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When Bonnie and I receive alumni magazines from colleges we have attended, we tend to put them at the bottom of our must-read piles. However, when the spring issue of Concordia Magazine (Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota) arrived, I, by chance, happened to notice an article about fellow Cobber (yes, our mascot was a corn cob) Greg Mortenson's work in Asia. So I have taken the liberty to include below an unusually lengthy excerpt from this article, "Fighting Terror with Books, Not Bombs":

"After college, Mortenson became a thoroughly addicted mountain climber who slept in his car and worked emergency room shifts to support his climbing jones. In 1992 his younger sister, Christa, died from a lifelong battle with epilepsy, and Mortenson joined a team to climb K2, the world's second highest mountain, in northern Pakistan. He planned to lay Christa's prized necklace from Africa at the summit, but a volunteer rescue mission left Mortenson weak, sick, exhausted, and unable to climb any higher. He was helped by two local Balti porters who took him to their remote mountain village of Korphe to recover. As his strength returned Mortenson met the impoverished villagers, applied his nursing skills, and discovered there was no school for the children.

"He observed Korphe's 84 children sitting outside, copying number lessons from a tattered book by scratching in the dirt with sticks. The poor village couldn't afford a dollar per day salary to hire a teacher.

"'Their determination reminded me of Christa,' says Mortenson. 'Since I couldn't help her anymore, I figured I had to find a way to help them.' Mortenson promised he would return to build a school.

"But how to make good on his promise? Using local labor and locally procured materials, Mortenson estimated a modest four room school would cost $12,000 �" money he certainly did not have. He sold all his possessions for $2,000 and sent out 580 letters to celebrities, businessmen, and prominent Americans asking for help. Only South Dakota native Tom Brokaw of NBC News responded with a check for $100.

"Mortenson's mother, who was teaching in Wisconsin, started an elementary school project called Pennies for Peace and sent her son 62,345 pennies to support his dream. It was the largest contribution Mortenson had received, and he was still woefully short. But a story about the pennies project, printed in a climbing newsletter, perked the interest of a pioneer Silicon Valley computer entrepreneur who also had climbed in the Karakorams. Jean Hoerni knew how poor the villagers in the region were, and he liked Mortenson's bold idea. And, after all, he could afford to bankroll a school. Hoerni sent Mortenson a check for $12,000. Ultimately, Hoerni would endow Mortenson's school-building efforts as the Central Asia Institute....

"Building a school in remote Pakistan turned out to be more complicated than simply raising money. Three Cups of Tea [Mortenson's book about his experiences available at www.threecupsoftea.com] chronicles the twists and turns Mortenson had to take as he negotiated with suspicious tribal chieftans, survived being kidnapped by the Taliban, and had to overcome a fatwa issued by an angry Islamic cleric because Mortenson was educating girls. Today, Mortenson is responsible for building 58 schools in Pakistan and 9 in Afghanistan educating 24,000 students �" most of them girls �" and training 547 local teachers, many of them graduates of their own schools....

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