Greg Mortenson with schoolchildren
After the runaway success of Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson has launched a second volume on the same topic, Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Like Three Cups, and indeed, like the author himself, this book is about goodness. Mortenson, who can outdraw Willie Nelson and pack a large arena, explains: "The heart of my presentation always includes the story of promise."
What's more, he sees his work fostering education and literacy in the hardest-to-reach places on the planet as his "life's calling" and modestly describes himself as "nothing more than a fellow who took a wrong turn in the mountains and never quite managed to find his way home."
He had set out to climb K2, the infamous Himalayan peak that denied him the summit and sent him disillusioned, cold and on the wrong path back down the mountain, a sojourn that led to a career change from mountaineer to founder of the South Asia Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to building schools. Lost and exhausted, he stumbled upon a villager from Korphe, Pakistan, and wound up being cared for like a native son. His thank you was a vow that he would return and build a school. That was the story of Three Cups of Tea.
Stones into Schools is based on an equally challenging promise: that he would build a school for the children who live at the top of the world on the finger of land that pokes its way into China in the forbidding northeast Pamir range of Afghanistan, in a scarcely populated corridor known as the Wakhan.
But the book's heart and soul is Mortenson's clever recognition of the other insurgency in Afghanistan: the revolution of female learning and literacy and, therefore, liberation.
It's a story that reads like a whodunit. He makes a dramatic promise on the opening pages to what seems more like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse than representatives of the Wakhan, and keeps the reader turning pages to find out how he handles the improbable escapades along the way. The characters - such as Sarfraz Khan, his point man, who wears a peacock-blue Dick Tracy-style fedora and has stainless-steel teeth and a three-fingered hook on his right hand - could have been sent by central casting.
The writing matches the larger-than-life characters: "There were fourteen riders, coming fast through a scrim of cold rain, and even from a distance of nearly a thousand yards the time-worn music of their cavalry, the hollow clomping of the hoof beats and the metallic clanking of steel in the horses' mouths cleaved the alpine air."
The remote, the inaccessible, the nearly impossible are the landscapes Mortenson prefers to serve. And he brooks no backchat from anyone who suggests he has strayed off the beaten path - again. In Kabul to fetch permits to build his school in the Wakhan, he spares little patience with officialdom when he is told in the space of a single five-minute exchange that "the Wakhan was filled with hundreds of schools, that the Wakhan was not part of Afghanistan and that no one actually lived in the Wakhan."
His passion for the outdoors is reflected in much of the scene setting. In describing the elusive Pamir, where "even in midsummer, winter was never more than half a step away," he writes: "Beyond the cluster of low-slung mud-and-stone houses that make up the village, wild-haired children preside over herds of shaggy-coated yaks and shovel-footed Bactrian camels that look as if they are still part of the Pleistocene."
The man loves an adventure. By his own admission he and his cohorts devour buckets of Ibuprofen - 12 to 15 pills a day "in order to help dull the aches and pains induced by the arduous travel and the lack of sleep." He'll drive himself, his staff and his vehicles to the point of collapse. His chain-smoking sidekick works the horses and himself nearly to death. To say Mortenson is obsessed with getting these schools built is an understatement.
If there's a criticism, it's that Mortenson either has extraordinary good luck with the people he meets (the U.S. military provides VIP clearance and drops in with Black Hawks and Chinooks stuffed with journalists to cover the opening of a girls' school) or the fortuitous ability to overlook some of the most brutal men in the world. Warlords seem to have epiphanies and want to help Mortenson build schools for girls. The warlords most of us run into while covering Afghanistan have no such ideals for girls and are seen as the power brokers responsible for keeping Afghanistan tribal, fractious and failing. There's even a reformed former Taliban fighter who acts as bookkeeper on Mortenson's team. But as one reader said of Three Cups of Tea, "The book is easy on my heart." So is Stones to Schools.
Sally Armstrong is the author of Bitter Roots, Tender Shoots: The Uncertain Fate of Afghanistan's Women. She has been reporting from Afghanistan for 12 years.