Wickedlocal.com/Mansfield
Bringing a Message of Hope
By Deborah Knight Snyder
Thurs. Feb 28, 2008

Mansfield - Wednesday was a special day in Mansfield, because we were visited by greatness. Greg Mortenson spent the day with us.

Mortenson has dedicated his life to creating schools, primarily for girls, in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He and his foundation, the Central Asia Institute, have built 60 schools so far, and he said they plan to “build 10 more schools every year.”

Mortenson’s book, “Three Cups of Tea, One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace … One School at a Time,” recounts his personal story, starting in 1993 when he tried to climb the mountain K2 but didn’t make it. In the process, he discovered a remote part of the world where people were struggling. When he saw the children there writing their school lessons with sticks in the dirt, he knew he had to help them.

The rest is history. The book, co-authored by Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, was the first Community Read for the town of Mansfield, and there have been several community activities surrounding the book over the past month, the high point being Mortenson’s visit on Feb. 27. The Community Read was sponsored by the Mansfield Women of Today and the Mansfield Public Library. “
I was so impressed by the warmth and sincerity of Greg Mortenson, and by the great welcome he received from all the people,” said Mansfield Library Director Janet Campbell. “When we started planning this event last summer, I knew it would be successful, but I am so pleased by the response of so many people in town. It is definitely one of the greatest things to happen in my 30 plus years at the library.”

“This event could never have taken place without the many hours of work that Cathy Hellard and Laura Humphrey of the Mansfield Women of Today devoted to it,” Campbell said.

Mortenson essentially spent his day inspiring all with whom he came into contact. He started with a visit to the Qualters Middle School, where he spoke about his work and showed slides of life in Pakistan and Afghanistan to the eighth-graders.

“He seemed like a really cool guy. He was really funny and down-to-earth,” said eighth-grader Drew Hayes, who added that he learned a lot about that part of the world from Mortenson’s talk.

Mortenson ate lunch at Mansfield High School with some seniors, who were so moved by him that they want to start doing similar work.

“It was such an honor to be able to eat lunch with a man who is such a role model for so many people,” said MHS senior Sara Yeransian. “His commitment to educating girls in Pakistan has so many far-reaching implications. We have already begun to brainstorm ideas to help with his future efforts in Pakistan, and we will hopefully be able to carry his message to even more people.”

Both before and after lunch, Mortenson visited the younger students, and his magic definitely seemed to dazzle them also. He visited about 10 second-grade classes at Robinson and several fourth- and fifth-grade classes at Jordan/Jackson. He encouraged the students to draw pictures and write letters for the kids in Pakistan.

The plan is for the teachers and principals to collect the letters and send them to Mortenson in Montana, so that he can bring the letters to the kids in Pakistan on his next trip. He said he would forward a response back to Mansfield. Because there is no postal system in many of the remote villages where Mortenson travels, that is as close as it gets to a penpal situation.

“The children were delighted and learned so much from his talk,” Hellard said.

Wednesday evening, a crowd of enthusiastic fans in the filled-to-capacity Mansfield High School auditorium was completely captivated by Greg Mortenson.

His message of promoting peace through literacy resonated with the crowd, who gave him a standing ovation. In the course of an hour, he had shared an extraordinary amount of information about the plight of children in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and offered some hope for them as well. He rattled statistical information off the top of his head and went from one meaningful story to another with hardly taking a breath.

As he spoke, Mortenson essentially recounted the highlights of the book, accompanied by slides he had taken of people and places in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Mortenson stresses that the optimal way to help that part of the world is not to simply fight terrorism, an act which is rooted in fear, he said, but to promote peace, an act which is based in hope.

The best way to promote peace, he said, is through the eradication of illiteracy, especially illiteracy of women, in these third-world countries. The conflict won’t be won with bombs, he said, but with books.

Early on in the talk, he shared an African proverb: “If you educate a boy, you education an individual. If you educate a girl, you educate a community.”

That, he said, is because boys in these communities often grow up and leave, going to look for work or to war, while girls are the ones who stay in the community and raise the next generation.

The story told in “Three Cups of Tea” ends four years ago, but a lot has happened since then. There is a lot of good news, Mortenson said.

Currently, in Afghanistan, there are five and half million children in school, and 1.8 million of them are girls. At the height of the Taliban’s reign, only 800,000 kids were in school. “

That’s what should be shouted from the mountaintops,” Mortenson said, rather than every suicide bomb that’s reported by the mainstream media. “

We should be doing everything we can to help those kids go to school,” he said simply.

The bad news, he said, is that, over the last year, the Taliban has closed or bombed hundreds of girls’ schools in Afghanistan.

“Their greatest fear is not the bullet, but the pen,” he said of the Taliban, going on to recount a story of a school that was recently attacked by the Taliban, but the school’s headmaster fought back and actually shot two of the Taliban attackers. The school was not closed as the Taliban had hoped but rather is back in session, with its students reporting as usual.

Seeing Mortenson was a moving experience for so many people who had waited to see him. “

I was deeply moved by Greg Mortenson’s gentleness, compassion, and self-deprecating manner,” said Chris Cormier Hayes, who led three book group discussions on “Three Cups of Tea” for the community. “I was particularly impressed with his message. This was no hard-sell pitch looking for money. I believe it was his genuine desire to educate us about this often-misunderstood part of the world and the need for education and hope. The warmth and support for him and his mission was palpable in the auditorium. He united one more community with his message of peace.” “

His kindness, compassion, and dedication to education are an inspiration to us all,” Hellard said.

The Mansfield school children had been collecting money for Mortenson through his Pennies for Peace program —- in which every penny makes a difference — and a group of children presented Mortenson with a check for $2,580.51.

After Mortenson’s talk, representatives [Dot Walsh and Andrea LeBlanc] from the Peace Abbey in Sherborn got up and spoke to Mortenson, presenting him with the Courage of Conscience award.

“ You’re a role model of how to live with purpose and compassion,” the representatives said in presenting Mortenson the award, adding that his life achievements would be like a pebble in a pond, spreading outward as they affect more and more people. In addition to educating the children in the countries, he is also educating us, they said.

Mortenson was visibly choked up during the presentation from the Peace Abbey.

He finished the night by signing books, with the line to get his autograph stretching to the back of the auditorium.

Thanks to Humphrey, Hellard, and Campbell, the Community Read was a great success.

“The goal of a community book read is not just about promoting literacy, it is also about bringing us together as a community. Tonight, Mansfield came together in an overwhelming manner,” Humphrey said Wednesday night.

The activities are not over, Campbell said. This Sunday, a family hike, beginning at noon, will take place at the Blue Hills Reservation. More information about the hike, our own version of mountain climbing, is available at the Mansfield Public Library. Also, local chef Florencia Gazzolo will be hosting a program on central Asian cooking at the library in April.

Campbell added that copies of the book are still available at the library, as are copies of some of the handouts Mortenson provided.

Anyone who wants to donate money toward Mortenson’s mission to build schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan can do so by sending a tax-deductible contribution, payable to the Central Asia Institute, to P.O. Box 7209, Bozeman, MT 59771.