Three Cups of Tea

by Greg Mortenson

  In 1950, the woman by then known as Mother Teresa received permission from the Vatican to found her own order, the Missionaries of Charity, whose duty, she said, was to care for “the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone.”

  Mortenson, with his affection for society’s underdogs, admired her determination to serve the world’s most neglected populations. As a boy in Moshi, he’d learned about one of her first projects outside India, a hospice for the dying in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. By the time she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, Mother Teresa’s celebrity had become the engine that powered Missionaries of Charity orphanages, hospices, and schools around the world.

  Mortenson had heard the criticism of the woman who lay on a cot before him ratchet up in the years before her death. He’d read her defense of her practice of taking donations from unsavory sources, like drug dealers, corporate criminals, and corrupt politicians hoping to purchase their own path to salvation. After his own struggle to raise funds for the children of Pakistan, he felt he understood what had driven her to famously dismiss her critics by saying, “I don’t care where the money comes from. It’s all washed clean in the service of God.”

  “I sat in the corner staring at this shrouded figure,” Mortenson says. “She looked so small, draped in her cloth. And I remember thinking how amazing it was that such a tiny person had such a huge effect on humanity.”

  Nuns, visiting the room to pay their respects, had knelt to touch Mother Teresa’s feet. He could see where the cream-colored muslin had been discolored from the laying on of hundreds of hands. But it didn’t feel right to touch her feet. Mortenson knelt on the cool tiled floor next to Mother Teresa and placed his large palm over her small hand. It covered it completely.

  The nun who’d showed him in returned, and found him kneeling. She nodded once, as if to say, “Ready?” And Mortenson followed her quiet footfalls down the dark hallway and out into the heat and clamor of Calcutta.

  His taxi driver was squatting on his heels, smoking, and jumped up when he saw his payday approaching. “Success? Success?” he asked, leading the distracted American through a street thick with rickshaws and back to the waiting Ambassador. “Now,” he said “you like some massage?”

  Safely back in his basement, during the winter of 2000, Mortenson often reflected on those few rare moments with Mother Teresa. He marveled at how she lived her life without long trips home, away from misery and suffering, so she could rest up and prepare to resume the fight. That winter, Mortenson felt bone-tired. The shoulder he’d injured falling on Mount Sill, the day Christa had died, had never fully healed. Fruitlessly, he tried yoga and acupuncture. Sometimes it throbbed so unignorably that he popped fifteen or twenty Advil a day, trying to dull the pain enough to concentrate on his work.

  Mortenson tried just as unsuccessfully to get comfortable with the process of becoming a public figure in America. But the endless ranks of people wanting to squeeze something from him sent him scurrying to his basement where he’d ignore the endlessly ringing phone and e-mails that piled up by the hundreds.

  Climbers contacted him, wanting help arranging expeditions to Pakistan, miffed when a former climber wouldn’t drop whatever he was doing to help them. Journalists and filmmakers called constantly, hoping to tag along with Mortenson on his next trip, wanting to exploit the contacts he’d made over the previous seven years to win access to restricted regions before their competitors could. Physicians, glaciologists, seismologists, ethnologists, and wildlife biologists wrote lengthy letters, unintelligible to laymen, wanting detailed answers to academic questions they had about Pakistan.

  Tara recommended a fellow therapist in Bozeman whom Mortenson began talking to regularly when he was home, trying to mine the root causes of his desire to hide when he wasn’t in Pakistan, and strategizing about ways to cope with the increasing anger of those who wanted more time than he was able to give.

  His mother-in-law Lila Bishop’s house became another of Mortenson’s havens, especially its basement, where he would spend hours poring over Barry Bishop’s mountaineering library, reading about the Balti migration out of Tibet, or studying a rare bound volume of the exquisite black-and-white plates of K2 and its accompanying peaks that Vittorio Sella shot on his large-format camera with the duke of Abruzzi’s 1909 expedition.

  Eventually, as his family gathered for dinner upstairs, Mortenson would permit himself to be coaxed away from his books. Lila Bishop, by then, shared her daughter’s opinion of Mortenson. “I had to admit Tara was right, there was something to this ‘Mr. Wonderful’ stuff,” Lila says. And like her daughter, she had come to the conclusion that the large, gentle man living two blocks away was cut from unusual cloth. “One snowy night we were barbecuing, and I asked Greg to go out and turn the salmon,” Lila says. “I looked out the patio door a moment later and saw Greg, standing barefoot in the snow, scooping up the fish with a shovel, and flipping it, like that was the most normal thing in the world. And I guess, to him, it was. That’s when I realized that he’s just not one of us. He’s his own species.”

  The rest of that winter, in his own basement, Mortenson obsessed about reports he was receiving detailing a calamity developing in northern Afghanistan. More than ten thousand Afghans, mostly women and children, had fled north ahead of advancing Taliban troops until they’d run out of real estate at the Tajik border. On islands in the middle of the Amu Darya River, these refugees scooped out mud huts and were slowly starving, eating grasses that grew by the riverbank out of desperation.

  While they sickened and died, Taliban soldiers shot at them for sport, firing their rocket-propelled grenades up in great arcs until they’d come crashing down among the terrified refugees. When they tried to flee to Tajikistan, paddling logs across the river, they were shot by Russian troops guarding the border, determined not to let Afghanistan’s growing chaos spill over into their backyard.

  “Since I started working in Pakistan, I haven’t slept much,” Mortenson says. “But that winter I hardly slept at all. I was up all night, pacing my basement, trying to find some way to help them.”

  Mortenson fired off letters to newspaper editors and members of Congress, trying to stir up outrage. “But no one cared,” Mortenson says. “The White House, Congress, the UN were all silent. I even started fantasizing about picking up an AK-47, getting Faisal Baig to round up some men, and crossing over to Afghanistan to fight for the refugees myself.

  “Bottom line is I failed. I couldn’t make anyone care. And Tara will tell you I was a nightmare. All I could think about was all those freezing children who’d never have the chance to grow up, helpless out there between groups of men with guns, dying from the dysentery they’d get from drinking river water or starving to death. I was actually going a bit crazy. It’s amazing that Tara put up with me that winter.

  “In times of war, you often hear leaders—Christian, Jewish, and Muslim—saying, ‘God is on our side.’ But that isn’t true. In war, God is on the side of refugees, widows, and orphans.”

  It wasn’t until July 24, 2000, that Mortenson felt his spirits lift. That day, he knelt in his kitchen and scooped up handfuls of warm water to dribble down his wife’s bare back. He laid his hands on Tara’s shoulders, kneading the taut muscles, but her mind was miles from his touch. She was concentrating on the hard labor ahead of her. Their new midwife, Vicky Cain, had suggested that Tara try an underwater birth for their second child. Their bathtub was too small so the midwife brought them a huge light-blue plastic horse trough she used, wedged it between their sink and kitchen table, and filled it with warm water.

  They named their son Khyber Bishop Mortenson. Three years earlier, before the Korphe School inauguration, Mortenson had taken his wife and one-year-old daughter to see the Khyber Pass. Their Christmas card that year featured a photo of Greg and Tara at t
he Afghan border, in tribal dress, holding Amira and two AK-47s frontier guards had handed them as a joke. Beneath the photo, the card read “Peace on Earth.”

  Two hours after his son floated into the world out of his horse trough, Mortenson felt fully happy for the first time in months. Just the feeling of his hand on his son’s head seemed to pour a current of contentment into him. Mortenson wrapped his brand-new boy in a fuzzy blanket and brought Khyber to his daughter’s preschool class so Amira could dazzle her classmates at show-and-tell.

  Amira, already a more comfortable public speaker than her father would ever be, revealed to her classmates the miracle of her brother’s tiny fingers and toes while her father held him bundled in his big hands like a football.

  “He’s so small and wrinkly,” a blonde four-year-old with pigtails said. “Do little babies like that grow up to be big like us?”

  “Inshallah,” Mortenson said.

  “Huh?”

  “I hope so, sweetie,” Mortenson said. “I sure hope so.”

  Chapter 19

  A Village Called New York

  The time of arithmetic and poetry is past. Nowadays, my brothers,

  take your lessons from the Kalashnikov and rocket-propelled grenade.

  —Graffiti spray-painted on the courtyard wall of the Korphe School

  “WHAT IS THAT?” Mortenson said. “What are we looking at?”

  “A madrassa, Greg Sahib,” Apo said.

  Mortenson asked Hussain to stop the Land Cruiser so he could see the new building better. He climbed out of the jeep and stretched his back against the hood while Hussain idled behind the wheel, flicking cigarette ash carelessly between his feet, onto the wooden box of dynamite.

  Mortenson appreciated his driver’s steady, methodical style of navigating Pakistan’s worst roads and was loath to criticize him. In all their thousands of miles of mountain driving the man had never had an accident. But it wouldn’t do to go out with a bang. Mortenson promised himself to wrap the dynamite in a plastic tarp when they got back to Skardu.

  Mortenson straightened up with a grunt and studied the new structure dominating the west side of the Shigar Valley, in the town of Gulapor. It was a compound, two hundred yards long, hidden from passersby behind twenty-foot walls. It looked like something he’d expect to find in Waziristan, but not a few hours from Skardu. “You’re sure it’s not an army base?” Mortenson said.

  “This is the new place,” Apo said. “A Wahhabi madrassa.”

  “Why do they need so much space?”

  “Wahhabi madrassa is like a…” Apo trailed, off, searching for the English word. He settled for producing a buzzing sound.

  “Bee?” Mortenson asked.

  “Yes, like the bee house. Wahhabi madrassa have many students hidden inside.”

  Mortenson climbed back in, behind the box of dynamite.

  Eighty kilometers east of Skardu, Mortenson noticed two neat white minarets piercing the greenery on the outskirts of a poor village called Yugo. “Where do these people have the money for a new mosque like this?” Mortenson asked.

  “This also Wahhabi,” Apo said. “The sheikhs come from Kuwait and Saudi with suitcases of rupees. They take the best student back to them. When the boy come back to Baltistan he have to take four wives.”

  Twenty minutes down the road, Mortenson saw the spitting image of Yugu’s new mosque presiding over the impoverished village of Xurd.

  “Wahhabi?” Mortenson asked, with a gathering sense of dread.

  “Yes, Greg,” Apo said, acknowledging the obvious thickly through his mouthful of Copenhagen, “they’re everywhere.”

  “I’d known that the Saudi Wahhabi sect was building mosques along the Afghan border for years,” Mortenson says. “But that spring, the spring of 2001, I was amazed by all their new construction right here in the heart of Shiite Baltistan. For the first time I understood the scale of what they were trying to do and it scared me.”

  Wahhabism is a conservative, fundamentalist offshoot of Sunni Islam and the official state religion of Saudi Arabia’s rulers. Many Saudi followers of the sect consider the term offensive and prefer to call themselves al-Muwahhiddun, “the monotheists.” In Pakistan, and other impoverished countries most affected by Wahhabi proselytizing, though, the name has stuck.

  “Wahhabi” is derived from the term Al-Wahhab, which means, literally, “generous giver” in Arabic, one of Allah’s many pseudonyms. And it is this generous giving—the seemingly unlimited supply of cash that Wahhabi operatives smuggle into Pakistan, both in suitcases and through the untraceable hawala money-transfer system—that has shaped their image among Pakistan’s population. The bulk of that oil wealth pouring in from the Gulf is aimed at Pakistan’s most virulent incubator of religious extremism—Wahhabi madrassas.

  Exact numbers are impossible to pin down in such a secretive endeavor, but one of the rare reports to appear in the heavily censored Saudi press hints at the massive change shrewdly invested petroleum profits are having on Pakistan’s most impoverished students.

  In December 2000, the Saudi publication Ain-Al-Yaqeen reported that one of the four major Wahhabi proselytizing organizations, the Al Haramain Foundation, had built “1,100 mosques, schools, and Islamic centers,” in Pakistan and other Muslim countries, and employed three thousand paid proselytizers in the previous year.

  The most active of the four groups, Ain-Al-Yaqeen reported, the International Islamic Relief Organization, which the 9/11 Commission would later accuse of directly supporting the Taliban and Al Qaeda, completed the construction of thirty-eight hundred mosques, spent $45 million on “Islamic Education,” and employed six thousand teachers, many of them in Pakistan, throughout the same period.

  “In 2001, CAI operations were scattered all the way across northern Pakistan, from the schools we were building along the Line of Control to the east to several new initiatives we were working on all the way west along the Afghan border,” Mortenson says. “But our resources were peanuts compared to the Wahhabi. Every time I visited to check on one of our projects, it seemed ten Wahhabi madrassas had popped up nearby overnight.”

  Pakistan’s dysfunctional educational system made advancing Wahhabi doctrine a simple matter of economics. A tiny percentage of the country’s wealthy children attended elite private schools, a legacy of the British colonial system. But as Mortenson had learned, vast swaths of the country were barely served by Pakistan’s struggling, inadequately funded public schools. The madrassa system targeted the impoverished students the public system failed. By offering free room and board and building schools in areas where none existed, madrassas provided millions of Pakistan’s parents with their only opportunity to educate their children. “I don’t want to give the impression that all Wahhabi are bad,” Mortenson says. “Many of their schools and mosques are doing good work to help Pakistan’s poor. But some of them seem to exist only to teach militant jihad.”

  By 2001, a World Bank study estimated that at least twenty thousand madrassas were teaching as many as 2 million of Pakistan’s students an Islamic-based curriculum. Lahore-based journalist Ahmed Rashid, perhaps the world’s leading authority on the link between madrassa education and the rise of extremist Islam, estimates that more than eighty thousand of these young madrassa students became Taliban recruits. Not every madrassa was a hotbed of extremism. But the World Bank concluded that 15 to 20 percent of madrassa students were receiving military training, along with a curriculum that emphasized jihad and hatred of the West at the expense of subjects of like math, science, and literature.

  Rashid recounts his experience among the Wahhabi madrassas of Peshawar in his bestselling book Taliban. The students spent their days studying “the Koran, the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed and the basics of Islamic law as interpreted by their barely literate teachers,” he writes. “Neither teachers nor students had any formal grounding in maths, science, history or geography.”

  These madrassa students were “the rootless and restless, t
he jobless and the economically deprived with little self knowledge,” Rashid concludes. “They admired war because it was the only occupation they could possibly adapt to. Their simple belief in a messianic, puritan Islam which had been drummed into them by simple village mullahs was the only prop they could hold on to and which gave their lives some meaning.

  “The work Mortenson is doing building schools is giving thousands of students what they need most—a balanced education and the tools to pull themselves out of poverty,” Rashid says. “But we need many more like them. His schools are just a drop in the bucket when you look at the scale of the problem in Pakistan. Essentially, the state is failing its students on a massive scale and making them far too easy for the extremists who run many of the madrassas to recruit.”

  The most famous of these madrassas, the three-thousand-student Darul Uloom Haqqania, in Attock City, near Peshawar, came to be nicknamed the “University of Jihad” because its graduates included the Taliban’s supreme ruler, the secretive one-eyed cleric Mullah Omar, and much of his top leadership.

  “Thinking about the Wahhabi strategy made my head spin,” Mortenson says. “This wasn’t just a few Arab sheikhs getting off Gulf Air flights with bags of cash. They were bringing the brightest madrassa students back to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait for a decade of indoctrination, then encouraging them to take four wives when they came home and breed like rabbits.

  “Apo calling Wahhabi madrassas beehives is exactly right. They’re churning out generation after generation of brainwashed students and thinking twenty, forty, even sixty years ahead to a time when their armies of extremism will have the numbers to swarm over Pakistan and the rest of the Islamic world.”