featured speaker: greg mortenson
Greg Mortenson stumbled from a failed K2 climb, in 1993, into an impoverished Pakistani village, where he was nursed to health and his eyes were opened.
Mortenson was surprised to see the village’s 84 children sit outdoors all day, without a teacher, scratching lessons in the dirt with sticks. The village couldn’t afford the $1-a-day salary to hire a teacher.
Weeks later, Mortenson, recovered and inspired, left the village with a parting promise: he would return to build the children a school.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have the means by himself. While his initial fundraising fell short, Mortenson changed strategies when he received $623.40 in pennies from a Wisconsin elementary school. And so Pennies for Peace began. Children and adults alike have contributed to Mortenson’s efforts, which have yielded a new bridge in Pakistan, 130 schools and vocational centers in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and ripple effort of generosity across the globe.
A former night nurse and mountain climber who grew up in Tanzania and hiked Mt. Kilimanjaro at the age of eleven, Mortenson is the only foreigner on Pakistan’s national education reform committee. Recently in Islamabad, President Asif Ali Zardari presented Mortenson with Pakistan’s highest civil honor, the Sitara-e-Pakistan (the Star of Pakistan) in thanks for the 15 years Mortenson has worked to promote education and literacy amongst Pakistani youth.
Mortenson is the co-founder of Central Asia Institute, a nonprofit that builds rural schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Pennies For Peace, which connects 2,700 American schools with struggling students abroad. He co-authored Time Magazine’s Asia Book of the Year, Three Cups of Tea, which remained on the New York Times Bestseller list for more than 100 weeks, with six months at the #1 spot.
As the United States launched massive military campaigns to fight terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11, Mortenson, a veteran U.S. Army medic, became increasingly convinced that investing in education, especially for women, is key to overcoming extremism.
"You can drop bombs," he says, "hand out condoms, build roads, or put in electricity, but until the girls are educated a society won’t change." And Mortenson has encountered his fair share of extremism.
Despite strong partnerships with Islamic leaders, military commanders and tribal chiefs, Mortenson has survived two fatwehs from enraged mullahs objecting to the secular education of girls, escaped a firefight between feuding Afghan warlords, and lived through an eight-day armed kidnapping by the Taliban. He has also endured two CIA investigations into his work and received myriad death threats and hate mail from fellow Americans who criticize his support of Muslim children. But he’s also witnessed firsthand the ways education transforms society.
Mortenson spends half of every year in Pakistan and Afghanistan and much of the other half traveling the United States lecturing to packed auditoriums about promoting peace, prosperity, and empowerment through education. He has spoken at more than 60 universities and 400 elementary and secondary schools, not to mention at Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, the Department of Defense, churches, mosques, synagogues, civic groups, and conventions across America.
Tom Brokaw described Mortenson as "one ordinary person, with the right combination of character and determination, who is really changing the world." Congresswoman Mary Bono (Rep – Cali.) says, "I’ve learned more from Greg Mortenson about the causes of terrorism than I did during all our briefings on Capitol Hill. He is a true hero, whose creativity, courage, and compassion exemplify the true ideals of the American spirit."
Mortenson, 50, lives in Bozeman, Montana with his wife, Dr. Tara Bishop, a clinical psychologist, and their two children, Khyber and Amira.
what’s ‘three cups’?»
Greg Mortenson, convocation keynote and author of Three Cups of Tea, explains his theory and discusses his quest to promote peace… one school at a time.