Three Cups of Tea

by Greg Mortenson

  Thousands of people felt the same way. By the time U.S. forces had settled in to endure their long occupation of Iraq, and Anne Beyersdorfer had dismantled the “shock and awe” operation and returned home, the CAI had gone from wallowing near financial insolvency to possessing a bank balance of more than one million dollars.

  “It had been so long since the CAI had some real money that I wanted to get right back over there and put it to work,” Mortenson says. “But the board pressed me to make some changes we’d been talking about for years, and I agreed it was time.”

  For six hundred dollars a month, Mortenson rented a small wood-paneled office space in a nondescript building a block from Bozeman’s Main Street, and hired four employees to schedule his speaking engagements, produce a newsletter, maintain a website, and manage CAI’s growing database of donors. And, at the board’s insistence, after a decade of living paycheck to paycheck, Mortenson accepted a long-overdue raise that nearly doubled his salary.

  Tara Bishop appreciated that her husband’s salary finally began to reflect the hardships her family had endured for almost a decade. But she was far from happy about how frequently her husband would now be away, launching ambitious new projects the Parade money made possible.

  “After Greg’s kidnapping, and after 9/11,1 didn’t bother trying to talk Greg out of going back because I knew he’d go no matter what,” Tara says. “So I’ve learned to live in what I call ‘functional denial’ while he’s away. I just keep telling myself that he’ll be fine. I trust the people he has around him, and I trust his cultural intelligence after working over there for so long. Still, I know it only takes one fundamentalist whack job to kill him. But I refuse to let myself think about that while he’s away,” she says with a strained laugh.

  Christiane Letinger, whose mountaineer husband, Charlie Shimanski, predicts Mortenson will win the Nobel Peace Prize one day, argues that Tara Bishop’s calm endurance is every bit as heroic as the risks her husband takes overseas. “How many women would have the strength and vision to let the father of their children work in such a dangerous place for months at a time?” Letinger asks. “Tara not only allows it, but supports it, because she believes so strongly in Greg’s mission. If that’s not heroism I don’t know what is.”

  Suleman was the first person in Pakistan to get the good news. As they drove past the scale model of the mountain where Pakistan had detonated its “Muslim Bomb,” Mortenson told his friend and fixer about the explosion of support Americans had provided to the CAI. Mortenson, whose staff in Pakistan had worked long hours alongside him for years, without benefiting personally the way locals allied with a foreigner might have expected to, was determined to share CAI’s good fortune with his troops.

  Mortenson told Suleman his salary would increase immediately, from eight hundred dollars to sixteen hundred dollars a year. That would be more than enough money for Suleman to achieve the dream he had been saving for, to move his family to Rawalpindi from his home village of Dhok Luna, and send his son Imran to private school. Suleman stole a glance from the road ahead to look at Mortenson, waggling his head with delight.

  In the years since they’d been working together, both men had put on considerable weight, and Suleman’s hair had gone mostly gray. But unlike Mortenson, once armed with his new salary, Suleman refused to let age have its way without a fight.

  Suleman drove to the Jinnah Super Market, a fancy shopping center, walked into a hairdresser’s, and ordered the most extravagant treatment on the menu. When he stepped outside two hours later, and found Mortenson browsing at his favorite bookstore, the thick thatch of graying hair over Suleman’s grinning face had been dyed a shocking shade of orange.

  In Skardu, Mortenson called ajirga in the upstairs dining room of the Indus to announce the good news. Gathering his staff around two tables, he announced that Apo, Hussain, and Faisal would now receive the raises they had deserved for years, and their salaries would double, from five hundred dollars to one thousand dollars a year. Parvi, who already made two thousand dollars annually as CAI’s director in Pakistan, would now receive four thousand dollars a year, a formidable salary in Skardu for the man who made all of CAI’s projects in Pakistan possible.

  To Hussain, Mortenson disbursed an additional five hundred dollars, so he could have the engine of the aging Land Cruiser that had logged so many miles overhauled. Parvi suggested renting a warehouse in Skardu, now that they had sufficient funds, so they could buy cement and building supplies in bulk and store them until they were needed.

  Mortenson hadn’t felt so fired up and frantic to work since the day, six years earlier, that he had gathered his staff around one of the plank tables downstairs in the lobby and told them to start spending the Parade readers’ money as quickly as they could construct schools. Before leaving town on a series of jeep rides and helicopter trips to jump-start two dozen new schools, women’s centers, and water schemes, Mortenson proposed one project more: “For a long time, I’ve been worrying about what to do when our students graduate,” he said. “Mr. Parvi, would you look into what it would cost to build a hostel in Skardu, so our best students would have someplace to stay if we give them scholarships to continue their education?”

  “I’d be delighted, Dr. Sahib,” Parvi said, smiling, freed finally to organize the project he’d been advocating for years.

  “Oh, and one more thing,” Mortenson said.

  “Yes, Dr. Greg, sir.”

  “Yasmine would be a perfect candidate to receive one of CAI’s first scholarships. Can you let me know what her tuition would be if she went to private high school in the fall?”

  Yasmine, fifteen, was Parvi’s daughter, a straight-A student who had obviously inherited her father’s fierce intelligence, and just as obviously inspired his fierce devotion. “Well?”

  For a rare, elongated moment, Ghulam Parvi, the most eloquent man in Skardu, was struck silent, his mouth hanging open. “I don’t know what to say,” he said.

  “Allah-u-Akbhar!” Apo shouted, throwing up his hands in theatrical rapture, as the table exploded in laughter. “How long…” he croaked between giggles in his gravelly voice, “I’ve waited… for this day!”

  Throughout the summer of 2003, Mortenson worked feverishly, testing the limits of the Land Cruiser’s rebuilt engine as he and his reenergized crew visited each of the new construction sites that the Parade money had made possible, smoothing out obstacles, and delivering supplies. Nine new schools in northern Pakistan were progressing smoothly, but one of CAI’s established projects, the Halde School, which the aging Mouzafer had helped bring to his village, had hit a roadblock, Mortenson learned. The five-room school had done so well that its operation was now entrusted to the increasingly effective local government.

  Yakub, who had seen Mortenson’s team member Scott Darsney safely off the Baltoro back in 1993, had created a crisis. An aging porter whose upside days were done, like his neighbor Mouzafer, Yakub wanted to be appointed the school’s chokidar, or watchman. He had petitioned the government, requesting the job. But after receiving no reply, he chained the doors of the school, demanding payment.

  A day after the news reached him in Skardu, Mortenson arrived in the Land Cruiser, dusty and exhausted from the eight-hour trip. Grinning with his sudden inspiration, Mortenson reached under his driver Hussain’s seat.

  He found Yakub standing uncertainly by the chained and padlocked door to the Halde School as a crowd of villagers gathered. Smilingly, Mortenson patted Yakub’s shoulder with his right hand, before holding out the two sticks of dynamite he clenched in his left fist.

  After exchanging pleasantries and inquiries about friends and family, Yakub’s voice shook as he asked the question he knew he must: “What is that for, Dr. Greg, Sahib, sir?”

  Mortenson handed the two sticks of dynamite to Yakub, still smiling. Perhaps, he thought, the explosives could clear up obstacles more intractable than a road covered with rocks. “I want you take these, Yakub,” Mortenson sai
d in Balti, pressing them into Yakub’s shaking hand. “I’m leaving now for Khanday, to check on the progress of another school. When I come back tomorrow, I’ll be bringing a match. If I don’t see that the school is open and the students are going to class, we’re going to make an announcement at the village mosque for everyone to gather here and watch you blow it up.”

  Mortenson left Yakub holding the dynamite in both trembling hands and walked back toward the jeep. “The choice is yours,” he said over his shoulder, climbing back in. “See you tomorrow. Khuda hafiz!”

  Mortenson returned the next afternoon and delivered new pencils and notebooks to Halde’s students, who were happily reinstalled at their desks. His old friend Mouzafer was not yet too feeble to assert his will on the school he helped to build. From Apo, Mortenson learned that Mouzafer, whose two grandchildren attended the Halde School, had also offered Yakub a choice after Mortenson left. “Get your keys and open the school,” he’d told Yakub, “or I’ll personally tie you to a tree and blow you up with Dr. Greg’s dynamite.” As punishment, Mortenson later learned, Halde’s village council forced Yakub to sweep the school early each morning without pay.

  Not every obstacle to education in northern Pakistan was so easily overcome. Mortenson would have liked to deliver dynamite to Agha Mubarek, but struggled to follow Parvi’s advice, and observe, from afar, as the case against the mullah for destroying the Hemasil School progressed in Shariat Court.

  After Korphe, no CAI project in Pakistan was closer to Mortenson’s heart than the Hemasil School. In 1998, Ned Gillette, an American climber and former Olympic skier Mortenson admired, was killed while trekking in the Haramosh Valley, between Hemasil and Hunza, with his wife, Susan. The details of his death are still disputed by Pakistan’s authorities, but the story Mortenson had pieced together from talking to Haramosh villagers was this: Gillette and his wife had been approached by porters who insisted that they hire them. Gillette, committed to traveling alpiniste-style, with only two light backpacks, refused, a bit too forcefully for the porters’ taste. Late that night, the two men returned with a shotgun to the tent where the couple was sleeping.

  “My guess is that perhaps they were just planning to rob them,” Mortenson says. “To take something that, in their minds, would avenge their wounded honor. But, unfortunately, things got out of hand.” Gillette was killed by a shotgun blast to the abdomen. Susan, badly wounded by buckshot in the thigh, survived.

  “As far as I know,” Mortenson says, “Ned Gillette was the first Westerner ever murdered in northern Pakistan. When his sister, Debbie Law, contacted me, and asked to donate money so a school could be built in her brother’s honor, I jumped to make it happen. I couldn’t imagine a more meaningful tribute.”

  But the site the elders of Shigar Valley chose for the Ned Gillette School was not only near the pass where he was murdered, it was adjacent to Chutran, mullah Agha Mubarek’s village.

  “After we had the walls built, and the men of our village were about to begin putting on the roof, Agha Mubarek and his men arrived to block the project,” says Mehdi Ali, the village elder who oversaw the construction of the Hemasil School. Mehdi was an activist for education whose father, Sheikh Mohammed, had written asking for a ruling from Iran after the first fatwa had been declared against Mortenson. “Mubarek told us, ‘This kafir school is no good. It is the non-Muslim school. It is to recruit Christians.’ I told him, ‘I know Mr. Greg Mortenson for a long time and he never does such like that,’ but Mubarek wouldn’t hear me. So after midnight, his men came with their hammers and tried to take away our children’s future.”

  Mehdi, along with Parvi, had paraded character witnesses for Mortenson through the high Shariat Court all spring and summer, and testified themselves. “I told the mullah in charge that Agha Mubarek collects money from my people and never provides any zakat for our children,” Mehdi Ali says. “I told them Agha Mubarek has no business making a fatwa on a saintly man like Dr. Greg. It is he who should be judged in the eyes of Allah Almighty.”

  In August 2003, when the Shariat Court issued its final ruling, it sided firmly with Mehdi Ali and Mortenson. The court declared Agha Mubarek’s fatwa illegitimate and ordered him to pay for the eight hundred bricks his men destroyed.

  “It was a very humbling victory,” Mortenson says. “Here you have this Islamic court in conservative Shia Pakistan offering protection for an American, at a time when America is holding Muslims without charges in Guantanamo, Cuba, for years, under our so-called system of justice.”

  After a decade of struggle, Mortenson felt that finally, all the tea leaves in Pakistan were swirling his way. That summer, Mortenson gained a powerful new ally when Mohammed Fareed Khan was appointed the new chief secretary of the Northern Areas. Khan, a Wazir from Miram Shah, took office determined to declare war on northern Pakistan’s poverty with his tribe’s traditional aggressiveness.

  At a meeting over tea, trout, and cucumber sandwiches in his headquarters, a nineteenth-century British colonial villa in Gilgit, he sought Mortenson’s advice about where to spend the money now finally flowing north from Musharraf’s government in Islamabad. And to demonstrate his support for girls’ education, he pledged to accompany Mortenson and personally inaugurate the Ned Gillette School after his police force had insured that it was rebuilt.

  Another forceful personality, Brigadier General Bhangoo, had a more novel way of demonstrating his support for Mortenson. Brigadier Bhangoo had been President Musharraf’s personal helicopter pilot before retiring from the military to join General Bashir’s civil aviation company. By the summer of 2003, he regularly volunteered for the honor of transporting Mortenson to far-flung projects in his aging Alouette helicopter.

  The general still wore his military flight suit, but substituted a pair of bright-blue jogging shoes for his combat boots, which he said gave him a better feel for the pedals.

  Flying down the Shigar Valley toward Skardu, after retrieving Mortenson from a remote village, Bhangoo became enraged when Mortenson pointed out the ruins of Hemasil’s school and related the story of his feud with Agha Mubarek.

  “Point out this gentleman’s house, will you?” Bhangoo said, increasing power to the Alouette’s turbine. After Mortenson leveled a finger at the large walled compound where Mubarek lived, far beyond the means of a simple village mullah, Bhangoo set his lips firmly below his precisely clipped mustache and nudged his control stick forward, dive-bombing toward Mubarek’s house.

  People on the rooftops ran inside to take shelter as Bhangoo buzzed the compound half a dozen times, like an angry hornet preparing to sting, leaving welts of dust in his wake after each pass. His thumb drifted to the red button marked “missile” and he toyed with it idly. “Pity we’re not armed,” he said, banking toward Skardu, “Still, that should give him something to think about.”

  Six months later, the red buttons would be connected to actual armaments, when fifteen military helicopters flew in formation up the Daryle Valley, a haven of Taliban and Al Qaeda holdouts two hundred miles to the west, hunting extremists who had bombed eight government girls’ schools. Mortenson, by then, had come to admire Musharraf, gratified to see that Pakistan’s government was prepared to fight for the education of its girls.

  In the fall of 2003, at the desk of his aviation company in Rawalpindi, as he tried to arrange a flight for Mortenson to Afghanistan, now that the CAI’s work in Pakistan was on firm enough footing for him to leave, Bhangoo’s boss, the bull-like Brigadier General Bashir Baz, ruminated on the importance of educating all of Pakistan’s children, and the progress America was making in the war on terror.

  “You know Greg, I have to thank your president,” Bashir, said, paging through flight schedules on his high-tech flat-screen computer monitor. “A nightmare was growing on our western border, and he’s paid to put it to an end. I can’t imagine why. The only gainer in the whole equation is Pakistan.”

  Bashir paused to watch a live CNN feed from Baghdad. Staring at
a small video window inset into the flight manifests scrolling down his monitor, Bashir was struck silent by the images of wailing Iraqi women carrying children’s bodies out of the rubble of a bombed building.

  As he studied the screen, Bashir’s bullish shoulders slumped. “People like me are America’s best friends in the region,” Bashir said at last, shaking his head ruefully. “I’m a moderate Muslim, an educated man. But watching this, even I could become zjihadi. How can Americans say they are making themselves safer?” Bashir asked, struggling not to direct his anger toward the large American target on the other side of his desk. “Your President Bush has done a wonderful job of uniting one billion Muslims against America for the next two hundred years.”

  “Osama had something to do with it, too,” Mortenson said.

  “Osama, baah!” Bashir roared. “Osama is not a product of Pakistan or Afghanistan. He is a creation of America. Thanks to America, Osama is in every home. As a military man, I know you can never fight and win against someone who can shoot at you once and then run off and hide while you have to remain eternally on guard. You have to attack the source of your enemy’s strength. In America’s case, that’s not Osama or Saddam or anyone else. The enemy is ignorance. The only way to defeat it is to build relationships with these people, to draw them into the modern world with education and business. Otherwise the fight will go on forever.”