Educating girls the key to peace, author says

PROVO — If you educate a boy, you educate an individual. Educate a girl, and you educate a community.

Greg Mortenson has dedicated his life to fulfilling this African proverb by organizing the building of schools for girls throughout Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The peace activist and New York Times best-selling author of "Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace … One School at a Time," received a standing ovation Tuesday at BYU as he talked about his passion to promote literacy, an effort that began with a failure.

In 1993, he attempted to climb K2, the second-highest mountain in the world, in honor of his sister Christa, who had died the year before.

But he failed to reach the top, and upon descending, became disoriented and ended up in a small Pakistani village where he spent several weeks recovering.

While there, he noticed the village children drawing with sticks in the sand. He remembers one girl asked him for help building a school.

"I made a promise, 'I'll build a school for you,' " he said. "Little did I know it would change my life forever."

Mortenson came back to the United States and began fundraising. His letters to celebrities went unanswered, but when his mother, a principal in Wisconsin, got her school involved, they gathered more than 62,000 pennies for the cause.

"It wasn't celebrities, it was children who reached out to children halfway around the world," Mortenson said.

Now "Pennies for Peace" is an ongoing fundraising program with more than 4,400 participating schools.

The program is run through Central Asia Institute, a nonprofit agency Mortenson cofounded to promote and support the education of girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

To date, the institute has helped establish 130 schools in the two countries, reaching out to more than 50,000 students, according to the program's Web site.

"The more I do this, I'm convinced that education should be our top global priority," Mortenson said.

By educating a girl to just a fifth-grade level, it reduces infant mortality and the population explosion and improves the basic quality of life, he explained.

Plus, educated mothers — whose opinion carries significant weight in those cultures — can dissuade their sons from joining terrorist groups, Mortenson said.

The publishers of "Three Cups of Tea" wanted the book's subtitle to be, "One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism One School at a Time," which Mortenson opposed.

"Fighting terrorism … is based in fear," he said. "Promoting peace is based in hope. The real enemy we have in Africa, Afghanistan or America, the real enemy we all face, is ignorance."