With years of mountain-climbing experience, Greg Mortenson felt he was capable of conquering the Himalayan giant known as K2. Although Mount Everest is higher, the "savage peak" is widely considered a more difficult climb.
That's exactly why the former U.S. Army medic chose it to pay tribute to his deceased sister, Christa, whose necklace he planned to place on its icy peak. He made his attempt in 1993, but the "mountain of mountains" denied him his victory.
The Minnesota-born climber had nearly reached the top of the 28,267 foot-high mountain when clouds moved in and forced him to turn back. Of the more than 50 climbers who have perished on K2, nearly half the deaths have occurred on the way down.
Exhausted and disoriented by a deep sense of failure and the dizzying effect of the thin atmosphere, Mortenson started his descent. Without realizing it he became separated from his climbing partners and soon was lost.
What happened next became the grist for the 2006 best-selling book "Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace? One School at a Time." Written by Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, it relates how getting lost in the extremely roughed terrain of Pakistan's Karakoram ultimately led to the building of many schools in rural areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Mortenson will be participating in the 14th annual Virginia Festival of the Book, which opens Wednesday and runs through March 30. In addition to visiting local schools, he will take the stage at the University of Virginia's Culbreth Theatre at 6 p.m. Thursday to talk about his work building schools.
"I think people are really hungry for examples of how individuals can make changes for the better in the world," said Nancy Damon, program director of the festival, which is produced by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.
"I think that's one of the reasons why 'Three Cups of Tea' affects people so strongly. It really shows the positive power a book can have.
"And we're having a panel talking about a book people felt has done a lot of damage. The book is the 1926 publication 'Mongrel Virginians,' which was a disparaging treatise on the Monacan Indians in Amherst County.
"We also have an incredible lineup this year of popular fiction writers, such as Homer Hickam, Adriana Trigiani and Walter Mosley. We have a lot of Virginia history books this year as well, which we're very pleased about."
In addition to the Culbreth Theatre event, Mortenson will be talking about his mountain-climbing experiences at Blue Ridge Mountain Sports on Friday at 4 p.m. He has climbed some of the most challenging mountains in the world, but K2 likely came the closest to taking his life.
After becoming separated from the other climbers, Mortenson wandered for days through the rocky terrain. When he stumbled into the small village of Korphe, he was near collapse from starvation and exhaustion.
Although the people in the village were extremely poor, they took the disheveled foreigner in and nursed him back to health. While recuperating, Mortenson had the opportunity to see how children in the village received their rudimentary education.
Because the villagers couldn't afford to pay a teacher the going rate of a dollar a day, they shared one three times a week with another village. There was no school building in Korphe so the students, nearly 100 of them, sat or knelt on the often frozen ground to learn their lessons.
Math problems were scratched into the ground with sticks or marked onto slate boards with improvised ink made from mud and water. Perhaps what touched Mortenson the most was the determination he saw in the children to learn. Before leaving the people who had saved his life, Mortenson made them a promise. "I will build a school," he told them, and he gave the villagers his word on it.
After returning home to Berkeley, Calif., Mortenson started working to fulfill his promise. He got a job as a nurse in an emergency room, and to save money for the future school he lived out of an aging Buick he called La Bamba.
Mortenson calculated he would need $12,000 to build a five-room schoolhouse. He mailed 580 letters to politicians and celebrities asking for their financial help in his endeavor. The letter-writing campaign generated one check for a $100 from television news anchor Tom Brokaw. Mortenson had trouble convincing adults about the worth of his effort, but young people understood immediately.
Mortenson's mother was the principal of Westside Elementary School in River Falls, Wis. Soon after her son returned to the States, she invited him to the school to talk to the students about what he was trying to do to help students on the other side of the world.
After the talk the Westside students took it upon themselves to start a "Pennies for Pakistan" fundraiser. In a matter of weeks they filled two 40-gallon trashcans with 62,345 pennies. When students at the Village School in Charlottesville heard that Mortenson was going to be attending the book festival, they started a penny drive of their own. Like many people who have read the best-selling book, they were inspired to help.
"My daughter gave me the book 'Three Cups of Tea' for Father's Day last June," said Proal Heartwell, cofounder of the private school for girls in fifth through eighth grades. "As an educator I was very taken with his story.
"When we heard Mr. Mortenson was coming here we initiated this 'Pennies for Peace' campaign. During his visit we're going to give him a nice check on behalf of the kids, their families and the broader community."
At last count the students had collected an estimated 110,000 pennies in the jars they have distributed in businesses around town. The goal is to raise $5,000, which will pay to operate one school in Pakistan for a year.
The students at Westside Elementary School have inspired many other schools to get involved in the Pennies for Peace program. Since it started in 1994 more than 8 million pennies have been collected. More can be learned about this program at www. penniesforpeace.org.
When Mortenson received a check for $623.45 from the kids at Westside, his spirits lifted. Then he received a check for $12,000 to cover the entire cost of constructing the school from wealthy physicist Jean Hoerni.
Today a yellow schoolhouse with red trim stands in Korphe, but it was just the beginning. With Hoerni's help, Mortenson founded the Central Asia Institute, which has the stated mission of promoting and providing "community-based education and literacy programs, especially for girls, in remote mountain regions of Central Asia."
In addition to building more than 60 schools so far, the nonprofit organization fully or partially supports more than 560 teachers. Much of the support CAI continues to receive can be directly attributed to the book.
"I think 'Three Cups of Tea' really speaks to how powerful literacy is," said Heartwell, who teaches English at Village School. "Our eighth-graders have been reading the book, and to be honest when we started it they were a bit skeptical about Mortenson's efforts, and they couldn't really understand what was motivating him.
"But as they read along in the book they became really quite taken with his experience and commitment. I think they've really been able to see that one person can make a huge difference.
"And through the book they're learning about a culture and region they know very little about. I think it has also heightened their awareness of extremism, and how promoting literacy and education is a way to combat extremism, and is a blow against terrorism."
Books have also been used to promote extreme agendas or beliefs. "Mongrel Virginians" by Arthur H. Estabrook and Ivan E. McDougle is a disturbing example of this.
What makes the book all the more chilling is that the two men weren't fringe fanatics, but respected scholars. This gave the book a certain amount of legitimacy.
The program, "One Bad Book: The Disturbing Legacy of 'Mongrel Virginians,' " will be held at 4 p.m. Saturday in the City Council Chambers at 605 E. Main St.
Karenne Wood, director of the Virginia Indian Heritage Program, will join Tribal Council members Sharon Bryant and Diane Johns Shields to discuss the book.
"The book was kind of an underpinning of the eugenics movement to promote the idea that racial purity was a good thing," Wood said. "I think the authors absolutely believed in what they were writing.
"In general the book said, 'These people aren't as good as us, and here's the proof.' There was a lot of discrimination against the Monacan Indian community in Amherst County as it was, and this book provided more fodder.
"What the book did was split the community. Those who had cooperated in trust with these researchers were labeled by the others as 'sellouts.' "
Wood said the authors of the book used codes with the intention of preserving the anonymity of the people in the study. But the community wasn't large, and residents easily deciphered the codes. The book wasn't designed with the general reading public in mind, but it became well known within certain circles. Some readers were like Virginia physician Dr. Walter Plecker, an avowed white supremacist and advocate of eugenics, who used the book to promote his views. There were plenty of others who were outraged by the book, and spoke out against it.
"When 'Mongrel Virginians' first came out, the well-known anthropologist Frank Speck reviewed it, and trashed it," Wood said. "But the book still did a lot of damage, and one of the things we're going to be talking about is how books like this can be used as weapons.
"I'm against censorship in general, because it can be detrimental to the freedom of ideas we all cherish. But I also believe researchers have a certain responsibility to their subjects.
"I'm hoping this program will draw attention to aspects of American Indian history in Virginia that are less well known. And we also want to talk about how Virginia has changed.
"The whole American Indian experience is now considered a positive aspect of our history, and people are proud of it."
A full schedule of events for the 14th annual Virginia Festival of the Book, March 26-30, is at www. vabook.org. Those wishing to attend Mortenson's talk at Culbreth Theatre at 6 p.m. Thursday can pick up free tickets at the venue one hour beforehand. No reserved or pre-ordered tickets are available.
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