Chapter 22 Summary
“The Enemy Is Ignorance”
Mortenson, Hussein, Apo, and Baig arrive in the Karakoram. It is a familiar place for them, but Kevin Fedarko and his photographer feel as if they have been “dropped at the wild edge of the Earth.” Fedarko is about to be the first reporter to tell the story from both sides of the India-Pakistan conflict, and Greg does everything possible to help him do it. The Korphe villagers are ecstatic to see Dr. Greg again and begin sharing their news and progress since his last visit. A young woman, Jahan, steps into the circle and sits boldly in front of Greg. She reminds him that he told her he would help her achieve her dreams. She is ready for medical school and needs twenty thousand rupees as outlined on a detailed itinerary of anticipated expenses she has prepared. When Greg says he will look over her list and discuss it with her, her reaction is immediate. Her classes begin next week and she says she needs the money immediately. Jahan is the first graduate from his first school, and Greg is impressed with her insistence. He counts out the required rupees (approximately four hundred dollars) and gives them to the woman’s father. Fedarko is amazed at how far things have come when a teenage girl in a Muslim society is bold enough and prepared enough to speak to an American male about her university education. This incident changes the article Fedarko plans to write.
Later, in April, Parade magazine publishes a cover article titled “He Fights Terror With Books” as American troops close in on Saddam Hussein. The reaction is immediate and powerful; it threatens to overwhelm the small organization run from the basement of a Montana bungalow. Two days after the story appears, Greg finds eighty letters in the Central Asia Institute (CAI) post office box. The next day he finds a note telling him to pick up his mail at the counter—all five canvas bags of it. There are four more bags the next day. The response to the Parade magazine article continues for three months. Greg hires a media consultant; she hires a phone bank and increases the bandwidth on the website to accommodate the influx of activity. After eventually reading all his mail, Greg is stunned to realize only one letter was negative. The support came from every kind of political and religious group and individual, including a Jewish teenager who donated more than a thousand dollars of his bar mitzvah money and offered to come to Pakistan and help the Muslim children. By the time the iconic image of Saddam Hussein’s statue is broadcast around the world, Greg has enough money to again make a difference. Over a million dollars will do great good in such a needy place.
First, however, Greg is convinced to make some much-needed changes in the CAI. He rents a small office in town and hires four people to take over scheduling, producing a newsletter, maintaining a website, and maintaining a donor database. Greg finally accepts a raise, for which Tara is especially thankful. She is still concerned for him every time he travels, but she trusts the people who love Greg in Pakistan to keep him as safe as they can; she simply refuses to consider anything but his safe return.
When Greg returns, Suleman is the first to hear of the outpouring of love and support for the Pakistani people. Greg immediately doubles his salary to sixteen hundred dollars a year, enough to make all his dreams—including private school for his son—come true. In...
(This entire section contains 1250 words.)
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Skardu, Greg announces the good news to everyone there, doubling their meager salaries as well. They make some needed repairs on the Land Rover, buy warehouse space to store building supplies, and plan two dozen more schools before Greg starts on his journey to visit work sites across the country. Also before leaving, Greg asks Parvi to explore the possibility of building a hostel in Skardu for students who want to continue their educations but need scholarships and a place to stay. Parvi is thrilled because this is a project he has advocated for years; he is even more thrilled when Greg suggests that the perfect candidate for one of CAI’s first merit-based scholarships is Yasmine, Parvi’s daughter. In the summer of 2003, Greg is re-energized, and projects all over the country are progressing as planned.
In Halde, Mouzafer’s town, there is a problem. The five-room schoolhouse has been successful enough that it is now in the hands of an effective city government. When one man is denied a job as the school’s watchman, he padlocks the school doors in a kind of hostage situation. Greg arrives and has an inspired idea: he takes several sticks of the dynamite Suleman keeps under his seat and hands them to the disgruntled, and now frightened, man. The American tells him he will return tomorrow with a match; if the problem is not resolved by then, he will make an announcement from the mosque that the man intends to blow up their school. “The choice is yours.” The next day students are happily working at their desks, and Greg learns later that the aging but determined Mouzafer issued his own ultimatum: open the school or he will tie the man to a tree and use the dynamite to blow him up. As a punishment for his outrageous act, the man must sweep the school each morning without pay.
Other problems are more difficult, including further clashes with Agha Mubarek, the mullah who declared the second fatwah on Greg. In August the Shariat Court firmly sides with Mortenson and declares the fatwah to be illegitimate. Several new leaders in Pakistan are now sympathetic to Greg’s cause and help him by supporting his efforts to build schools, especially schools for girls. In the months ahead, they would even take military action against those who tried to stop such efforts. Brigadier General Bashir Baz talks with Greg before he returns to America. Bashir is thankful to President Bush for some things but angry at him for others. He claims he is the kind of friend America most needs—a moderate, educated Muslim. The battle for the hearts and minds of the Muslim people is going to be long and difficult, but he is encouraged that “at least one American’s war on terror [is] being fought in an effective fashion.” The Parade magazine donations build nine schools that year, and the other schools across the country are thriving.
In his last days in Skardu, Greg meets Jahan and Tahira, daughter of schoolmaster Hussein, from Korphe. They are the first two scholarship students to continue their educations here. Jahan once had the simple goal to become a health worker; now she has a far loftier ambition. She feels clean and educated in a way she never imagined, and she wants to be a woman who starts a hospital and oversees the health of all women in the region, a very famous woman because she helps her people, a “Superlady.” She announces her plans defiantly, daring Greg to laugh at her lofty goals. He does not laugh; instead, he thinks of her grandfather, Haji Ali, and their struggles to build that first school in Korphe:
Five hundred and eighty letters, twelve rams, and ten years of work was a small price to pay, Mortenson thought, for such a moment.
