12, 1997, the long and controversial life of the visionary who helped found the semiconductor industry, and the Central Asia Institute, came to an end. The following month, Greg Mortenson purchased the first good suit he’d ever owned in his life and gave a eulogy to a crowd of Hoerni’s family and former colleagues gathered for a memorial service at the Stanford University Chapel, at the heart of the Silicon Valley culture Hoerni helped to create. “Jean Hoerni had the foresight to lead us to the twenty-first century with cutting-edge technology,” Mortenson told the assembled mourners. “But he also had the rare vision to look behind and reach out to people living as they have for centuries.”

  Chapter 15

  Mortenson In Motion

  Not hammer-strokes, but dance of the water,

  sings the pebbles into perfection.

  —Rabindranath Tagore

  AT 3:00 A.M., in the Central Asia Institute’s Bozeman “office,” a converted laundry room in the basement of his home, Greg Mortenson learned that the sher of Chakpo, a village in the Braldu Valley, had declared a fatwa against him. It was midafternoon in Skardu, where Ghulam Parvi shouted into the phone that Mortenson had paid to have installed in his home.

  “This mullah is not about Islam!” Parvi bellowed. “He is a crook concerned with money! He has no business pronouncing a fatwa!”

  Mortenson knew from the venom in Parvi’s voice how serious a problem the fatwa presented. But home in his pajamas, half a world away, half awake, with his bare feet propped comfortably over a heating vent, it was difficult to summon the alarm the development apparently deserved.

  “Can you go talk to him, see if you can work it out?” Mortenson asked.

  “You need to come here. He won’t agree to meet me unless I bring a valise stuffed with rupees. Do you want me to do that?”

  “We don’t pay bribes and we’re not going to start,
” Mortenson said, stifling a yawn so as not to offend Parvi. “We need to talk to a mullah more powerful than him. Do you know someone?”

  “Maybe,” Parvi said. “Same program tomorrow? Call the same time?”

  “Yes, the same time,” Mortenson said. “Khuda hafiz.”

  “Allah be with you also, sir,” Parvi signed off.

  Mortenson had fallen into the daily routine he would adhere to for the next decade, dictated by the thirteen-hour time difference between Bozeman and Baltistan. He went to bed by 9:00 p.m., after making “morning” calls to Pakistan. He woke up at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., in time to contact Pakistanis before the close of business. Consumed with leading the Central Asia Institute, he rarely slept more than five hours a night.

  Mortenson padded up to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee, then returned to the basement to compose the first e-mail of the day: “To: All CAI Board Members,” Mortenson typed. “Subject: fatwa declared on Greg Mortenson, text: Greetings from Bozeman! Just got off the phone with new CAI Pakistan Project Manager Ghulam Parvi. (He says thank you, his phone is working well!) Parvi said that a local sher, a religious leader who doesn’t like the idea of us educating girls, just declared a fatwa on me, trying to prevent CAI from building any more schools in Pakistan. FYI: a fatwa is a religious ruling. And Pakistan is ruled by civil law, but also by Shariat, which is a system of Islamic law like they have in Iran.

  “In the small mountain villages where we work, a local mullah, even a crooked one, has more power than the Pakistani government. Parvi asked if I wanted to bribe him. (I said no way Jose.) Anyway, this guy can cause a lot of problems for us. I asked Parvi to see if some bigshot mullah might be able to overrule him and I’ll let you know what he finds out. But this means I’ll probably have to go back over there soon to sort it out, Inshallah. Peace, Greg.”

  Jean Hoerni had left Mortenson $22,315 in his will, the amount of Mortenson’s own money the old scientist judged his young friend had spent in Pakistan. And he left Mortenson in an unfamiliar position— in charge of a charitable organization with an endowment of nearly a million dollars. Mortenson asked Hoerni’s widow, Jennifer Wilson, to serve on a newly formed board of directors, along with his old friend Tom Vaughan, the pulmonologist and climber from Marin County who’d helped talk Mortenson through his darkest days in Berkeley. Dr. Andrew Marcus, the chairman of Montana State’s Earth Sciences Department, agreed to serve as well. But the most surprising addition to the board came in the form of Jennifer Wilson’s cousin, Julia Bergman.