Eight days from now, on March 23, 2009, Greg Mortenson, the hero of Three Cups of Tea, will receive Pakistan's highest civil award, the Star of Pakistan, for his courage and humanitarian effort to promote education and literacy in the rural areas of Pakistan for the past 15 years.
There is a certain irony in this. In the passage we heard a few minutes ago,* Mortenson listens to the children sing the Pakistani national anthem on that day 15 years ago when he first stumbled upon what would become his life's mission.
As he listened to the children sing the words, "This flag of crescent and star leads the way to progress and perfection…," he found himself fuming: Why is it that the Pakistani government will pour money into its costly, ongoing military standoff with India to control the nearby border lands, but will not spend even a paltry sum to elevate the lives of the people who actually live on that land?
"Why," he wondered at the time, "couldn't the flag of crescent and star lead these children such a small distance toward progress and perfection" by providing them a school teacher?"
He returns to Berkeley, California, with virtually no money to his name, but seized with a mission. He manages to get part-time nursing work and, living out of his car, he begins his effort to raise money for the Korphe village school by banging out individualized solicitation letters to potential benefactors on an IBM typewriter rented at the neighborhood copy shop. The keys of the typewriter are too small for his huge hands, so he keeps making blunders like, "Anything you can contribute would be a bledding," instead of a "blessing," and then has to throw the letter out and start all over.
From these incredibly humble beginnings, and by a strange combination of single-minded advocacy and a labyrinthine path of leads and detours that often bring fortuitous connections, he manages to fund and oversee the building of not only the one school in Korphe, but now, 15 years later, 78 more schools throughout rural Pakistan and Afghanistan.
You'll have to read Three Cups of Tea to really get the whole amazing account. But what I wanted to pay attention to today is the idea of fierce desire: the fierce desire that is not stopped by improbability or inconvenience, the fierce desire to learn demonstrated by the children who sit on the frosty ground in disciplined study every day, with or without their teacher present; the fierceness of Mortensen's determination to fulfill his promise; the intensity of commitment that most significant creative endeavors call forth from their creators if there is to be any real achievement.
In the dictionary, some of the antonyms for fierce are "tame, mild, docile, unthreatening…."
For those of us who love peace, let's beware that our love of peace is not a docile, tame, or entirely unthreatening peacefulness. If this story holds any truth, even the desire for peace must be fierce if it is to be a life-giving, creative peace.
Over time, Mortenson has come to recognize that the education of girls in particular is crucial to peace and economic development. He writes: "You can drop bombs, hand out condoms, build roads, or put in electricity, but until the girls are educated, a society won't change."
Until the girls are educated, a society won't change…. It is as if much of the world is missing half of its intelligence, and until we recover that half, we won't be able to solve the problems we're facing.
Victoria Safford is a Unitarian Universalist minister whose ministry and writing I greatly admire. There is a short reflection she wrote called Women In Loud Shoes, written at a time when the Taliban had full control in Afghanistan.
She describes a visit to a hospital to see one of members of the congregation. She inadvertently manages to park in the hospital complex at the farthest possible point from where she's actually trying to get to, and has to walk for what seems like miles through the parking garage and a maze of hospital corridors.
As she makes her pilgrimage from the car to her distant destination, she becomes aware of how loudly the clickety-clack of her heeled shoes is echoing through the spaces, announcing her presence. Sounding either overly important or clumsy, she's not sure, but there's no denying the fact that she coming, she's here, she's walking through this space.
As she walks, she remembers reading an article about the many offenses for which the Taliban rulers might arrest and imprison people. Among these crimes was listed "women walking in loud shoes." Can you believe that? For walking in loud shoes, and thus, I would imagine, for making her presence known, a woman could be seized off the street or from her home and thrown into a cell. It suggests to me that she is not really supposed to exist.
Safford writes: "I did try to go respectfully on tiptoe when I got to floors where patients might be sleeping, but I have to confess that in the empty hallways, the stairwells, the corridors … I wanted see just how loud those fancy shoes could be. I stamped on the tiles … a noisy prayer and a blessing for the Afghan women."
She ends her reflection with this: "Once you realize that walking in loud shoes, or any shoes at all, or simply walking, safely, as we do every day, is a privilege and a luxury, then the burden is on you. The burden of response, of giving back and taking risks for what is right, the burden of courage and clear speaking and clear thinking, the burden of gratitude and compassion is on you, and one thing can lead to something else."
As we hear the difficult news from Afghanistan, it is hard know-at least it is for me to know-what the right policy would be and what the right course of action is for our military there. But when I am reminded of the oppression inflicted by the Taliban upon women and girls in particular, I am grateful for anything that can defeat and disempower them from inflicting their perverse notion of a holy life upon others. To know what blossoming becomes possible when the burka is thrown off-at least the psychological burka of invisibility is thrown off-is heartbreakingly inspiring.
On the website of Mortenson's organization, the Central Asia Institute, there is a really wonderful video called "The Girl Effect." It begins by asking,
The world is a mess: Poverty, AIDS, war…. So, what else is new? But what if there was an unexpected solution that could turn this sinking ship around? Would you even know it if you saw it? It's not the Internet, it's not science, it's not the government, it's not money … it's … a GIRL.
And it goes on to show the a kind of chain reaction of change that can occur when a girl, illiterate and in abject poverty, with nothing before her but marriage, children, and manual labor, is given a chance to go to school. Drop the spark of education into her hungry, hungry mind, and possibility explodes.
In the book Three Cups of Tea, there are moving stories about the very young women who become the first educated women in their villages, sometimes in an initial atmosphere of severe disapproval in the village culture. But the aching desire of some future-looking parents to see their daughters have expanded possibilities for their lives, combined with the daughter's fierce determination and discipline, enabled by the presence of a schools that Mortenson has built or is building, ignites that chain reaction.
In time, maybe the girl becomes a medical practitioner or an engineer, all the other girls look up to her and, envisioning what they might become, they study hard. She gains the respect of the village leadership. Even the men begin to listen to her and accept her counsel at meetings, and new kinds of economic and social potential begin to unfold in the community.
Although the world of these villages is extremely harsh and strenuous in comparison with our own, it is in many ways a simpler world than ours. There, small changes can have dramatic effects. When we have so much choice, and so much distraction, and so much noisy complexity, it can be hard to know where to apply our energies if we want to make a difference.
But perhaps what really counts, what really makes the difference, is that quality of fierce desire. One must have some ardor, some fire in the belly or in the heart. Even if it's a quiet ferocity, some ferocity is needed to build anything or to turn a sinking ship around.
Has there ever been a calling your life that awakened fierce desire? What endeavor, what vision, might call forth fierceness in you? And when you feel it, how will you keep it alive? How will you sustain and protect it in those long stretches when any satisfaction of progress seems to recede from your grasp?
And I wonder, is there something in our life together, our journey together, as a faith community, for which we could join one another in a kind of fierce and focused determination? Something we want to build, material or spiritual or relational. Something worthy that we want to create, something that will need our ferocity, our ardor, our fire? And how will we sustain it in the long periods when progress seems at a standstill?
Greg Mortenson is a mountain climber. His whole adventure started with an almost fatal attempt to climb K2, the second-highest mountain in the world after Everest. Mountain climbing is a fierce endeavor, requiring extraordinary endurance and focus. Undoubtedly his mountain-climbing background equipped him with some of the character qualities that have made his current work possible and successful.
So perhaps it is fitting to close with these words, words that may be familiar to you, by another mountain climber, William Hutchison Murray, from The Scottish Himalaya Expedition, 1951:
When I said that nothing had been done I erred in one important matter. We had definitely committed ourselves, and thus were halfway out of our ruts. We had put down our passage money-booked a sailing to Bombay. This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.
"I have learned," says Murray, "a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets…."
And here I will quote a more complete passage freely translated from Goethe:
Indecision brings its own delays,
And days are lost lamenting over lost days.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute;
What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
May we know boldness, and fierceness, in devotion to our most worthy visions, and, as they say in Muslim lands, Inshallah, God willing, may our worthiest visions in time, become reality.
* The reading is drawn from Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. In this chapter, severely weakened after his failed attempt to climb K2, Mortenson takes a wrong turn and finds himself in the village of Korphe, where the people take him in. As he gradually recovers his strength through the hospitality of the people, he realizes that his nursing training and first aid supplies can provide desperately needed help to people who have virtually no access to medical care. One day, he asks to see the village school.
…Haji Ali led Mortenson up a steep path to a vast open ledge eight hundred feet above the Braldu Valley. The view was exquisite, with the ice giants of the upper Baltoro [glaciers] razored into the blue far above Korphe's gray rock walls. But Mortenson wasn't admiring the scenery.
He was appalled to see eighty-one children-seventy-seven boys, and the four girls who had the pluck to join them, kneeling on the frosty ground, in the open. Haji Ali, avoiding Mortenson's eyes, said that the village had no school, and the Pakistani government didn't provide a teacher. A teacher cost the equivalent of one dollar a day, which was more than the village could afford. So they shared a teacher with the neighboring village of Munjung, and he taught in Korphe three days a week. The rest of the time, the children were left alone to practice the lessons he left behind.
Mortenson watched, his heart in his throat, as the students stood at rigid attention and began their "school day" with the Pakistani national anthem. "Blessed be the sacred land. Happy be the bounteous realm, symbol of high resolve, land of Pakistan…," they sang with sweet raggedness, their breath streaming in air already touched with winter…. After the last note of the anthem had faded, the children sat in a neat circle and began copying their multiplication tables. Most scratched in the dirt with sticks.... The more fortunate had slate boards they wrote on with sticks dipped in a mixture of mud and water.
"Can you imagine a fourth grade class in America, alone without a teacher, sitting quietly and working on their lessons?" Mortenson asks. "I felt like my heart was being torn out. There was a fierceness in their desire to learn, despite how mightily everything was stacked against them…. I knew I had to do something."
But what? He had just enough money to travel … to Islamabad and catch his flight home. In California he could look forward to only sporadic nursing work, and most of his possessions fit in the trunk of … the burgundy, gas-guzzling Buick that was as close as he had to a home. Still, there had to be something.
[As he stood] next to Haji Ali, overlooking the valley, with such a crystalline view of the mountains he'd come halfway around the world to measure himself against, climbing K2 to place a necklace on its summit suddenly seemed beside the point. There was a much more meaningful gesture he could make in honor of his sister's memory.
He put his hands on Haji Ali's shoulders, as the old man had done to him dozens of times since they'd shared their first cup of tea. "I'm going to build you a school," he said, not yet realizing that, with those words, the path of his life had just detoured down a route far more serpentine and arduous that the wrong turns he'd taken since retreating from K2. "I will build you a school," Mortenson said. "I promise."