On the seat of the last chair in the last row, next to the display of digital watches, Mortenson found an envelope torn from the back of a CAI newsletter. Inside was a personal check for twenty thousand dollars.
Mortenson didn’t face a sea of empty seats every week. In the Pacific Northwest particularly, the outdoor community had begun to embrace him, especially after the details of his story began to trickle out to the public. In February 1999, the Oregonian became the first major American newspaper to tell Mortenson’s story. Outdoor writer Terry Richard drew his readers’ attention to the former climber’s unlikely success scaling a different sort of peak from the physical kind. “It’s a part of the world where Americans are mistrusted and often hated,” Richard wrote, “but not Greg Mortenson, a 41-year-old resident of Montana whose life’s work is to build schools in remote villages of Pakistan’s mountain valleys.”
Richard related Mortenson’s mission to his readers, arguing that aid work half a world away was having more of an effect on their lives than most Americans realized. “A politically volatile area, rural Pakistan is a breeding ground for terrorists who share anti-American sentiment,” Richard explained. “Illiterate young boys often wind up in [terrorist] camps,” he quoted Mortenson as saying. “When we increase literacy, we substantially reduce tensions.”
“In one of the world’s most volatile regions, “[Mortenson’s] work already is making a difference,” Richard concluded.
The following month, San Francisco Examiner travel editor John Flinn wrote a piece promoting Mortenson’s upcoming lecture in the Bay Area by summarizing his remarkable life story, concluding, “It’s something to think about the next time you ask: What difference can one person make?” That winter, when Mortenson gave his slide show in Portland and San Francisco, event organizers had to turn hundreds of people away from packed venues.
By the millennium, Mortenson and the CAI had become a cause to which many of America’s leading mountaineers were rallying. Before his October 1999 death in a freak avalanche on Nepal’s Shisha-pangma, Mortenson’s neighbor and friend Alex Lowe, at the time perhaps the world’s most respected alpinist, introduced Mortenson at a Montana fundraiser. “While most of us are trying to scale new peaks,” Lowe told an audience of climbers, “Greg has quietly been moving even greater mountains on his own. What he has accomplished, with pure tenacity and determination, is incredible. His kind of climb is one we should all attempt.”
Lowe’s message echoed throughout the mountaineering world. “A lot of us think about helping, but Mortenson just does it,” says famed climber Jack Tackle, who donated twenty thousand dollars to help CAI establish the Jafarabad girls’ elementary school in the Upper Shigar Valley.
But the more beloved Mortenson became in Pakistan, and the more admiration Mortenson inspired among the mountaineering community, the more he frustrated the people who worked with him in America.
When he wasn’t bouncing down dirt roads in Pakistan or hauling his bags to slide shows in his own country, Mortenson jealously guarded his time with his family in Bozeman and cloaked himself in the silence of his basement.
“Even when he was home, we often wouldn’t hear from Greg for weeks,” says former CAI board chairman Tom Vaughan. “And he wouldn’t return phone calls or e-mails. The board had a discussion about trying to make Greg account for how he spent his time, but we realized that would never work. Greg just does whatever he wants.”
“What we really needed to do was train a few Greg Juniors,” says Hoerni’s widow, Jennifer Wilson, “some people Greg could delegate projects to. But he refused to do that. He said we didn’t have enough money to rent an office or hire staff. And then he’d just bog down in the details of one project and neglect another. That’s why I decided to distance myself from CAI. He accomplished a lot. But I felt we could do so much more if Greg agreed to run CAI more responsibly.”
“Let’s be honest,” says Tom Vaughan. “The fact is the CAI is Greg. I didn’t mind rubber-stamping whatever he wanted to work on. But without Greg, the CAI is finished. The risks he takes in that part of the world I understand—that’s part of the job. But I began to get angry about the terrible way he took care of himself. He stopped climbing and exercising. He stopped sleeping. He began to gain so much weight that he didn’t even look like a mountaineer anymore. I understand that he decided to pour everything into his work,” Vaughan says, “But if he drops dead of a heart attack what’s the point?”
Reluctantly, Mortenson agreed to hire an assistant, Christine Slaughter, to work with him a few hours each day organizing his basement, which even he could see was becoming an embarrassing mess. But throughout the winter of 2000, Mortenson was too alarmed by CAI’s dwindling funds—their bank balance had dipped below one hundred thousand dollars—to expand CAI’s American operations any further. “I mean, I’d gotten to the point where I could put up a school that would educate a village for generations for about twelve thousand dollars,” Mortenson says. “Most of our staff in Pakistan were thrilled to make four hundred or five hundred dollars a year. It was hard to imagine paying someone an American salary when that money could do so much more over there.”
Mortenson was then earning an annual salary of twenty-eight thousand dollars. Coupled with Tara’s meager income as a part-time clinical psychologist at Montana State, they were just managing to tread water with their monthly expenses. But with CAI under serious financial strain, Mortenson says he couldn’t, in good conscience, have accepted more, even if the board had offered him a raise.
The idea of a single rich donor solving all his problems with one flourish of a pen lodged in Mortenson’s mind. Wealthy people aren’t easily pried apart from their fortunes. He had learned that much since the comedy of the 580 letters. But Jean Hoerni had also taught him how much difference a single large donation could make. When a potential donor in Atlanta began calling CAI’s office dangling monetary bait, Mortenson bit down on the hook and booked a flight.
“I’ve been saving money all my life,” the elderly widow explained to Mortenson on the phone. “I’ve accumulated a fortune with at least six zeros behind it and after I read about the work you’re doing I know what I was saving it for. Come down to Atlanta so we can discuss my donation.”
At the Hartsfield International Airport arrivals hall, Mortenson switched on his cell phone and retrieved a message instructing him to take a shuttle to a hotel fifteen minutes away, then walk to a remote parking lot at the edge of the hotel’s grounds.
In the lot, he found seventy-eight-year-old Vera Kurtz hunched over the wheel of her elderly Ford Fairlane. The trunk and rear seat were jammed with old newspapers and tin cans, so he climbed into the passenger seat and wedged his carry-on bag between the dashboard and his chest. “She’d sent me on this goose chase so she could avoid paying a few dollars to park at the airport. And when I saw that she couldn’t even bear to part with the papers and cans in her car, I should have turned around and taken a plane home, but that line about the six zeros messed up my judgment. It made me get in and close the door.”
While Mortenson squeezed the handles of his bag, Vera drove the wrong way down one-way streets, shaking her fist at the drivers who honked at her in warning. In her 1950s ranch home, Mortenson sidestepped through towering rows of decades-old magazines and newspapers until he reached Vera’s kitchen table, beside a plugged sink full of filmy gray water. “She unscrewed a few of those minibottles of whiskey that she’d been collecting on airplanes for years, poured us a drink, and presented me with a bouquet of roses that looked recycled,” Mortenson says. “The flowers were brown and almost completely dead.”
After a decent interval, Mortenson tried to steer the conversation toward Vera’s donation to the CAI, but his host had her own agenda. She laid out her plans for the next three days—a visit to the High Museum of Art, a stroll through the Atlanta Botanical Garden, and three talks she had arranged for Mortenson at a local library, a community college, and a travel club. Seventy-tw
o hours had never offered such a bleak prospect to Mortenson before. He was weighing whether to stick them out when a knock on the door announced the arrival of a masseur Vera had hired.
“You work too hard, Greg,” Vera told him, as the masseur set up his folding table in a clearing at the center of her living room. “You deserve to relax.”
“They both expected me to strip naked right there,” Mortenson says, “but I excused myself and went into the bathroom to think. I figured I’d been through enough getting CAI up and running that I could just roll with whatever Vera did for the next three days, especially if there was the chance of a big donation at the end of the tunnel.”
Mortenson fished around in her cabinet for something large enough to wrap around his waist. Most of the towels Vera had stockpiled bore the fading logos of hotels, and were too small to cover him. He pulled a graying sheet from the linen closet, tucked it as securely as he could around his waist, and shuffled out to endure his massage.
At 2:00 a.m., Mortenson was out cold, snoring on Vera’s sagging mattress, when the lights flicked on, waking him. Vera had insisted on sleeping on her couch and offering Mortenson the bed. He opened his eyes to the phantasmagorical vision of the seventy-eight-year-old Vera standing over him in a transparent negligee.
“She was right there in front of me,” Mortenson says. “I was too shocked to say anything.”
“I’m looking for my socks,” Vera said, fishing interminably through the drawers of her dresser as Mortenson pulled a pillow over his head and cringed beneath it.
Back on the airplane to Bozeman, empty-handed, Mortenson realized that his hostess had never intended to donate any money. “She didn’t even ask one question about my work, or the children of Pakistan,” Mortenson says. “She was just a lonely woman who wanted a visitor, and I told myself I’d better be smarter in the future.”
But Mortenson continued to snap at the bait wealthy admirers of his dangled. After a well-attended speech at the Mountain Film Festival in Banff, Mortenson accepted an invitation from Tom Lang, a wealthy local contractor, who hinted at a large donation he was prepared to make, and offered to hold a CAI fundraising party at his estate the following evening.
Lang had designed his ten-thousand-square-foot home himself, down to the faux marble paint on the walls of the great room where guests mingled with glasses of the cheap wine so often served by the very wealthy, and the twelve-foot-high white plaster statues of poodles that sat vigil at both ends of his twenty-foot fireplace.
Lang displayed Mortenson to his guests with the same pride of ownership with which he pointed out his custom bathroom fixtures and the fireplace poodles. And though Mortenson placed a large stack of CAI pamphlets prominently on the buffet table, at evening’s end, he hadn’t raised a cent from Lang for CAI. Having learned his lesson from Vera Kurtz, Mortenson pressed his host for details about his donation. “We’ll work all that out tomorrow,” Lang told him. “But first you’re going dogsledding.”
“Dogsledding?”
“Can’t come to Canada without giving it a whirl,” Lang said.
In a warming hut an hour west of Banff, where they sat after Mortenson had been dragged by a team of huskies on a cursory loop through the woods by himself, Mortenson spent the better part of the following afternoon listening to the man’s self-aggrandizing epic about how a plucky contractor, armed only with grit and determination, had conquered the Banff housing market.
Mortenson, whose mother, Jerene, had flown from Wisconsin to hear his speech, hardly saw her son during her three-day visit. Mortenson, unsurprisingly, returned to Montana empty-handed.
“It just makes me sick to see Greg kowtowing to all those rich people,” Jerene Mortenson says. “They should be bowing down to him.”
By the spring of 2000, Tara Bishop had tired of her husband’s flitting across the country on fool’s errands when he wasn’t away in Pakistan. Seven months pregnant with their second child, she called a summit meeting with her husband at their kitchen table.
“I told Greg I love how passionate he is about his work,” Tara says. “But I told him he had a duty to his family, too. He needed to get more sleep, get some exercise, and get enough time at home to have a life with us.” Until then, Mortenson had left home to be in Pakistan for three or four months at a time. “We agreed to set the limit at two months,” Tara says. “After two months things just get too weird around here without him.”
Mortenson also promised his wife he’d learn to manage his time better. The CAI board set aside a small budget each year for Mortenson to take college courses on subjects like management, development, and Asian politics. “I never had the time to take classes,” Mortenson says. “So I spent the money on books. A lot of the time, when people thought I was just sitting in my basement doing nothing, I was reading those books. I would start my day at 3:30 a.m., trying to learn more about development theory finance, and how to be a better manager.”
But the lessons he’d learned in the Karakoram had taught him there were some answers you couldn’t find in print. So Mortenson designed a crash course on development for himself. From his reading, he decided that the two finest rural development programs then running in the world were in the Philippines and Bangladesh. For a rare untethered month he left Pakistan and Bozeman behind and flew to Southeast Asia.
In Cavite, an hour south of Manila, Mortenson visited the Institute of Rural Reconstruction, run by John Rigby, a friend of Lila Bishop’s. Rigby taught Mortenson how to set up tiny businesses for the rural poor, like bicycle taxis and cigarette stands, that could quickly turn a profit on a small investment.
In the country that had once been called East Pakistan, Mortenson visited BARRA, the Bangladesh Rural Reconstruction Association. “A lot of people call Bangladesh the armpit of Asia,” Mortenson says, “because of its extreme poverty. But the girls’ education initiative is hugely successful there. I knocked on doors and visited NGOs that had been in the business of educating girls for a long time. I watched as amazing, strong women held village meetings and worked to empower their daughters.
“They were following the same philosophy as I was,” Mortenson says. “Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen’s idea that you can change a culture by giving its girls the tools to grow up educated so they can help themselves. It was amazing to see the idea in action, working so well after only a generation, and it fired me up to fight for girls’ education in Pakistan.”
On the bumpy Biman Airways flight from Dacca to Calcutta, Mortenson had his notion of the desperate need to educate rural girls confirmed. The lone foreigner on the flight, he was shepherded by stewardesses to first class, where he sat among fifteen attractive Bangladeshi girls in bright new saris. “They were young and terrified,” Mortenson says. “They didn’t know how to use their seatbelts or silverware and when we got to the airport, I watched helplessly as corrupt officials whisked them off the plane and around the customs guards. I couldn’t do anything for them. I could only imagine the kind of horrible life of prostitution they were heading to.”
From the headlines of newspapers on stands at Calcutta International Airport, Mortenson learned that one of his heroes, Mother Teresa, had died after a long illness. He had a brief layover in Calcutta before heading home and decided to try to pay her his respects.
“Hashish? Heroin? Girl massage? Boy massage?” the taxi driver said, taking Mortenson’s arm inside the arrivals hall, where he wasn’t supposed to have access to passengers. “What you like? Anything, no problem.”
Mortenson laughed, impressed by this shady wisp of a man’s determination. “Mother Teresa just died. I’d like to visit her,” Mortenson said. “Can you take me there?”
“No problem,” he said, waggling his head as he took Mortenson’s bag.
The driver smoked furiously as they rolled along in his black and yellow Ambassador cab, leaning so far out the window that Mortenson had an unobstructed view of Calcutta’s doomsday traffic through the windshield. They stopped at a f
lower market where Mortenson gave the driver ten dollars’ worth of rupees and asked him to select an appropriate funeral arrangement. “He left me sitting there, sweating, and came back at least thirty minutes later, carrying a huge gaudy mass of carnations and roses in his arms,” Mortenson says. “We could hardly squeeze it into the backseat.”
At dusk, outside the Missionaries of Charity Motherhouse, hundreds of hushed mourners crowded the gates, holding candles and arranging offerings of fruit and incense on the pavement.
The driver got out and rattled the metal gate loudly. This Sahib has come all the way from America to pay his respects! He shouted in Bengali. Open up! An elderly chokidar guarding the entrance stood up and returned with a young nun in a blue habit who looked the dusty traveler and his explosion of flowers up and down before waving him inside. Walking distastefully ahead, she led Mortenson down a dark hallway echoing with distant prayer, and pointed him toward a bathroom.
“Why don’t you washing up first?” she said in Slavic-accented English.
She lay on a simple cot, at the center of a bright room full of flickering devotional candles. Mortenson gently nudged other bouquets aside, making room for his gaudy offering, and took a seat against a wall. The nun, backing out the door, left him alone with Mother Teresa.
“I sat in the corner with no idea what to do,” Mortenson says. “Since I was a little boy she’d been one of my heroes.”
An ethnic Albanian born to a successful contractor in Kosovo, Mother Teresa began her life as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. From the age of twelve, she said, she felt a calling to work with the poor, and began training for missionary work. As a teenager she joined the Sisters of Our Lady of Loreto, an Irish order of nuns, because of their commitment to provide education for girls. For two decades, she taught at St. Mary’s High School in Calcutta, eventually becoming its principal. But in 1946, she said, she received a calling from God instructing her to serve the “poorest of the poor.” In 1948, after receiving the special dispensation of Pope Pius XII to work independently, she founded an open-air school for Calcutta’s homeless children.