Mountain climber turned humanitarian Greg Mortenson says his work of the past decade building schools in remote villages across Pakistan and Afghanistan has taught him one overriding lesson: Westerners can “drop bombs, build roads or put in electricity, but until the girls are educated, a society won't change.” The “Three Cups of Tea” author has delivered that message at the Pentagon, on college campuses and on the literary lecture circuit he travels when not visiting with tribal elders across a rugged region of South Asia to map plans for more schools. Mortenson's work has won the admiration of Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, who in July 2009 flew by helicopter through the mountains north of Kabul and landed in a Panjshir Valley village to cut the ribbon at the Pushghar Village Girls School, which Mortenson helped community leaders to build. Mullen brought presents for the schoolchildren — 300 veiled girls and 45 boys — from his wife, Deborah, who first introduced him to “Three Cups of Tea.” “She'd read it in a book club and said, ‘This is something you really need to read',” the admiral recalled. Lima, a 16-year-old girl who is a top student at a Kabul high school, interpreted the admiral's remarks in Dari, a Persian dialect spoken by Afghans. Mullen said afterward it had been one of the best days of his life. While the Taleban have destroyed hundreds of girls' schools elsewhere, for the most part they have not attacked the secular schools that Mortenson's nonprofit Central Asia Institute builds with strong support from village elders. Some former Taliban teach in these schools. “They all got out of the Taliban because their mothers told them, ‘What you're doing is not a good thing.' Now these young men are willing to risk their lives to advocate for girls' education,” said Mortenson. “There's nothing in the Holy Qur'an that says girls can't go to school. In fact, the first word in the Qur'an of the revelation to Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) is ‘Iqra', and that means ‘read.' If you talk to a scholarly imam, they all will say the Qur'an actually is a mandate for education.” In “Three Cups of Tea”, which has sold more than 3 million copies, Mortenson and co-author David Oliver Relin cite Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen's formulation that simply educating girls to the fifth grade can dramatically raise the incomes of poor villagers. Schooling, Mortenson believes, is “the single most important and effective investment we can make in any society.” The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization calculates adult literacy rates for the countries where Mortenson builds schools. In Afghanistan in 2000–2006, literacy rates were 43 percent for males and 13 percent for females; in Pakistan, the rates were 68 percent for males and 40 percent for females. Girls make up 70 percent of the roughly 40,000 students attending the 92 schools that bear the Central Asia Institute's imprint and four dozen other sites where classes are taught in tents or outdoors for displaced families. “We hear a lot of bad news from Afghanistan,” said Mortenson, but on the education front “a lot of really good things are happening. … In 2001, at the height of the Taleban, there were 800,000 children — mostly boys — enrolled in schools.” Today, “there are over 8.4 million children attending school in Afghanistan, including 2.5 million females. This is the greatest increase in school enrollment in any country in modern history.” Mortenson is convinced that educating girls does far more than just raise literacy rates in these poor mountain villages. “Once you educate the boys, they tend to leave the villages and go search for work in the cities,” Mortenson explains in “Three Cups of Tea.” “But the girls stay home, become leaders in the community and pass on what they've learned. If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygiene and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls.” A girl inspired Mortenson's work: his young sister Christa, stricken by meningitis as a toddler in Tanzania and later by severe epilepsy that claimed her life when she was 23. It was to honor her memory that Mortenson set out to climb K2, the world's second-tallest mountain, in hopes of leaving behind on the 8,611-meter summit Christa's favorite amber necklace, wrapped in a Tibetan prayer flag. Mortenson came up short of that goal and nearly froze to death after getting lost on the five-day descent before stumbling into Korphe, Pakistan, where villagers nursed him back to health. Searching for a way to repay their kindness, Mortenson decided that building the village's first school was a more fitting homage to Christa's memory than leaving a piece of jewelry on a mountaintop. Sixteen years later, that tribute goes on, through new schools in other villages. - SG – This article has been contributed by America.gov __
