The Daily Aztec (10-31-07)

Daily Aztec
San Diego State University, CA
Pennies add up
By Shanee Warden - Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 31, 2007

In 1833, a penny could buy a newspaper. In 1950, a penny could buy a piece of candy. In 2007, a penny can help build a new school.

San Diego State 's Mortar Board raised $6,000 - the equivalent of 600,000 pennies - to help pay for half the cost of a school in either Pakistan or Afghanistan .

Mortar Board's Pennies for Peace project made its goal in June of this year. The campaign collected about 300,000 pennies and other forms of cash. Jane Smith, assistant vice president of academic services, said many people donated dollar bills, dimes and nickels.

With so many coins and dollar bills, sorting the donations was a hefty task, but the SDSU Bookstore and Aztec Shops helped out.

"We had to put all the pennies on a dolly to take them from my office," Smith said.

Smith said they received a letter saying that donations would help to build a school in either Pakistan or Afghanistan - which country it will be is currently unknown.

"One penny can buy a pencil in Pakistan or Afghanistan ," Smith said. "Every penny makes a difference."

Samantha Spilka, former president of Mortar Board, made the Pennies for Peace project a reality at SDSU in February. Penny collecting containers were set up in a variety of places, including fraternity houses, student service offices and the library.

Spilka, who graduated from SDSU and is attending Columbia University , got the idea of the penny project from the book "Three Cups of Tea" by Greg Mortenson.

The program is a part of the Central Asia Institute, an organization founded by Mortenson, which encourages education in Pakistan and Afghanistan .

Henry Janssen, professor emeritus and the adviser to honors council, said SDSU chose "Three Cups of Tea" as its book for next year. Mortenson will be on campus to talk about the book.

Janssen said the next pennies project will be with the San Diego Public Library and hopefully include San Diego city schools.

"The San Diego schools could raise $12,000 to fund one whole school," Janssen said.

The project is supposed to start collecting pennies in January 2008.

http://media.www.thedailyaztec.com/media/storage/paper741/news/2007/10/31/City/Pennies.Add.Up-3067922.shtml

(c) 2007 Daily Aztec. All Rights Reserved.

Contra Costa Times (10-28-07)

Contra Costa Times
Students at Livermore school save their pennies to build a school in Pakistan
By Mark Tarte
Sunday, October 28, 2007

CHILDREN LEARN IN SO MANY DIFFERENT WAYS. A fifth-grade class at Emma C. Smith School is learning about the world around them in a positive way and helping other children in Pakistan at the same time.

It started when a student's mother brought a book to her child's principal, Denise Nathanson, called "Three Cups of Tea." It is about a young man's near-fatal climbing accident on the mountain known as K2 and his subsequent recovery at the hands of poor Pakistani villagers.

Out of this near tragedy and recovery for the climber, Greg Mortenson, grew the program Pennies for Peace. A Berkeley nurse, Mortenson made a vow to the villagers who saved his life that he would come back and build a school for them.

The village was so poor that it couldn't even afford the dollar a day it takes to hire a teacher. The children would climb to the next village at times to go to school and still study together even if the teacher didn't arrive. Their writing was done with sticks in the dirt since they were so poor they couldn't afford pencils and paper in a country where a penny buys a pencil.

Mortenson did scrape together the money to build a school and fulfilled his promise. He then wrote "Three Cups of Tea" with David Oliver Relin about his experience. To date, he has helped to build 59 schools in Pakistan and is now expanding into Afghanistan .

His work is especially important for girls in a culture where they were not normally allowed to receive an education and the schools are slowly countering the Taliban-supported schools where children were taught only to hate.
The story has enthralled those who read it, and Nathanson asked if anyone at the Smith school wanted to get involved. Two teachers who job-share took it on enthusiastically. Erin Summers' and Megan Fletcher's fifth-grade class have jumped in with both feet and are trying to raise the $12,000 it takes to build a school in Pakistan .

The class has raised almost $2,200 in the past month or so toward their eventual goal, and they are working hard to raise the rest. This is a daunting task for any fundraiser, let alone a group of young students.

Each week these fifth- graders go into the other classrooms, update the younger students about the project and leave behind containers to collect pennies. At the end of the week, those cans are collected and added to the slowly growing total.

The students have also written letters to many politicians about what they are doing and will be making a presentation to the Livermore school board Nov. 7.

I learned about this wonderful project through Charlotte Grabill, the volunteer publicity chairwoman at the school. The more I looked into what Charlotte told me, the more I was pleasantly surprised by the dedication and drive these youngsters demonstrate. Everyone should be as passionate about something as these students are.

You can help if you'd like. Donations are being accepted through the school; you just need to earmark a check with "Pennies for Peace" when you send it.

You can mail a donation to the Emma C. Smith School , 391 Ontario Drive , Livermore , CA 94550 .

To find out more about the international project or the book itself, go to http://www.penniesforpeace.org. There, you will find different links to this project and other projects supported by this group throughout central Asia . My check is on its way ... how about yours?

Until next week, be alert, be safe and God bless America .

Reach Mark Tarte c/o the Times, P.O. Box 607 , Pleasanton , CA 94566 or by e-mail: Aroundliv@comcast.net

http://www.contracostatimes.com/ci_7305968?source=most_emailed
(c) 2007 Contra Costa Times

Making a Difference: Bringing light to danger zones (10-12-07)

NBC Nightly News covered Cetral Asia Institute and Greg Mortenson in their "Making a Difference" segment. Click the following link to view the story and watch the video that was aired:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10397946

A Journey Of Hope (10-10-07)

http://bozemandailychronicle.com/pakistan/pakistan1.php

This is the story of one man's mission and what it means to those who live in a region plagued by war, poverty and illiteracy. The reports, in photographs captured by Deirdre Eitel and stories written by Karin Ronnow while in Pakistan and Afghanistan, detail why Greg Mortenson started the Central Asia Institute, and how his efforts have become a source of hope. Devastation & Hope

• Winning Hearts and Minds

• Isolation and Hope

• War and Hope

• Relocation and Hope

• Poverty and hope

Mortenson: Regular guy gets big results (10-07-07)

Photo: Deirdre Eitel - Greg Mortenson talks with his friend and supporter Mehdi Ali in the lobby of the Indus Hotel in Skardu, Pakistan, in July. Mortenson has been able to build girls schools in conservative, rural areas of the Pakistan by gaining trust and nurturing relationships with the villagers.

Bozeman Daily Chronicle

Mortenson: Regular guy gets big results

By KARIN RONNOW Chronicle Staff Writer

October 7, 2007, Sunday

Note: This is the last of a five part Sunday weekly feature by Bozeman Chornicle editor Karin Ronnow and photographer Deirdre Eitel who spent several weeks following Greg Mortenson and the work of Central Asia Institute in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the summer of 2007.

All five features are available on subscription to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle https://secure.pocatelloshops.com/Pioneer/subscribe.php?site=bozeman or from the office of Central Asia Institute after November 10th, 2007. Permission to reprint or use these articles in amy format or place must be obtained from the Chronicle first.

When Greg Mortenson was 3 months old, his parents packed him up in Minnesota and took him halfway around the world, to the East African country of Tanzania, where they would spend the next 14 years as Lutheran missionaries in the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro.

“When he was 2 or 3 years old, one day I couldn't find him,” said his mother, Jerene Mortenson. “And I looked outside and there he sat in the pathway with an old beggar and the cookie jar.

“Greg was handing the old beggar cookies and the two of them were having this conversation. He didn't just give him something, they were talking. And that just sums up how Greg has been all his life,” she said.

Now, at 49, Greg Mortenson heads the Bozeman-based Central Asia Institute, a nonprofit organization he founded. Instead of cookies, he's delivering education to children, especially girls, in some of the most isolated villages of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan.

His success and a bestselling book about his life, “Three Cups of Tea,” has made him a bit of a celebrity - both at home and in the areas where he works - and that takes a toll on him and on his family. But it hasn't changed who he is at heart. He's one of those rare birds, driven by a sincere compassion for disenfranchised people about whom few others know or care.

“Even as a child I was deeply affected and disturbed by seeing really impoverished people starving or dying,” Mortenson said. “If I had extra food, I always wanted to share it. And now it's hard to keep my balance because I see so much poverty and hurting and suffering. It really takes a concerted effort, stamina and sometimes courage to remove yourself a little bit.

“But I always think it's important that you touch and smell and feel poverty, extreme poverty. You have to do that to understand it. You can't do it from a think tank in Washington, D.C.”

And he really means that, said retired Lt. Col. Ilyas Ahmad Mirza of Pakistan, a longtime friend of Mortenson's.

“He loves those people, he listens to them, he lives with them,” Mirza said. “Their houses are dirty and smelly, but it doesn't matter. Greg goes and stays with them for days. He's a different breed.”

REGULAR GUY

One thing Mortenson is not is vain. He's about as humble as they come. All of the attention he's getting, the success of “Three Cups of Tea,” the speaking engagements, newspaper and magazine articles, TV interviews, are seen by him solely as opportunities to build more schools.

He is not a man on whom the mantel of celebrity and greatness rest weightlessly. Rather, Mortenson is far more at ease with his self perception as "a regular guy."

He comes from truly humble beginnings. His family never had much money. After Tanzania, he went to high school in Minnesota, then volunteered for the U.S. Army and served as a medic in Germany for two years. “I joined in 1975, after Vietnam, when it was not cool.”

When he got back, he attended Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., where he played football on an NAIA II national championship team. He later transferred to the University of South Dakota, and earned degrees in chemistry and nursing.

He was a trauma nurse and a mountain climber before he started the Central Asia Institute. In 1995, he married Tara Bishop, a psychologist, and they now have two children, Amira, 11, and Khyber, 7.

Mortenson has some quirks, just like everyone else. He is constantly running late. He sometimes forgets appointments.

“I'm still not very socially adept at the wining and dining” part of fundraising, he said. “Often I show up late and I don't even have socks on.”

Perhaps it goes back to growing up in Africa; perhaps it is something more organic, something temperamental. Either way, he's not wired like most Americans.

It is one of his “maddening aspects,” Bishop agreed.

In his own defense, Mortenson said, “To me, the world is an oyster. I am very curious about a lot of things, so I take time to do everything, and now I am perpetually late. I'm just so busy,” he said.

He is that. He is on the road at least six months a year, overseas and crisscrossing the United States. After his book, "Three Cups of Tea," was published in 2006, life became increasingly hectic. The phone rings off the hook with people wanting him to come and speak. He gets hundreds of e-mails each day. People stop him on the street, in the coffee shop or at the airport.

“Our lives have really changed since the book was published, as far as the level of demand for his time,” Bishop said. “It was already building its own momentum, but until then, if they didn't go to a talk, people didn't know about him. Then all of the sudden it just geometrically took off.”

Mortenson's perpetual lateness is less of an issue overseas.

“In Baltistan, in the language, there is no sense of time,” Mortenson said. “You can say, ‘I go to Korphe,' which could mean you will be there tomorrow, or you were there yesterday, or you were there 10 years ago. Time is irrelevant. They don't have watches over there. I enjoy working like that, things work well and we get things done.”

OVER THERE

Nevertheless, when he gets to Pakistan, he still can't enter a room without great fanfare. A steady stream of people come to see him as soon as he arrives at the Indus Motel in Skardu.

“It's like he's a rock star or something,” Doug Chabot, a mountain climber and friend of Mortenson's from Bozeman, said of the scene at the Indus. “People will do anything for him. They just love being around him. It's like, ‘I'll just be standing over here in the corner trying to anticipate your needs.' ”

In July, some of the teachers at remote institute schools had traveled long distances to visit Mortenson during his week in Skardu. Although he has staff in country to make decisions and keep the ball rolling, they often defer to him. Besides, Mortenson is the one who people want to see and talk to.

“He has this incredibly busy schedule when he goes over there, because not only is he checking on schools, but he has all these relationships with people,” Chabot said. “He doesn't sleep much when he's over there. When he's in work mode, it's pretty impressive.”

RETREAT

When he isn't working, Mortenson is often hunkered down in his basement office at home. The small space has, over the years, become his sanctuary.

The 8-by-10-foot room is cluttered with photos, satellite phones, old Texas Instrument calculators, camera parts and books, lots of books, on all four walls up to the ceiling. They are organized into sections on terrorism, poverty, nonprofits, fundraising, Pakistan, Afghanistan and history.

“I don't drink much or smoke,” he said. “The one vice I have is I am a voracious reader and I buy a lot of books.”

Over the years he has developed a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of the history, culture and religion of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He also has learned the languages spoken in the areas where he works - Balti, Urdu and Farsi.

As a kid, his mom said, “Greg's strongest areas were language, math and science.”

A few minutes later, she went back to that thought. “He does have a particular facility with languages. When he was 8 or 9 years old, we were in Rome and the maid came into the hotel room and said something. My husband and I couldn't understand her.

“But Greg said, ‘She's asking are we leaving today and should she change the sheets or just make the beds.' It amazed me. That was what she was asking us.”

Mortenson attended an international school his parents started in Tanzania, and that might have contributed to his ear for language.

But his appetite for knowledge is just a part of who he is.

“We had a set of children's encyclopedias and he started with A and read through the whole set,” Jerene Mortenson said. “We didn't have a television. Greg liked facts. I remember he got a ‘Guinness Book of World Records' that really intrigued him.”

These days, he prefers nonfiction to fiction. And he prefers reading to television, music or even parties.

“He doesn't watch movies,” Bishop said. “He doesn't have a pulse at all on popular media.”

He also doesn't, at this point, have a lot of friends he socializes with at home, Bishop said.

“He doesn't have time for it. His friends are his staff. They get him, his quirkiness,” she said. “He's a little cynical about western, American culture, the power stuff that's such a big part of how we interact here, the teasing, the one-up-manship and the humor around belittling. It baffles him.”

RELATIONSHIPS

Instead, he focuses on relationships he needs overseas to accomplish his goals of literacy and peace - a lesson he said he learned from his dad, Dempsey.

“My dad worked closely with the Tanzanians, especially his handyman, John Moshe,” Mortenson said. “The expats often scoffed at him, saying he should have the upper hand and be the boss. But he believed everybody was part of the team.”

Mortenson has integrated that philosophy into his own work in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“If anything happens to me, everything will be taken care of over there,” he said. “We have amazing staff and we have amazing community support.”

That staff, his central team, is largely a result of serendipity, composed of people that Mortenson tripped over in his work and later hired. But the team is devoted to Mortenson. And the feeling is mutual.

“I consider my staff to be family,” Mortenson said. “They are prepared to give up everything they have to help CAI. They are all family men who have kids and wives. But they are willing to be gone from their families even more than me, for months at a time.

“They are the ones who go to the village with the hardened mullah, trying to convince them to send girls to school, who really push the envelope in working with different ethnic groups, Sunni and Shia, and different politicians, bringing the hardest opponents together with the proponents and work until they come up with some solution.”

Most of the staff are not highly educated, either, he said, “yet they are willing to work very had to learn difficult skills.”

They have flaws, he said. Sometimes they push too hard when it might be better to give people time.

“I love them dearly as my family, but sometimes I have to remind them that to do business, sometimes it takes" time, he said.

TIME UNPLUGGED

While a lot of the village work might be handled by the in-country staff, the fundraising and public speaking is exclusively Mortenson's job. And it takes a toll.

“The success of all this has forced me to become a much more public person,” he said. “I'm rather shy and reserved by nature, and at first it was really hard on me. But the more I do this, the more comfortable it is. And I really want to do this because I want to promote education and promote peace. But I have to raise money.

“The hard part is that I've been married for 12 years and more than 65 months of that time, I haven't been with my family.”

“It's a tricky thing for Greg,” Bishop said. “I think he would like to do it all. I don't think can't is in his vocabulary. He really is committed to those little kids over there. And he has a huge heart.

“But I miss him, that's the biggest thing. I'd like more time with him. That's the part that makes me sad.”

The other thing Bishop would like her husband to do is take a little better care of himself; he's paying a price for the pace he keeps.

“I get frustrated because his life is so overwhelming,” she said. “I'm happy for his success and what it means for the world and for him. But I wish he could have some more time to catch up with himself, to be able to slow down a little bit and fully think. He's truly an introvert and he's not getting what all introverts need, which is time unplugged."

Karin Ronnow is at kronnow@dailychronicle.com

http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/articles/2007/10/07/news/000guy.txt

© 2007 Bozeman Daily Chronicle. All Rights Reserved.

S.D. connections helped author of book (10-05-07)

Sioux Falls Argus Leader

S.D. connections helped author of book

By David Kranz

October 5, 2007, Friday

If you have been in a bookstore in recent months, you probably have seen "Three Cups of Tea" prominently displayed on the shelf.

I was intrigued by the cover but never picked it up. It wasn't until Jack Rentschler told me about it that my interest was piqued, particularly by the South Dakota connection.

Greg Mortenson's story, co-authored with David Oliver Relin, is a powerful account of the challenges he's faced in Pakistan and Afghanistan. From those major hurdles came a commitment from him to help make a difference in the area of education. Mortenson, a 1983 graduate of the Univ. of South Dakota with a bachelor's of liberal studies and an degree in nursing, tells the compelling story that began in 1993, rising out of his failed pursuit to reach the peak of K2 in Pakistan, the world's second highest mountain.

After descending the mountain, he was separated from those he traveled with, coming upon a poverty-stricken Pakistani village - a place that left a permanent impression in his mind, a place where children had little or no opportunity to receive an education.

Failure to conquer the mountain led Mortenson to reprioritize his life, focusing on becoming a humanitarian. His goal would be improving and expanding educational opportunities in these countries.
He only would be content making sure these children's educational needs were met, particularly addressing the educational opportunities for girls. Today, 58 schools have grown out of Mortenson's mission in Pakistan and Afghanistan, educating more than 20,000 children. He is founder and executive director of the nonprofit Central Asia Institute, an organization dedicated to promoting education to underprivileged children.

Achieving the goal would create new concerns, resulting in his campaign against Islamic fundamentalists who would sometimes find their members in the religious schools.

Mortenson's ultimate objective to educate in the face of the turmoil of war is defined in a chapter aptly titled, "The Enemy Is Ignorance."

"If we try to resolve terrorism with military might and nothing else, then we will be no safer than we were before 9-11. If we truly want a legacy of peace for our children, we need to understand that this is a war that will ultimately be won with books, not with bombs," Mortenson writes.

His acknowledgements in the book include help he received along the way and covers four pages, including these mentions: "From South Dakota, and my USD alma mater, I thank four noteworthy individuals who touched my life: Lars Overskei, Tom Brokaw, Dr. Dan Birkeland, and Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today and the D.C.-based Freedom Forum, from which I received the 2004 Free Spirit Award."

Incidentally, Brokaw was one of 580 celebrities he wrote to, asking for money to build a school in that village. Of those 580 letters, Brokaw was the only one who responded with money.

Mortenson returned in 2006 to deliver the USD commencement address.

© 2007 Souix Falls Argus Leader. All Rights Reserved. Used With Permission.

http://www.argusleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071005/COLUMNISTS0102/710050336/1160/OPINION01

TCT holding ground (10-02-07)

Three Cups of Tea is # 5 this week on NY Times bestseller list (paperback nonfiction) for week # 34

PAPERBACK NONFICTION
Top 5 at a Glance
1. EAT, PRAY, LOVE, by Elizabeth Gilbert
2. INTO THE WILD, by Jon Krakauer
3. 90 MINUTES IN HEAVEN, by Don Piper with Cecil Murphey
4. THE GLASS CASTLE, by Jeannette Walls
5. THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
Complete Paperback Nonfiction List »

Thanks!
Greg Mortenson