Tuesday, Nov. 03, 2009

'Three Cups of Tea' author to speak in Columbus

In 1993, Greg Mortenson stumbled into a remote village in the Karakoram mountains of Pakistan after a failed attempt to summit K2 and was greeted by an elderly bearded man who shook his hand and said “As-salaam Alaaikum” — peace be with you.

It was with those words from a warm and wizened village chief that Mortenson left behind mountaineering and embarked on a career in peace building.

While he recovered his strength in the village of Korphe, after a climb he had made to honor the memory of his sister who had suffered with epilepsy and died after a massive seizure, Mortenson was touched deeply by the generosity and hospitality of an otherwise impoverished people.

And when he wandered out behind the village and discovered 78 boys and four tenacious girls drawing multiplication tables in the dirt with sticks — with no teacher to guide them that day — he saw in the faces of the girls the same kind of determination to learn that had driven his sister. He promised that day that he would return and build a school for the people of Korphe.

Mortenson is a man of his word. Sixteen years later the Korphe school is one of 131 secular schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan built by Mortenson and the Central Asia Institute, a nonprofit organization he co-founded in 1996.

On Nov. 12, Mortenson will come to Columbus to share his story, much of which is detailed in “Three Cups of Tea,” a book he co-authored and a New York Times Best Seller since its release in 2007. The book is required reading for U.S. senior military commanders, Pentagon officers in counter-insurgency training and U.S. Special Forces deploying to Afghanistan.

And this year it’s also required reading at Brookstone School, where every student is reading some version of “Three Cups of Tea,” whether it’s the original edition, a young reader’s edition or a picture book account of Mortenson’s story called “Listen to the Wind.” On Nov. 12, Mortenson, who was a nominee for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, will speak to three different assemblies of Brookstone students before taking his talk to the public in the evening.

It’s all in a day’s work for a man accustomed to fighting tirelessly for a cause he believes in. When he works in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mortenson dresses in traditional clothes, lives among the people according to their customs, and braves places most Westerners never see.

In 1996, Mortenson survived an eight-day armed kidnapping by the Taliban in Waziristan in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, and in 2003 he escaped a firefight with feuding Afghan warlords by hiding for eight hours under animal hides in a truck bound for a leather-tanning factory.

Unofficial military adviser

Mortenson said he is eager for the opportunity to speak in Columbus in part because of its proximity to Fort Benning.

He said that after the publication of “Three Cups of Tea,” he was flooded with e-mails and letters from soldiers who had served in Afghanistan and who recognized that without education for its citizens, nothing would change in the war-torn country.