Greg Mortenson: Three Cups of Tea

My book group back home in Lunenburg is reading Three Cups of Tea, so I couldn't pass up the opportunity to see the author and hear him retell in person the captivating story of what led him to build schools for girls in remote villages like Korphe, Pakistan and later to found the Central Asia Institute and Pennies for Peace.

Greg told his story, showing slides of the people and schools he has built in their villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan and introduced Julia Bergman, the librarian who helped him build libraries in his schools.

Bergman's cousin is Jennifer Wilson, the wife of the late Jean Hoerni, the eccentric millionaire who funded Greg's first school and later, the Central Asia Institute. She described the series of serendipitous events that brought her and Greg together. This is the description of their meeting from Three Cups of Tea:

"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 the 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."

The most moving part of Mortenson's talk came when he told us about the hate mail he received after 9/11 that almost caused him to abandon his efforts. Thankfully his wife reminded him that education overcomes hate and fear. "If you educate a boy, you educate an individual, but if you educate a girl, you educate a community."

The Auditorium Speakers Series is always a huge draw at ALA conferences. Next I'm looking forward to hearing astronaut Sally Ride and her co-author Tam O'Shaughnessy speak about their book, Mission Planet Earth.