Stones into Schools

Mortenson, Greg.  Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  New York: Viking, 2009.

 Of the hundreds of soldiers I have spoken with during the past six years who have been deployed in Afghanistan, almost every one of them firmly believes that the best way to augment our security is by truly being of service to the Afghan people — and moreover, that the capacity to render this service meaningfully and well is predicated upon listening, understanding, and building relationships.  In this respect, the goal of enhancing our own security is best achieved by enhancing theirs.  And the most critical building block to accomplishing both is education.

- Greg Morstenson, Stones into Schools

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Americans have far more to learn from the people of Afghanistan than we could ever hope to teach them.

- Greg Mortenson to Admiral Mike Mullen, Stones into Schools

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Greg Mortenson‘s 2003 bestseller, Three Cups of Tea, chronicles how Mortenson’s failed attempt to climb K2 landed him, lost and hungry, in the Pakistani village of Korphe, whose inhabitants inspired him to not only promise to build them a school for boys and girls alike, but to actually fulfill that promise.  Mortenson thus evolved from a failed mountain climber into the head of the Central Asia Institute and champion of female literacy.  Stones into Schools provides the next chapter of the story, describing the CAI’s endeavor to build a school for Kirghiz children in one of the most remote parts of Afghanistan.

Mortenson’s mission, as Stones into Schools articulates more than once, is to promote female literacy and empowerment by building schools, establishing women’s centers, and paying teachers’ salaries in a land previously dominated by Islamic extremism.  As Mortenson argues, an educated population, particularly an educated female population, can help reduce infant mortality and women’s deaths in childbirth, contribute extra income to their families, and thwart the Taliban by opening the hearts and minds of the Afghan people to possibilities beyond the rule of “men with Kalashnikovs who help sustain the grotesque lie that flinging battery acid into the face of a girl who longs to study arithmetic is somehow in keeping with the teachings of the Koran.”  Mortenson, with the aid of his dedicated partners, Sarfraz Khan and Wakil Karimi, constructs schools in the most remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, areas in which traditional international aid never arrives, in hopes of improving lives while simultaneously undermining the extremists who have long held hostage the people they purport to serve and protect.

While charting the growing number of CAI schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Stones into Schools likewise describes the growth and maturation of the CAI itself.  In Three Cups of Tea, one CAI board member laments that the CAI was, essentially, Mortenson himself, and that if something ever were to happen to Mortenson, the CAI would cease to exist.  Fortunately, this situation has been rectified in the years since Three Cups of Tea was penned, as Mortenson has finally learned to delegate.  Sarfraz Khan spearheads the CAI’s operations in Pakistan, while Wakil Karimi builds relationships and schools throughout Afghanistan.  Supplies are purchased locally, transported by local drivers or yak trains, and the schools are approved and built by natives of the communities they will serve, communities that donate both their land and their labor to make these schools more personal and important than a gift of international aid could ever be.  Mortenson continues to struggle with his role as author and chief fundraiser (he would prefer to be on the ground), but he simultaneously recognizes the toll his incessant working and travelling has taken on his health and his family.  Indeed, he finds it necessary to apologize to his children in the book’s acknowledgements: “I’m sorry that I missed out on nearly half of your childhoods.  That reality is the most painful part of my work.”  Stones into Schools illustrates Mortenson’s process of learning to share this burden, as Sarfraz and Wakil spend up to nine months a year away from their families, reporting to Mortenson in Montana via satellite phone, asking for funds when necessary.

Stones into Schools may reiterate the three-cups-of-tea metaphor a bit too often for my taste, but it is easy to forgive Mortenson his literary foibles when faced with the tale of his courageous, if unlikely, fight for universal education.  Mortenson and his CAI colleagues fight the War on Terror one book, one schoolgirl, one school at a time, hoping to eventually erect a girls’ school in Mullah Omar’s home town as a powerful slap in the face to those who would deny women their right to read and learn.  I firmly believe Mortenson will win the Nobel Peace Prize someday.  After reading Stones into Schools, it is difficult to reach any other conclusion.

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