The work of the Central Asia Institute illustrates what one person can do — beyond all expectations -- to facilitate change. It provides one nurse's roadmap – however long and strenuous — for achieving a sustainable peace precisely in the world's most acute theatre of conflict.
Billions of dollars are poured into generating social and economic development in Afghanistan and Northwest Pakistan -- one of the world's poorest and least developed regions in the world. The Berlin Donors Conference for Afghan reconstruction in March 2004 reached $8.9 billion for 2004-09. The region is the focus of much debate and discussion today. The work of Greg Mortenson, a nurse from America, and founder of the Central Asia Institute, CAI, provides salutary lessons for world leaders on how social development, with strong support from village communities, can become a reality in the region. Since 1996, through voluntary efforts, CAI has so far established 78 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, providing education to over 28,000 students, with an emphasis on educating girls. The statistics demonstrate that there is clear demand among villagers for the education of their children. CAI's programmes include health issues, environment and cultural preservation. It has expanded its scope to Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan. Dr Deva-Marie Beck reviews Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace, One School at a Time, which describes the challenging work of Greg Mortenson and demonstrates what a nurse can do to bring change in difficult situations.
One Nurse's Trail to Peace along the Afghan-Pakistani Border
by Deva-Marie Beck, PhD, RN, International Co-Director, Nightingale Initiative for Global Health (NIGH)
As NIGH, we are constantly looking for stories about people who are “creating a healthy world.” Such a story is Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace, One School at a Time.
Greg Mortenson was a trauma nurse working extra long shifts to fund his favourite hobby — hiking in the Himalayas, aiming to scale the formidable K2 -- the second-highest mountain on Earth, located in the Northern Areas of Pakistan. His story begins with “failure”. Greg is stopped, within 600 meters from K2's summit. Because he had joined a several-day effort to rescue a fellow climber, Greg was forced to choose between reaching the top and returning safely. Abandoning his dream, he turned back, realizing, within a few hours, how he had failed again. Preoccupied with his own thoughts, he had lost the trail.
Greg Mortenson with students
After spending the night on a frozen ledge, he hiked, for several kilometers, looking for the trail, to finally come upon Mouzafer, one of his guides, who was making his way back to his own village. Moouzafer, the first of Greg's many guides and new friends and mentors, guided him back to the tree-line, where he ‘got lost’ again. Severely weakened, Greg traversed the precarious switchbacks leading to the tiny village of Korphe, perched, amid outcropping apricot trees, on a ledge 800 feet above a river below.
The people of Korphe’s people helped Greg to regain his strength. He learned about their lives, particularly about the many diseases stemming from their poverty and how one out of every three of Korphe's children died before reaching their first birthday.
Greg also visited their ‘school’ — set outdoors, on a freezing plateau, higher still, above the village. The students, 78 boys and 4 girls, knelt on the frosty ground, using sticks to scratch their numbers and letters in the dirt. “I felt like my heart was being torn out. There was a fierceness in their desire to learn, despite how mightily everything was stacked against them.... I knew I had to do something…. I'm going to build you a school!”
And so, the story of Three Cups of Tea continues, for 20 more chapters, masterfully woven — with threads of the region's history, politics and descriptions of vast and treacherous beauty. The book captures the reader in Greg's single-minded desire to build schools for children — especially girls — along the entire range of the Afghan-Pakistani border. Even as he finally succeeds well beyond his first promise to Korphe — finding friendship among many, both rich and poor — Greg also meets danger. He endures two ‘fatwa’ death sentences to eventually face Pakistan's highest Sharia court.
Greg is detained for eight days at gunpoint in a military prison. Skirting past landmines hidden in the snows of the Afghan mountains, he survives the crossfire between opium warlords. He also walks along the cool marble corridors of the Pentagon and, receives Taliban hospitality over a hot cup of tea in a remote Pakistani cafe.
Along the way, he also meets a retired Brigadier General, Bashir Baz, who runs a private air charter service and volunteers, whenever possible, to assist Greg to reach remote regions. Baz reflects: “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” — on all sides. The defeat of ignorance only occurs through learning to build understanding, relationship and wisdom at every level. “Otherwise, the fight will go on forever.”
In the final chapter, Greg begins his long-promised plans to also bring schools to the Afghanistan side of the border. Greg arrives, from Kabul, to this area. In an Afghan village sited only a few kilometers and several deep chasms away from a school established in Pakistan, Greg meets Commandhan Sadhir Khan, “the fearsome Badakshan's military mujahadeen.”
Astonished that Greg would risk his life to be there, Khan welcomes Greg to collaborate in building schools for Afghan children. Khan points to his own landscape, “Look here…. there has been far too much dying in these hills…. every rock, every boulder that you see before is [like] one of my mujahadeen, shahids, martyrs who sacrificed their lives…. Now we must make their sacrifice worthwhile.... now we must turn these stones into schools.”
UNICEF — the United Nations Children's Fund — has identified the education of girls as one of the most important interventions required to establish and sustain the health of humanity. According to UNICEF: “Socially constructed roles too often thwart the potential of girls and women. Discrimination denies them health care and education.... robs girls and women of the power to make decisions, to earn a living and to be free from violence, abuse and exploitation... By recognizing and addressing discrimination against girls and women, success in the fight against all forms of discrimination — class, race, ethnicity and age — will become more likely, and more lasting.”
Within his own story, Greg learns as much as he brings, of the value of respect, commitment and fortitude. He learns that his caring can make a world of difference, turning the tide of prejudice and hatred. He celebrates the bright eyes of 1000s of girls who are in school for the first time in their peoples’ history.
Three Cups of Tea illustrates what one person can do — beyond all expectations -- to facilitate change. It provides one nurse's roadmap –- however long and strenuous — for achieving a sustainable peace precisely in the world's most acute theatre of conflict.
