I thought, somehow, that he would look larger than life. That his face would radiate serenity or his walk communicate a brisk confidence. Instead, he looked as if he might be a junior high science teacher and live just down the street. Greg Mortenson spoke to students at the kick-off presentation of the Student Affairs Lecture Series. Three Cups of Tea, his best-seller about the power of schools to transform lives in such far-away places as Pakistan and Afghanistan, had been required reading for incoming freshmen, and his slide show of life on the edge in central Asia was quietly moving: rarely flashy but filled with profound lessons that have the power to heal and to change. Although it means leaving his wife and two children in Montana, he spends a huge amount of time “on the road” – building more than 140 schools that now educate nearly 65,000 young people. They are, he says unapologetically, mostly all girls. What is it, he asks, that scares the men who bomb schools – especially those of young girls? “They are afraid. Afraid because they know that if girls are educated, then all of society will change: there can be no turning back.” So, one by one, and classroom by classroom, he helps build schools and build the future. It often means clearing away still-lethal landmines left from decades of warfare: landmines that kill hundreds of Afghan children each year who might otherwise be in school. When you talk to women in this shattered region of the world and ask them their hopes for the future, he recalls emphatically, they have two answers: They don’t want their babies to die. And they want their children to have a good education, one that will help build a new society. When you hear Greg Mortenson explain it, it not only sounds reasonable, it sounds completely realistic as well.
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