Human touch

Combat brigades leave Iraq last week.

A troop surge continues in Afghanistan even as the appetite for that war seems to fade at home.

Brouhaha breaks out over the construction of an Islamic Cultural Center, not a mosque, a few blocks away from Ground Zero on a site formerly occupied by a Burlington Coat Factory and just one block from a renowned gentlemen’s club in New York City.

All of which represents an appropriate time to remember the work of Greg Mortenson.

Mortenson wrote “Three Cups of Tea” and a subsequent volume “Stones to Schools” and his story is an amazing saga of grace and humanity by an American in a part of the world where, we are told, Americans are the mortal enemy.

Where the Taliban is gaining ground and threatens to return Afghanistan to the Stone Age.

Mortenson might offer a different tale.

The Cliff’s Notes version of “Three Cups of Tea” would detail Mortenson’s coming down from the heights of a mountain climbing expedition into an Afghan village, near death.

The residents of a remote village helped bring the man back to life and in return he had just a simple question.

You helped me, what can I do to help you?

The answer was quick and succinct – a school.

And thus Mortenson embarked on an improbable journey to build a school in a remote village in Afghanistan.

What Mortenson discovered is a tribal society in which the elders seem more interested in educating their people, even young girls, than is widely reported by major news outlets.

And what he also discovered is that by making those villagers part of the process, sitting down with them to share thoughts and ideas, breaking bread and having tea, the path to a new school seemed less treacherous and futile.

It came down to the title of the book.

The first cup of tea, an elder explained, is shared as a stranger, the second as a friend and the third as family.

Mortenson worked to become family simply by being human.

Today, Mortenson has been part of building more than 100 schools with over 64,000 students, primarily girls.

During his time in Afghanistan, the number of students enrolled in a school has grown from 80,000 to over 8 million.

Mortenson is knocking down walls, he said, by empowering, by bringing the folks he seeks to help into the equation, providing ownership for what he is trying to accomplish.

He seeks not to force anything upon anybody unwilling to accept his simple gesture of fostering education as a means to an end of a modern, mobile society.

And he has gotten by-in even from the Taliban, having constructed a number of schools that continue to operate in areas controlled by the Taliban.

On its face, the tale is remarkable and a testament to one man’s ability to alter the broader course of events.

Not that Mortenson lacked a background in such benevolence – his father had decades before helped build a hospital in the jungles of Tanzania.

But in one of the most hostile lands on Earth, one of the most dangerous countries on the planet, a country that seems barely in the 20^th Century let alone the 21^st, Mortenson seeks to make a difference without a weapon.

He is, to paraphrase an old adage, winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, one school at a time.

And this would all make a great episode of Oprah Winfrey – which it did some time back – if not for the wives of two generals, Gen. David Patraeus, commander of Allied forces in Afghanistan, and Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The generals’ wives read “Three Cups of Tea” and urged their husbands to read it.

The husbands embraced the concept, especially Patraeus who had earned a sterling reputation for fighting the insurgency in Iraq by seeking and earning buy-in from the innocents of that country.

Patraeus earned much commendation and changed the military’s way of thinking about battling an insurgency by bringing a focus to improving the lot of the people caught in the cross-hairs, by building relationships, human connections.

And that is what the general hopes to do in Afghanistan and Mortenson has been enlisted as an official advisor to both generals.

He has facilitated meetings with tribal elders, taught about the culture and how to gain traction in an inhospitable land.

His books have become required reading for military leaders in that part of the world, a blueprint on how to build a country through education and human interaction, in discovering that despite our many differences there is a fundamental connection – as human beings.

Mortenson holds on to a sense of perspective that more binds than divides us as humans. That education is critical to building a modern society and marginalizing those who hate with blind ignorance and who paint with a bigoted and broad brush.

Some would, as Bob Schieffer of CBS News did on Sunday, call Mortenson a hero.

He prefers “human being” who sees in a cloud of war, poverty and hatred the opportunity to extend a hand.

And through the simple step of building a school, the opportunity to bridge a chasm that too many see as too wide to connect save through military intervention.

Yet, in Mortenson, even the highest ranking American generals on the ground have discovered that guns and bullets go only so far.