Three Cups of Tea: Greg Mortensen
In one of life’s strange twists of fate, a failed climber becomes a great humanitarian. Salma Hasan Ali tells the extraordinary story of Greg Mortenson and his passion to build schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Nasreen sits on the floor of her two-room apartment in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, a patterned red shawl gently draped over her hair. The only piece of furniture in the room is a small table with a computer, covered with layers of blankets. Her three young children, torn between curiosity and shyness, surround her as she discusses her daily routine, her dreams for her kids and her desire for education. She has a gentle grace, a serene disposition, but her eyes - heavy, settled, soulful - betray the difficult journey she has endured.Nasreen grew up in a tiny village in the northernmost part of Pakistan. Although one of the brightest students in school, in a region where few girls have the opportunity to learn to read and write, the unexpected death of her mother when she was 12 forced her to drop out to take care of her four younger siblings and her blind father. “When my mother died, all my dreams went far away,” she says. But she continued to study, on her own, late at night, and in 1995 at the age of 15, became one of the first girls in the region to receive her metric diploma.Greg Mortenson met Nasreen in her village in 1999 and promised to help her fulfill her dream of becoming a maternal health care provider. His organisation, the Central Asia Institute (CAI), offered her a scholarship to study in Rawalpindi. Eight years later, village elders allowed Nasreen to leave the village. Today, she is completing her medical assistant degree and wants to get an ob-gyn nursing diploma. She hopes to work in areas even more remote than her own to teach other women what she has learned. “I am very happy,” she tells me as we look at family photographs. “I’ve been given a chance to fulfill my dreams. I want to give my children the best education, so they can fulfill theirs too.”Mortenson has been helping girls get an education in remote, sometimes volatile, parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan for the past 18 years. CAI has built or supported more than 170 schools, mainly for girls, providing education to more than 68,000 children. It also supports women’s literacy centres and maternal healthcare programs, and provides higher education scholarships for bright young women like Nasreen. “Watching that first brave girl enter a school is like watching ... Read full article
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