In October 1996, Bergman had been traveling in Pakistan with a group of friends who chartered a huge Russian MI-17 helicopter out of Skardu in hopes of getting a glimpse of K2. On the way back the pilot asked if they wanted to visit a typical village. They happened to land just below Korphe, and when local boys learned Bergman was American they took her hand and led her to see a curious new tourist attraction— a sturdy yellow school built by another American, which stood where none had ever been before, in a small village called Korphe.
“I looked at a sign in front of the school and saw that it had been donated by Jean Hoerni, my cousin Jennifer’s husband,” Bergman says. “Jennifer told me Jean had been trying to build a school somewhere in the Himalaya, but to land in that exact spot in a range that stretches thousands of miles felt like more than a coincidence. I’m not a religious person,” Bergman says, “but I felt I’d been brought there for a reason and I couldn’t stop crying.”
A few months later, at Hoerni’s memorial service, Bergman introduced herself to Mortenson. “I was there!” she said, wrapping the startled man she’d just met in a bruising hug. “I saw the school!”
“You’re the blonde in the helicopter,” Mortenson said, shaking his head in amazement. “I heard a foreign woman had been in the village but I didn’t believe it!”
“There’s a message here. This is meant to be,” Julia Bergman said. “I want to help. Is there anything I can do?”
“Well, I want to collect books and create a library for the Korphe School,” Mortenson said.
Bergman felt the same sense of predestination she’d encountered that day in Korphe. “I’m a librarian,” she said.
After sending his e-mail to Bergman and the other board members, Mortenson wrote letters to a helpful government minister he’d met on his last trip and to Mohammed Niaz, Skardu’s director of education, asking for advice about the sher of Chakpo. Then he knelt in the dim light from his desk lamp and searched through the towering stacks of books leaning against the walls, before he found what he was looking for, afakhir—a scholarly treatise on the application of Islamic law in modern society, translated from the Farsi. He demolished four cups of coffee, reading intently, until he heard Tara’s feet on the kitchen floor above his head.
Tara sat at the kitchen table, nursing Amira and a tall mug of latte. Mortenson didn’t want to disturb the tranquil scene with what he had to say. He kissed his wife good morning before breaking the news. “I have to go over there sooner than we planned,” he said.
On a frosty March morning in Skardu, Mortenson’s supporters met for tea at his informal headquarters, the lobby of the Indus Hotel. The Indus suited Mortenson perfectly. Unlike Skardu’s handful of tourist resorts, which were hidden away among idyllic landscaped grounds, this clean and inexpensive hotel sat on Skardu’s main road without pretension, between Changazi’s compound and a PSO gas station, mere feet from the Bedfords rumbling by on their way back to Islamabad.
In the lobby, under a bulletin board where climbers posted pictures from recent expeditions, two long wood plank tables were perfect for accommodating the lengthy tea parties it took to do any sort of business in town. This morning, eight of Mortenson’s supporters sat around a table, spreading Chinese jam on the hotel’s excellent chapatti, and sipping milk tea the way Parvi preferred it—painfully sweet.
Mortenson marveled at how efficiently he’d been able to summon these men from the far corners of northern Pakistan, even though their distant valleys didn’t have phones. It might take a week from the time he sent a note with a jeep driver to the day the person he’d summoned arrived in Skardu, but in an era before satellite phones became common in this part of the world, there was no other way to defeat the rugged distance of these ranges.
From the Hushe Valley, a hundred miles east, Mouzafer had made his way to this convivial table with his friend, an old-time porter and base camp cook of wide renown known as “Apo,” or “Old Man” Razak. Next to them, Haji Ali and Twaha wolfed their breakfast, glad of the excuse to leave the Braldu Valley to the north, which was still mired in snow of midwinter depth. And Faisal Baig had strolled into the lobby just that morning, after traveling more than two hundred miles from the rugged Charpurson Valley to the west, on the border of Afghanistan.
Mortenson had arrived two days earlier, after a forty-eight-hour bus trip up the Karakoram Highway, traveling with the newest addition to his odd band, a forty-year-old Rawalpindi taxi driver named Suleman Minhas. After Mortenson’s kidnapping, Suleman had chanced to pick him up at the Islamabad airport.
On the drive to his hotel, Mortenson related the details of his recent detention in Waziristan, and Suleman, enraged that his countrymen had put a guest through such an inhospitable ordeal, had turned as protective as a mother hen. He convinced Mortenson to stay at an inexpensive guest house he knew in Islamabad, in a much safer location than his old standby, the Khyaban, where sectarian bomb blasts had begun terrorizing the neighborhood nearly every Friday aiterjuma prayers.
Suleman had returned each day to monitor Mortenson’s recovery, bringing him bags of sweets and medicines for the parasites Mortenson had picked up in Waziristan and taking him out for meals at his favorite Kabuli sidewalk barbecue. After their taxi had been stopped by a police roadblock on the way to the airport for Mortenson’s flight home, Suleman had talked his way past the police with such easygoing charm that Mortenson offered him a job as CAI’s “fixer” in Islamabad before getting on his flight.
In the Indus lobby, Suleman sat like a smiling Buddha next to Mortenson, his arms crossed over the beginning of a pot belly, entertaining the whole table between puffs of the Marlboros Mortenson had brought him from America with tales of the life of a big-city taxi driver. A member of Pakistan’s Punjabi majority, he had never been to the mountains before and rattled volubly on, relieved that these men who lived at the edge of the known world spoke Urdu in addition to their native tongues.
Mohammed Ali Changazi walked past in his white robes, visible through the glass walls of the lobby, and old Apo Razak, with a jester’s leer blooming below his hooked nose, leaned forward and told the men a rumor about Changazi’s successful conquest of two different German sisters who’d come to Skardu on the same expedition.
“Yes, I can see he’s a very religious man,” Suleman said in Urdu, waggling his head for emphasis, playing to the table. “He must pray six times a day. And wash this six times each day also,” he said pointing to his lap. The roar of laughter all around the table told Mortenson his instincts had served him well in assembling this mismatched group.
Mouzafer and the Korphe men were Shiite Muslims, along with Skardu residents Ghulam Parvi, and Makhmal the mason. Apo Razak, a refugee from Indian-occupied Kashmir, was a Sunni, as was Suleman. And the fiercely dignified bodyguard Faisal Baig belonged to the Ismaeli sect. “We all sat there laughing and sipping tea peacefully,” Mortenson says. “An infidel and representatives from three warring sects of Islam. And I thought if we can get along this well, we can accomplish anything. The British policy was ‘divide and conquer.’ But I say ‘unite and conquer.’”
Ghulam Parvi spoke calmly to the group about the fatwa, his anger having cooled to practicality. He told Mortenson he had arranged a meeting for him with Syed Abbas Risvi, the religious leader of northern Pakistan’s Shia Muslims. “Abbas is a good man, but suspicious of foreigners,” Parvi said. “When he sees that you respect Islam and our ways he can be of much help, Inshallah.”
Parvi also said that Sheikh Mohammed, a religious scholar and rival of the sher of Chakpo, had, along with his son, Mehdi Ali, petitioned for a CAI school to be built in his village of Hemasil and written a letter to the Supreme Council of Ayatollahs in Qom, asking Iran’s leading clerics, the ultimate authority to the world’s Shia, to rule on whether the, fatwa was justified.
Haji Ali announced he’d met with the elders of all the Braldu villages and they had selected Pakhora, an especially impoverished community in the Lower Braldu V
alley, governed by his close friend Haji Mousin, as their choice for the site of the CAI’s second school.
Makhmal the mason, who’d done such a professional job in Korphe, requested a school for his home village of Ranga, on the outskirts of Skardu, and said his extended family, all skilled construction workers, could be counted on to complete the project quickly.
Mortenson imagined how happy Hoerni would have been to sit at such a table. His advice about not holding grudges against the villages that competed in the tug-of-war for the first school rang clearly in Mortenson’s ears: “The children of all those other villages that tried to bribe you need schools, too.”
Mortenson thought of the goatherding children he’d taught the day he bolted out of Changazi’s banquet, of the thirsty way they gulped down even his goofy lesson about the English name for “nose,” and proposed building a school in Kuardu, Changazi’s village, since the elders had already agreed to donate land.
“So, Dr. Greg,” Ghulam Parvi said, his pen tip tapping at the tablet where he’d been taking notes. “Which school will we build this year?”
“All of them, Inshallah,” Mortenson said.
Greg Mortenson felt that his life was speeding up. He had a house, a dog, a family, and before he’d left, he and Tara had discussed having more children. He’d built one school, been threatened by an enraged mullah, assembled an American board and a scruffy Pakistani staff. He had fifty thousand dollars of CAI’s money in his rucksack and more in the bank. The neglect and suffering northern Pakistan’s children endured towered as high as the mountains encircling Skardu. With the fatwa dangling over his head like a scimitar, who knew how long he would be allowed to work in Pakistan? Now was the time to act with all the energy he could summon.
For fifty-eight hundred dollars, Mortenson bought an army-green, twenty-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser with the low-end torque to rumble over any obstacle the Karakoram highways could throw at him. He hired a calm, experienced chain-smoking driver named Hussain, who promptly bought a box of dynamite and stowed it under the passenger seat, so they could blast their way through landslides without waiting for government road crews. And with Parvi and Makhmal bargaining ruthlessly by his side, Mortenson purchased enough construction supplies from the merchants of Skardu to break ground on three schools as soon as the soil thawed.
For the second time in Greg Mortenson’s life, a gas station proved pivotal to his involvement with Islam. One warm April afternoon, standing in a fine drizzle by the pumps of the PSO petrol station, Mortenson met Syed Abbas Risvi. Parvi explained that it was best that they meet in a public place, until the mullah had made up his mind about the infidel, and suggested this busy lot near Mortenson’s hotel.
Abbas arrived with two younger assistants, both lavishly bearded, who hovered protectively. He was tall and thin, with the trimmed beard of the Shia scholar who had outshone most of his peers at madrassa in Najaf, Iraq. He wore a severe black turban wrapped tightly around his high brow and studied the large American wearing Pakistani clothes through a set of square, old-fashioned spectacles, before offering his hand for a firm shake.
“As-Salaam Alaaikum,” Mortenson said, bowing with his hand held respectfully over his heart. “It’s a great honor to meet you, Syed Abbas,” he continued in Balti. “Mr. Parvi has told me much about your wisdom and compassion for the poor.”
“There are certain Europeans who come to Pakistan determined to tear Islam down,” Syed Abbas says. “And I was worried, at first, that Dr. Greg was one of them. But I looked into his heart that day at the petrol pump and saw him for what he is—an infidel, but a noble man nonetheless, who dedicates his life to the education of children. I decided on the spot to help him in any way I could.”
It had taken Mortenson more than three years, years of false steps, failures, and delays, to drive the Korphe School from promise to completion. Having taken his mistakes to heart, with the money finally to make his vision a reality and a staff and army of volunteers who were passionately dedicated to improving the lives of Balti children, Greg Mortenson’s CAI built three more primary schools in only three months.
Makhmal was true to his word. He and his family of Kashmiri masons spearheaded the assault on the school in their village of Ranga, constructing a replica of the Korphe School in only ten weeks. In a place where schools often took years to complete, this pace was unprecedented. Though their village was only eight miles outside Skardu, Ranga’s children had been offered no education by the government. Unless they could afford the cost of transportation to, and fees for, private schools in Skardu, the children of Ranga had remained uneducated. After one spring of furious labor, the fortunes of Ranga’s children had been changed forever.
In Pakhora, Haji Ali’s friend Haji Mousin made the most of the opportunity for his village. Convincing many of the Pakhora men not to take jobs as expedition porters until the school was built, Pakhora’s nurmadhar assembled a large and enthusiastic crew of unskilled laborers. Zaman, a local contractor, turned down a construction job for the army and led the effort to build a beautiful U-shaped stone school, shaded by a grove of poplars. “Zaman did an incredible job,” Mortenson says. “In one of the most remote villages of northern Pakistan, he built a school in twelve weeks that was vastly superior to anything the Pakistani government could have built, and at half the cost of a project that would have taken the government years to finish.”
In Changazi’s village of Kuardu, elders were so determined to make their school a success that they donated a plot for it at the very center of the settlement and demolished a two-story stone house so the school could sit on prime real estate. Like everything associated with Changazi, the Kuardu School’s trappings were made to exceed the local standard. Kuardu’s men built a solid stone foundation six feet deep and constructed the stone walls double-width, determined the school should stand proudly at the center of village life forever.
All spring and summer, Mortenson whirled around Baltistan like a dervish in a green Land Cruiser. He and his crew delivered bags of cement when the various construction sites fell short, drove Makhmal up the Braldu to adjust a set of ill-fitting roof beams at Pakhora, and buzzed over to the woodshop in Skardu to check on the progress of five hundred students’ desks he was having constructed.
When it was clear all the school projects would be completed ahead of time, Mortenson launched an ambitious array of new initiatives. Parvi alerted Mortenson that more than fifty girls had been studying in cramped conditions in a one-room school on the south bank of the Indus, in the village of Torghu Balla. With supplies left over from the other building projects, Mortenson saw that a two-room extension was added to the school.
On a trip to visit Mouzafer’s village, Halde, in the Hushe Valley, where he promised village elders he’d construct a school the following year, Mortenson learned of a crisis at an existing government school in nearby Khanday village. In Khanday, a dedicated local teacher named Ghulam was struggling to hold classes for ninety-two students, despite not having received a paycheck from the government for more than two years. An outraged Mortenson offered to pay Ghulam’s salary, and hire two more teachers to reduce Khanday’s student-teacher ratio to a reasonable level.
During his travels, Syed Abbas had heard hundreds of Balti praising Mortenson’s character and speaking glowingly of the endless acts of zakat Mortenson had performed in his time among them. Syed Abbas sent a messenger to the Indus Hotel inviting Mortenson to his home.
Mortenson, Parvi, and the religious leader sat cross-legged on the floor of Syed Abbas’s reception room, on especially fine Iranian carpets, while Abbas’s son brought them green tea in pink porcelain cups and sugar cookies on a wayward Delft tray decorated with windmills.
“I’ve contacted the sher of Chakpo and asked him to withdraw his fatwa,” Syed Abbas said, sighing, “but he refused. This man doesn’t follow Islam. He follows his own mind. He wants you banished from Pakistan.”
“If you think I’m doing anything agai
nst Islam, tell me to leave Pakistan forever and I will,” Mortenson said.
“Continue your work,” Syed Abbas said. “But stay away from Chakpo. I don’t think you’re in danger, but I can’t be certain.” Pakistan’s supreme Shia cleric handed Mortenson an envelope. “I’ve prepared a letter for you stating my support. It may be helpful, Inshallah, with some of the other village mullahs.”
Skirting Chakpo, Mortenson returned by Land Cruiser to Korphe, to arrange an inauguration ceremony for the school. While he held a meeting on the roof with Haji Ali, Twaha, and Hussein, Hussein’s wife, Hawa, and Sakina sat boldly down with the men and asked if they could speak. “We appreciate everything you’re doing for our children,” Hawa said. “But the women want me to ask you for something more.”
“Yes?” Mortenson said.
“Winter here is very hard. We sit all day like animals in the cold months, with nothing to do. Allah willing, we’d like a center for the women, a place to talk and sew.”
Sakina tugged Haji Ali’s beard teasingly. “And to get away from our husbands.”
By August, with guests due to arrive for the school-opening ceremony, Hawa presided glowingly over the new Korphe Women’s Vocational Center. In a disused room at the back of Haji Ali’s home, Korphe’s women gathered each afternoon, learning to use the four new Singer hand-crank sewing machines Mortenson purchased, under the tutelage of Fida, a master Skardu tailor who’d transported bales of fabric, boxes of thread, and the machines, tenderly, on their trip “upside.”