Three Cups of Tea
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THREE CUPS OF TEA THREE CUPS OF TEA ONE MAN’S MISSION TO FIGHT TERRORISM AND BUILD NATIONS… ONE SCHOOL AT A TIME ., GREG MORTENSON and DAVID OLIVER RELIN VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada MP4 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in 2006 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, 2006 All rights reserved LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Mortenson, Greg. Three cups of tea : one man’s mission to fight terrorism and build nations— one school at a time / Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. p. cm. Includes index. ISB: 1-4295-1547-3 1. Girls’ schools—Pakistan. 2. Girls’ schools—Afghanistan. 3. Humanitarian assistance, American—Pakistan. 4. Humanitarian assistance, American—Afghanistan. 5. Mortenson, Greg. I. Relin, David Oliver. II. Title. LC2330.M67 2006 371.82209549—dc22 2005043466 Set in Stempel Garamond • Designed by Elke Sigal Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. 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Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. to Irvin “Dempsey” Mortenson Barry “Barrel” Bishop and Lloyd Henry Relin for showing us the way, while you were here Pakistan and Its Neighbors Faizabad I D O R C O R R A N K H Baharak W A H K U S A K R A K U O D R A N Gilgit M I Indus R A H N G Karakoram D E Highway EO Skardu Panjshir S AI Valley P BALTISTAN Salang Tunnel LA T E A U INE O L F CONTROL Shomali Plain Kargil Jalalabad Kabul Khyber Srinagar Pass Tora Bora Peshawar Islamabad Rawalpindi NORTH Bannu WAZIRISTAN SOUTH WAZIRISTAN Indus Lahore N WWE E S 0 80 Kilometers Arabian Bay of 0 50 Miles Sea Bengal Irshad Pass H K U S Charpurson D U Valley I N Zuudkhan Khunjerab H Sost Pass N Z A A H U K Hunza Valley A Karimabad R Karakoram Highway Hispar Glacier A (KKH) Muztagh K Tower Rakaposhi (7273 m) K2 (8611 m) (7788 m) O Godwin- Austen Broad Peak (8047 m) R Baltoro Glacier Gilgit Biafo Glacier Glacier Gasherbrum 2 A (8035 m) M Gasherbrum 1 Braldu (8068 m) Askole Concordia Shigar Indus Shigar Korphe R Valley A Masherbrum (7821 m) Shigar Hushe N Chilas Hushe Valley G E Skardu Siachen Nanga Parbat BALTIST AN Glacier (8125 m) Satpara Lake Khaplu Shyok D E O S A I P L A T E A U LINE OF CONTROL Kargil N WWE E S 0 40 Kilometers 0 25 Miles CONTENTS INTRODUCTION IN MR. MORTENSON’S ORBIT 1 CHAPTER 01 FAILURE 7 CHAPTER 02 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE RIVER 17 CHAPTER 03 “PROGRESS AND PERFECTION” 27 CHAPTER 04 SELF-STORAGE 34 CHAPTER 05 580 LETTERS, ONE CHECK 47 CHAPTER 06 RAWALPINDI’S ROOFTOPS AT DUSK 57 CHAPTER 07 HARD WAY HOME 70 CHAPTER 08 BEATEN BY THE BRALDU 83 CHAPTER 09 THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN 98 CHAPTER 10 BUILDING BRIDGES 108 CHAPTER 11 SIX DAYS 125 CHAPTER 12 HAJI ALI’S LESSON 136 CHAPTER 13 “A SMILE SHOULD BE MORE THAN A MEMORY” 154 CHAPTER 14 EQUILIBRIUM 174 CHAPTER 15 MORTENSON IN MOTION 184 CHAPTER 16 RED VELVET BOX 198 CHAPTER 17 CHERRY TREES IN THE SAND 211 CHAPTER 18 SHROUDED FIGURE 225 CHAPTER 19 A VILLAGE CALLED NEW YORK 241 CHAPTER 20 TEA WITH THE TALIBAN 261 CHAPTER 21 RUMSFELD’S SHOES 278 CHAPTER 22 “THE ENEMY IS IGNORANCE” 297 CHAPTER 23 STONES INTO SCHOOLS 314 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 333 THREE CUPS OF TEA INTRODUCTION IN MR. MORTENSON’S ORBIT The little red light had been flashing for five minutes before Bhan- goo paid it any attention. “The fuel gages on these old aircraft are noto- riously unreliable,” Brigadier General Bhangoo, one of Pakistan’s most experienced high-altitude helicopter pilots, said, tapping it. I wasn’t sure if that was meant to make me feel better. I rode next to Bhangoo, looking down past my feet through the Vietnam-era Alouette’s bubble windshield. Two thousand feet below us a river twisted, hemmed in by rocky crags jutting out from both sides of the Hunza Valley. At eye level, we soared past hanging green glaciers, splintering under a tropical sun. Bhangoo flew on unper- turbed, flicking the ash of his cigarette out a vent, next to a sticker that said “No smoking.” From the rear of the aircraft Greg Mortenson reached his long arm out to tap Bhangoo on the shoulder of his flight suit. “General, sir,” Mortenson shouted, “I think we’re heading the wrong way.” Brigadier Bhangoo had been President Musharraf’s personal pilot before retiring from the military to join a civil aviation company. He was in his late sixties, with salt-and-pepper hair and a mustache as clipped and cultivated as the vowels he’d inherited from the private British colonial school he’d attended as boy with Musharraf and many of Pakistan’s other future leaders. The general tossed his cigarette through the vent and blew out his breath. Then he bent to compare the store-bought GPS unit he bal- anced on his knee with a military-grade map Mortenson folded to highlight what he thought was our position. “I’ve been flying in northern Pakistan for forty years,” he said, waggling his head, the subcontinent’s most distinctive gesture. “How 1 THREE CUPS OF TEA is it you know the terrain better than me?” Bhangoo banked the Alou- ette steeply to port, flying back the way we’d come. The red light that had worried me before began to flash faster. The bobbing needle on the gauge showed that we had less than one hun- dred liters of fuel. This part of northern Pakistan was so remote and inhospitable that we’d had to have friends preposition barrels of avia- tion fuel at strategic sites by jeep. If we couldn’t make it to our drop zone we were in a tight spot, literally, since the craggy canyon we flew through had no level areas suitable for setting the Alouette down. Bhangoo climbed high, so he’d have the option of auto-rotating toward a more distant landing zone if we ran out of fuel, and jammed his stick forward, speeding up to ninety knots. Just as the needle hit E and the red warning light began to beep, Bhangoo settled the skids at the center of a large H, for helipad, written out in white rocks, next to our barrels of jet fuel. “That was a lovely sortie,” Bhangoo said, lighting another ciga- rette. “But it might not have been without Mr. Mortenson.” Later, after refueling by inserting a handpump into a rusting barrel of aviation fuel, we flew up the Braldu Valley to the village of Korphe, the last human habitation before the Baltoro Glacier begins its march up to K2 and the world’s greatest concentration of twenty-thousand- foot-plus peaks. After a failed 1993 attempt to climb K2, Mortenson arrived in Korphe, emaciated and exhausted. In this impoverished community of mud and stone huts, both Mortenson’s life and the lives of northern Pakistan’s children changed course. One evening, he went to bed by a yak dung fire a mountaineer who’d lost his way, and one morning, by the time he’d shared a pot of butter tea with his hosts and laced up his boots, he’d become a humanitarian who’d found a mean- ingful path to follow for the rest of his life. Arriving in Korphe with Dr. Greg, Bhangoo and I were welcomed with open arms, the head of a freshly killed ibex, and endless cups of tea. And as we listened to the Shia children of Korphe, one of the world’s most impoverished communities, talk about how their hopes and dreams for the future had grown exponentially since a big Ameri- can arrived a decade ago to build them the first school their village had ever known, the general and I were done for. “You know,” Bhangoo said, as we were enveloped in a scrum of 120 students tugging us by the hands on a tour of their school, “flying 2 IN MR. MORTENSON’S ORBIT with President Musharraf, I’ve become acquainted with many world leaders, many outstanding gentlemen and ladies.