[Hac-announce] Reminder! Conversations Sat. 2:30pm 9/04/10.

[L.M.C. Harvey]

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This month, 9/04/2010 the stimulus for
our Converstions will be an  interview of
Greg Mortenson by  Charlie Rose, 07/27/2010. 

   

         Mortenson is the author of the best
seller Three Cups of Tea.[1]  …The the book’s yarn is well known:
disoriented after a 1993 failed attempt on Pakistan’s K2, the second-highest
mountain in the world, Mr. Mortenson took a wrong turn into the village of
Korphe, was nursed back to health by the villagers and, in gratitude, vowed to
build them a school.    [Besides writing about his experiences,
Mortenson established a foundation to raise money to build more schools in
Pakistan and Afghanistan and has recently published Stones Into Schools.]
 

   

         In its early days “Three Cups of Tea,”
the story of Mr. Mortenson’s efforts to build schools in Pakistan, was largely
ignored by the military, and for that matter by most everyone else.  …But the book’s message of the importance of
girls’ education caught on [with] women’s book clubs, church groups and high
schools. Military interest… grew in part out of the popularity of “Three Cups
of Tea” among military wives who told their husbands to read it. 

  

         By the summer of 2009, Mr. Mortenson
was [arranging] meetings in Kabul with Colonel Kolenda, [top
adviser at the Kabul headquarters for the International Security Assistance
Force,] village elders and at times President Obama’s new commander, General
McChrystal. As Colonel Kolenda tells it, Mr. Mortenson and his Afghan partner
on the ground, Wakil Karimi, were the American high command’s primary conduits
for reaching out to elders outside the “Kabul bubble.” 

   

         [Mortenson]
said he had accepted no money from the military and had no contractual
relationship with the Defense Department.  [He] was initially critical of the armed
forces in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as “laptop warriors” who
appeared, he said, indifferent to the civilian casualties inflicted by the
American bombardment of Afghanistan. 

   

Mr.
Mortenson acknowledges that his solution in Afghanistan, girls’ education, will
take a generation and more. “But Al Qaeda and the Taliban  are looking at it long range over
generations,” he said. “And we’re looking at it in terms of annual fiscal
cycles and presidential elections.” 










[1]  The following
notes have been extracted from a NY Times story published July 17, 2010.
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