Jerene Mortenson, mother of convention keynoter Greg Mortenson

I’ve never met Greg Mortenson, but recently I met his mother, Jerene. My wife and I were first introduced to Jerene Mortenson, PhD, in the pages of Three Cups of Tea. Co-authored by Greg Mortenson and journalist David Oliver Relin, the book remains on the New York Times bestseller list after 138 weeks. This past summer, Mary Ellen and I took turns reading the book to each other, from cover to cover, a practice we adopted years ago when we came across a book we wanted to digest together.

We live in a small town in northwestern Wisconsin that is situated on a chain of lakes. As we sat in our car by one of those lakes and read the book, we watched people fishing, turtles sunning and ducks ducking while we were transported in our imaginations to a very different environment, to the rugged Karakoram mountains of Pakistan, where Greg Mortenson, together with his Pakistani friends, overcame great odds to construct schools in remote villages to educate young girls.

In the process, we learned that chances are good that we’ve at least crossed paths with the Mortensons. In 1973, Irvin “Dempsey” and Jerene Mortenson, Lutheran missionaries to Tanzania, returned to Minnesota with their two children, Greg and Christa, so that Greg could attend high school. (In Tanzania, Dempsey founded Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center, a 640-bed facility and the nation’s first teaching hospital, and Jerene founded Moshi International School, an academy for children of expatriates.) After a brief stint in St. Paul, they moved to Roseville, a suburb of St. Paul that I traversed almost daily back in those days.

While reading the book, we also learned about Dempsey’s death in 1981, at age 48, from cancer; about Christa’s death in 1992, on her 23rd birthday, from a massive seizure; about Greg’s decision to honor his sister by leaving her amber-beaded necklace at the summit of Pakistan’s K2, the second highest mountain peak in the world (and the most difficult to conquer); of his aborted attempt to reach K2’s summit because of a rescue mission in which he helped save the life of a fellow climber; and about the navigational error that led him to the village of Korphe—the “wrong turn” I wrote about in a previous article. To date, that “wrong turn” has resulted in the building of 131 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan that are educating 58,000 children, including 44,000 girls.

After “meeting” Jerene Mortenson in Three Cups of Tea, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that she was going to be speaking at a church just one-half mile from our home. The presentation was sponsored by the church’s women’s group but was open to the public, so I made plans to attend and arranged to meet with her.

I asked Mortenson if she had observed any signs during her son’s early years that revealed a humanitarian bent. Not really, she responded. “But there was the time when he was 3 years old—this was in Africa. I could not find him, and here he was, sitting on the path up to our house with the cookie jar and an old beggar. And the two of them were sitting there, eating cookies and talking to each other. So I could have guessed that he would do something in the helping profession.”

Greg’s years in predominantly Islamic Tanzania prepared him well for the work he would later do in Pakistan and Afghanistan, observes Jerene. “At the international school he attended [the school she founded], he had friends that were Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist, so he was acculturated religion-wise. And nationalities—the 150 kids spoke 27 different languages, so exposure to other cultures wasn’t strange to him. When we come up against things that are really different, it’s the strangeness of it that can throw us, make us feel unsettled. It just wasn’t strange to him. It was different, but not strange. Just one more culture.”

School in Afghanistan built by Central Asia Institute

After building schools in Pakistan, Mortenson also turned his attention to neighboring Afghanistan. I asked Jerene if recent resurgence of the Taliban in that country has negatively impacted those efforts. “One of his schools was threatened, but nothing happened, and no other schools have even been threatened,” she responded. “The villagers, because they’ve given the land and helped build the schools, feel that the schools are theirs, so they are very protective of them. They now have 12 ex-Taliban teaching in Central Asia Institute schools.”

Although the organization has built fewer schools in Afghanistan than in Pakistan, more Afghan children attend CAI schools. “Greg tells me that the desire for education in Afghanistan is unbelievable,” says Jerene.

Jerene Mortenson was the principal of Westside Elementary School in River Falls, Wisconsin, during Greg’s initial, often-discouraging attempts to raise money. He had typed—he was not computer-savvy at the time—and mailed 580 letters to U.S. senators, movie stars and pop culture icons to solicit funds for the first school and had received nothing in response. (Eventually, $100 did come in as a result of that effort, in the form of a check from NBC News’ Tom Brokaw.) His mother tried to help by inviting her son to come to River Falls and give a slide show to her school’s 600 students.

Greg Mortenson

“The kids got it right away,” Greg Mortenson recalls. “When they saw the pictures, they couldn’t believe that there was a place where children sat outside in cold weather and tried to hold classes without teachers. They decided to do something about it” (Mortenson & Relin, 2007, p. 52).

As a result, the students launched “Pennies for Pakistan” and, in succeeding weeks, brought in 62,345 pennies that filled two 40-gallon trashcans. “Children had taken the first step toward building the school,” Greg Mortenson says. “And they did it with something that’s basically worthless in our society—pennies” (Mortenson & Relin, 2007, p. 52). Now known as Pennies for Peace and operating on six continents, the program, which solicits funds in the form of each country’s least valuable coin, brought in the equivalent last year of 100 million pennies, or approximately $1 million.

“Pennies really can make a difference,” Jerene Mortenson observed in her presentation. “They go a long way in that part of the world. But what I’ve been realizing lately is how much it does for our children. I don’t think our children have a lot of chances to feel they’re really important. It came to my mind what this was doing when I was in Grand Marais [Minnesota]. A little 6-year-old boy came to me and said, ‘I didn’t have a penny, so I took my dollar to the bank and bought some.’ And then, he asked me, ‘Was that cheating?’ I assured him, ‘No, it wasn’t cheating.’ He said, ‘Well, what are you going to do with my pennies?’ and I said, ‘What do you want them to do?’ And he said, ‘I want them to buy 100 pencils so that 100 kids can write.’”

One of the reasons CAI schools are so successful, observes Jerene, is that the people build the schools themselves. The schools follow government curriculum, with two exceptions. Beginning with the first grade, they have a class in nutrition, sanitation and hygiene, which results in cleaner, healthier villages. Second, to maintain oral traditions, they incorporate four to five hours a week of storytelling, in which elders from the community come to the school and pass on their knowledge of local and national history. “I could have guessed that [Greg] would do something in the helping profession.”

“I’m really proud of my son for this,” says Jerene. “He has become very concerned that, as a society becomes literate, they lose their oral traditions.” When traveling in the United States, she continued, Greg sometimes asks students how many of them have learned from their parents, grandparents, or aunts and uncles about the Depression, landing on the moon, World War II or the Civil Rights Movement. If 15 percent of the hands are raised, that’s a good response, she said. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, all children hear such stories, and Greg doesn’t want what has happened to U.S. children’s awareness of history to occur in the places his schools are located.

To hear Greg Mortenson and to have him sign your personal copy of Three Cups of Tea, make plans now to attend the honor society’s 40th Biennial Convention in Indianapolis. For more information and to register, visit http://www.nursingsociety.org/
STTIEvents/BiennialConvention/Pages/GregMortenson.aspx. RNL

James E. Mattson is editor, Reflections on Nursing Leadership.

Reference:
Mortenson, G., & Relin, D. (2007). Three cups of tea. New York: Penguin.