Three Cups of Tea

by Greg Mortenson

  “Balti already had a rich tradition of sewing and weaving,” Mortenson says. “They just needed some help to revive the dying practice. Hawa’s idea was such an easy way to empower women that I decided from that day on to put in vocational centers wherever we built schools.”

  In early August 1997, Greg Mortenson rode triumphantly up the Braldu Valley in a convoy of jeeps. In the green Land Cruiser sat Tara, and on her lap, Amira Mortenson, not yet one. Their entourage included police officers, army commanders, local politicians, and board members Jennifer Wilson and Julia Bergman, who’d spent months assembling a collection of culturally appropriate books to create a library for Korphe.

  “It was incredible to finally see the place Greg had talked so passionately about for years,” Tara says. “It made a whole part of my husband more real to me.”

  The jeeps parked by the bridge and, as the procession of Westerners crossed it, the people of Korphe cheered their arrival from the bluff above. The small yellow school, freshly painted for the occasion and festooned with banners and Pakistani flags, was clearly visible as the group climbed to Korphe.

  Two years later, when Mortenson’s mother, Jerene, visited Korphe, she remembers being overwhelmed by the sight of her son’s labors. “After I saw the school way off in the distance, I cried all the way up,” Jerene says. “I knew how much of his heart Greg had put into building it—how hard he worked and how much he cared. When your kids accomplish something it means much more than anything you’ve done.”

  “The day of the inauguration, we met Haji Ali and his wife, and the whole village competed to take turns holding Amira,” Tara says. “She was in heaven, a little blonde toy everyone wanted to play with.”

  The school was buffed to perfection. Dozens of new wooden desks sat in each classroom, on carpets thick enough to shield students’ feet from the cold. Colorful world maps and portraits of Pakistan’s leaders decorated the walls. And in the courtyard, on a stage beneath a large hand-lettered banner proclaiming “Welcome Cherished Guests,” the speeches went on for hours beneath an untempered sun, while sixty Korphe students squatted patiently on their heels.

  “It was the most exciting day of my life,” says schoolmaster Hussein’s daughter, Tahira. “Mr. Parvi handed each of us new books and I didn’t dare to open them, they were so beautiful. I’d never had my own books before.”

  Jennifer Wilson wrote a speech about how much her husband, Jean Hoerni, would have loved to see this day in person, and had Ghulam Parvi render it into phonetic Balti so she could directly address the crowd. Then she handed each student a crisp new school uniform, neatly folded inside its cellophane wrapper.

  “I couldn’t take my eyes off all the foreign ladies,” says Jahan, who, along with Tahira, would one day become the first educated woman in the long history of the Braldu Valley. “They seemed so dignified. Whenever I’d seen people from downside before, I’d run away, ashamed of my dirty clothes. But that day I held the first set of clean, new clothes I’d ever owned,” Jahan says. “And I remember thinking, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t feel so ashamed. Maybe, one day, Allah willing, I can become a great lady, too.’”

  Master Hussein, and the two new teachers who’d come to work with him, made speeches, as did Haji Ali and each of the visiting dignitaries. Everyone except for Greg Mortenson. “While the speeches went on Greg stood in the background, against a wall,” Tara says, “holding a baby someone had handed him. It was the most filthy baby I’d ever seen, but he didn’t seem to notice. He just stood there happily, bouncing it in his arms. And I told myself, ‘That’s the essence of Greg right there. Always remember this moment.’ “

  For the first time in recorded history, the children of Korphe village began the daily task of learning to read and write in a building that kept the elements at bay. With Jennifer Wilson, Mortenson poured Jean Hoerni’s ashes off the bridge the scientist had paid to build, into the rushing waters of the Braldu River. Then Mortenson returned to Skardu with his family. During the days he spent showing Tara around his adopted hometown, driving into Skardu’s southern hills to share a meal at Parvi’s house, or hiking up to crystalline Satpara Lake south of town, he became convinced he was being followed by an agent of Pakistan’s feared intelligence service, the ISI.

  “The guy they assigned to tail me must not have been very high up in the organization,” Mortenson says, “because he was poor at his job. He had bright red hair and wobbled around on his red Suzuki motorcycle so it was impossible to miss him. And every time I’d turn around, there he would be, smoking, trying to look like he wasn’t watching me. I had nothing to hide, so I decided I might as well let him figure that out and report back to his superiors.”

  Another Skardu resident paid uncomfortably close attention to Mortenson’s family, too. One afternoon, Mortenson left Tara and Amira in the rear seat of his Land Cruiser while he stopped to buy bottles of mineral water in Skardu’s bazaar. Tara took advantage of the time alone to nurse Amira discreetly. When Mortenson returned, he saw a young man pressing his face to the Land Cruiser’s window, leering in at his wife. His bodyguard Faisal Baig saw the voyeur, too, and got to him before Mortenson could.

  “Faisal dragged the guy around a corner, into an alley, so Tara wouldn’t have to be degraded by watching, and beat him unconscious,” Mortenson says. “I ran over and asked Faisal to stop. And I checked his pulse, making sure he hadn’t killed him.”

  Mortenson wanted to take the man to a hospital. But Baig kicked and spat on the man’s prone figure when Mortenson suggested helping him and insisted that he remain where he belonged, lying in the gutter. “This shetan, this devil, is lucky I didn’t kill him,” Baig said. “If I did, no one in Skardu would disagree.” Years later, Mortenson learned that the man had been so ostracized in Skardu after word spread about how he had disrespected the wife of Dr. Greg that he was forced to move out of town.

  After putting his wife and daughter safely on a plane home, Mortenson stayed on in Pakistan for two more months. The success of the Women’s Vocational Center led the men of Korphe to ask if there wasn’t something Mortenson could do to help them earn extra money, too.

  With Tara’s brother, Brent Bishop, Mortenson organized Pakistan’s first porter-training program, the Karakoram Porter Training and Environmental Institute. Bishop, a successful Everest climber like his late father, convinced one of his sponsors, Nike, to donate funds and equipment for the effort. “Balti porters worked gallantly in some of the harshest alpine terrain on earth,” Mortenson says. “But they had no mountaineering training.” On an expedition led and organized by Mouzafer, Mortenson, Bishop, and eighty porters trekked up the Baltoro. Apo Razak, a veteran at feeding large groups in inhospitable places, worked as the head cook. On the glacier, the American mountaineers taught classes in first aid, crevasse rescue, and basic ropecraft.

  They also focused on repairing the environmental damage done to the Baltoro each climbing season, constructing stone latrines at campsites along the glacier, which they hoped would eliminate the fields of frozen turds expeditions left in their wake.

  And for the porters who returned after each trip up the glacier with empty baskets, they created an annual recycling program, which removed more than a ton of tin cans, glass, and plastic from K2, Broad Peak, and Gasherbrum base camps that first year. Mortenson arranged to have the recyclables transported to Skardu and saw that the porters were paid for their efforts by the pound.

  When winter clasped the high valleys of the Karakoram in its annual lingering embrace, Mortenson returned home at the end of the busiest year of his life to his basement in Bozeman.

  “When I look back at everything we accomplished that year, despite thefatwa, I have no idea how I did it, how I had that kind of energy.” Mortenson says.

  But his hyperactive efforts had only made him more aware of the ocean of need still awaiting him. With a nocturnal flurry of phone calls to Pakistan, e-mails to his board, and countless pots of coffee, he began planning his spring assa
ult on Pakistan’s poverty.

  Chapter 16

  Red Velvet Box

  No human, nor any living thing, survives long under the eternal sky. The

  most beautiful women, the most learned men, even Mohammed,

  who heard Allah’s own voice, all did wither and die. All is temporary.

  The sky outlives everything. Even suffering.

  —Bowajohar, Balti poet, and grandfather of Mouzafer All

  MORTENSON IMAGINED the messenger traveling inexorably to the southeast. He envisioned the Supreme Council’s ruling tucked into an emissary’s saddlebags as he rode from Iran into Afghanistan, pictured a small mountain pony skirting the heavily mined Shomali Plain, before plodding up the high passes of the Hindu Kush and crossing into Pakistan. In his mind, Mortenson tried to slow the messenger down, planted rockslide and avalanche in his path. The messenger would take years to arrive, he hoped. Because if he came bearing the worst news, Mortenson might be banished from Pakistan forever.

  In reality, the red velvet box containing the ruling was mailed from Qom to Islamabad. It was flown in a PIA 737 to Skardu, and delivered to the foremost Shia clerics in northern Pakistan for a public reading.

  While the Supreme Council had pondered Mortenson’s case, they had dispatched spies to inquire into the affairs of the American working at the heart of Shia Pakistan, Parvi says. “From many, many schools, I began to get reports that strange men had visited, asking about each school’s curriculum. Did the schools recruit for Christianity or promote Western-style licentiousness? these men wanted to know.

  “Finally, an Iranian mullah visited me, myself, at my home. And he asked me directly, ‘Have you ever seen this infidel drink alcohol, or try to seduce Muslim ladies?’ I told him truthfully that I had never seen Dr. Greg take a drink, and that he was a married man, who respected his wife and children and would never Eve-tease any Balti girls. I also told him that he was welcome to come and investigate any of our schools, and that I would arrange his transportation and pay his expenses if he wanted to set out right away. ‘We have been to your schools,’ he said, and thanked me most courteously for my time.”

  Early on an April morning in 1998, Parvi appeared at the door to Mortenson’s room in the Indus Hotel and told him they’d both been summoned.

  Mortenson shaved and changed into the cleanest of the five mud-colored shalwar kamiz he’d by then accumulated.

  The Imam Bara Mosque, like much of Shia Pakistan, showed little of its face to the outside world. Its high earthern walls were unadorned, and it focused its energies inward, except for a tall, green-and-blue-painted minaret mounted with loudspeakers to summon the faithful inside.

  They were led through the courtyard, and into an arched doorway. Mortenson brushed aside a heavy chocolate-colored velvet curtain and approached the mosque’s inner sanctum, a place no infidel had been invited before. Mortenson, making sure to step carefully over the threshold with his right foot, to avoid offense, entered.

  Inside stood the eight imposing black-turbaned members of the Council of Mullahs. From the severity with which Syed Mohammed Abbas Risvi greeted him, Mortenson presumed the worst. With Parvi, he sank heavily down on an exquisite Isfahan carpet woven with a pattern of flowing vines. Syed Abbas motioned for the rest of the council to join them in a circle on the carpet, then sat himself, placing a small red velvet box on the plush wool before his knees.

  With due ceremony, Syed Abbas tilted back the lid of the box, withdrew a scroll of parchment wrapped in red ribbon, unfurled it, and revealed Mortenson’s future. “Dear Compassionate of the Poor,” he translated from the elegant Farsi calligraphy, “our Holy Koran tells us all children should receive education, including our daughters and sisters. Your noble work follows the highest principles of Islam, to tend to the poor and sick. In the Holy Koran there is no law to prohibit an infidel from providing assistance to our Muslim brothers and sisters. Therefore,” the decree concluded, “we direct all clerics in Pakistan to not interfere with your noble intentions. You have our permission, blessings, and prayers.”

  Syed Abbas rolled the scroll, stowed it in the red velvet box, and presented it to Mortenson, grinning. Then he offered his hand.

  Mortenson shook the hand of each member of the council in turn, his head swimming. “Does this mean…” he tried to speak. “The fatwa, is it…”

  “Forget all that small-minded, small-village nonsense,” Parvi said, beaming. “We have the blessing of the highest mufti in Iran. No Shia will dare to interfere with our work now, Inshallah.”

  Syed Abbas called for tea. “I want to speak with you about another matter,” he said, relaxing now that his formal duty had been discharged. “I’d like to propose a little collaboration.”

  That spring, word of the ruling in the red velvet box spread throughout Baltistan more thoroughly than the glacial meltwater trickling down to its valleys from the high Karakoram. Mortenson’s peaceful morning gatherings over tea in the lobby of the Indus Hotel grew too large for the two tables and had to be moved to a banquet room upstairs, where the meetings became increasingly raucous. Each day he was in Skardu, emissaries from Baltistan’s hundreds of remote villages sought him out with petitions for new projects, now that he had the Supreme Council of Ayatollahs’ stamp of approval.

  Mortenson began taking his meals in the hotel kitchen, where he could finish an omelette or a plate of vegetable curry without having to respond to a note, in tortured English, asking for a loan to kick-start a semiprecious-stone-mining venture, or funds to rebuild a neglected village mosque.

  Though he didn’t fully recognize it yet, a new phase in Mortenson’s life had now begun. He no longer had the time to speak with everyone who came to him with a request, though, at first, he tried. He’d been busy before, but now each day seemed five or six hours too brief. He set himself the task of sifting through the flood of requests for the few worthy projects he had the means and ability to accomplish.

  Syed Abbas, whose influence extended up dozens of wild mountain valleys, had an acute sense of each community’s needs. He told Mortenson he agreed that education was the only long-term tactic to combat poverty. But he argued that the children of Baltistan faced a more immediate crisis. In villages like Chunda, in the lower Shigar Valley, Syed Abbas said, more than one child in three died before celebrating their first birthday. Poor hygiene and lack of clean drinking water were the culprits, he said.

  Mortenson wove this new strand into his mission enthusiastically. One had to water a plant before it could be coaxed to grow; children had to survive long enough to benefit from school. With Syed Abbas, he visited the nurmadhar of Chunda, Haji Ibramin, and convinced him to put the men of his village at their disposal. Residents of four neighboring villages requested permission to join the project. And with hundreds of workers digging trenches ten hours a day they completed the project in one week. Through twelve thousand feet of pipe Mortenson provided, fresh spring water flowed to public taps in the five villages.

  “I came to respect and depend on the vision of Syed Abbas,” Mortenson says. “He’s the type of religious leader I admire most. He is about compassion in action, not talk. He doesn’t just lock himself up with his books. Syed Abbas believes in rolling up his sleeves and making the world a better place. Because of his work, the women of Chunda no longer had to walk long distances to find clean water. And overnight, the infant mortality rate of a community of two thousand people was cut in half.”

  At a meeting before Mortenson left for Pakistan, the board had approved the construction of three more schools in the spring and summer of 1998. Mouzafer’s school was Mortenson’s priority. During their last few visits, Mouzafer hadn’t seemed himself. The oxlike strength of the man who led him off the Baltoro was less evident. He’d become increasingly deaf. And as with so many Balti men who’ve labored for years in the elements, the onset of old age stalked him as swiftly as a snow leopard.

  Halde, Mouzafer’s village, was in the lush Lower Hushe Valley
. By the bank of the Shyok River, where it slows and widens before meeting the Indus, Halde was as perfect a place as Mortenson had seen in Pakistan. Irrigation channels trickled through neat patchwork fields that rolled down to the riverbank. The village pathways were shaded by mature apricot and mulberry trees. “Halde is my kind of Shangri-La. It’s the kind of place I could see bringing a pile of books, taking my shoes off, and hiding out for a very long time,” Mortenson says. He had no such luxury. But Mouzafer, his trekking days having come to an end, envisioned his last quiet years spent here in his small home surrounded by orchards and his children and their children, far below the land of eternal ice.

  With the process he, Parvi, and Makhmal had now perfected, Mortenson obtained a plot of open land between two groves of apricot trees and, with the village’s help, built a sturdy stone four-classroom school in three months, for just over twelve thousand dollars. Mouzafer’s grandfather Bowa Johar had been a poet, renowned throughout Baltistan. Mouzafer had labored as a simple porter his whole adult life, and enjoyed no special standing in Halde. But his ability to bring a school to the village conferred a new level of respect on the kindly man who carried quarried rocks to the construction site and raised roof beams, though younger hands tried to shift the burden from his shoulders.

  Standing with Mortenson before the finished school, watching Halde’s children stretch on tiptoe to look through unfamiliar glass panes at the mysterious rooms where they would start class in the fall, Mouzafer took Mortenson’s hand in both of his.

  “My upside days are over, Greg Sahib,” he said. “I’d like to work with you for many years more, but Allah, in his wisdom, has taken much of my strength.”

  Mortenson hugged this man who’d helped him so often to find his way. Despite Mouzafer’s talk of weakness, his arms were still strong enough to squeeze the breath out of a large American. “What will you do?” Mortenson asked.