Attached is my own brief synopsis of the cover story in today's issue of Parade, the ubiquitous Sunday supplement. If you can get your hands on it, it's the first ray of hope we have seen in the media in weeks -- or perhaps since 9/11 -- regarding Islamic extremism, its impact on our future, and, most importantly, a positive, peaceful way for us to gain some control over that future. If you can't find a hard copy of Parade, there's a glossy slide-and-sound version of the cover story on their website http://www.parade.com/current/coverstory/slideshow.html , but it is edited for fans of TV, not print, news. A Google search on the Central Asia Institute or Greg Mortenson yields plenty of respectable links to validate the legitimacy of the man and his creation. His own site http://www.ikat.org/articles.html lists several articles and interviews whose authenticity is easy to verify. If you have a charity budget during these harsh times, and if you feel as we do that the world is spinning out of control because its leaders are still trying to bungle their way through the Paradigm Shift, we urge you to join us and support the Central Asia Institute and its thoroughly post-Industrial-Era, grass-roots approach to making our own planet happier and safer for all of its inhabitants. ------------------------------------------------------------------ HE FIGHTS TERROR WITH BOOKS by Kevin Fedarko Abstracted from Parade Magazine, April 6, 2003 In 1993 Greg Mortenson, a former medic in the U.S. Army, was climbing K-2, the world's second tallest mountain, located near the point where India, Pakistan, and China meet. He fell ill and two of the Pakistani porters led him down to their home village, Korphe, which had no medical facilities -- or schools. Apparently all he needed was rest, but while he was recovering, he watched the village's (male) children in their dedicated, daily struggle to take lessons from one of the few literate elders, by scratching letters in the dirt with sticks. The entire village couldn't raise the dollar per day needed to hire a teacher. When he got home to Bozeman, Montana, he vowed to repay their kindness by building and staffing a school. He sent out 580 letters to celebrities... and got back one $100 check from newsman Tom Brokaw. He submitted sixteen grant proposals that were all rejected. After selling his car and his mountain-climbing gear his resources totaled $2,000. Then the elementary school children in River Falls, Wisconsin, donated $623 in pennies, piquing the media's interest. The Central Asia Institute was founded on that day, and as soon as it reached its first goal of $12,000 in 1996, it was able to build the school in Korphe. Since then it has built 28 schools in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan, for an average cost of $15,000 -- half of what it costs the government of Pakistan and a quarter of the price charged by the World Bank. It's also completed fifteen water projects and four women's vocational centers. Mortenson has seen first-hand the madrasas, schools built by Islamic extremist organizations bankrolled by the Saudis, which are the only source of education in many remote areas, and which, with no exaggeration, can be called terrorist training camps. After talking personally with parents throughout the most destitute corners of the Islamic Mideast, he is convinced that almost all of them, if given a choice, would eagerly send their children to schools with a curriculum that teaches peace, tolerance, and secularism. He is also convinced that educating women, with a current literacy rate near zero, will reduce infant mortality, childbirth mortality, and the birth rate itself, breaking the cycle of ignorance and poverty that fuels religious extremism. Before Mortenson agrees to build a school in a community, the community must agree to open its doors to both boys and girls. Of the 8,200 children studying in his schools, 3,400 are girls. As he puts it, "You can hand out condoms, build roads and bring in electricity, but nothing will change until the girls are educated. They are the ones who remain at home. They are the ones who instill the values. Educating the girls is a long-term solution to the war on poverty, and that will have a big impact on the war on terrorism." Last year fifth-graders in CAI schools averaged 72% on the exams to qualify for middle school, compared to Pakistan's national average of 44%. Mortenson says, "In the past ten years more than 80,000 Pakistani and Afghani boys who received hard-line religious instruction in the madrasas were fed directly into the ranks of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and other extremist organizations whose agendas range from mere destabilization of the region to outright terrorism. The West has so far failed to recognize that offering an alternative by building secular schools is the cheapest and most effective way to combat terrorism." This afternoon, Mortenson has a meeting with Jahan, now 17, the first girl who learned to read and write in his first school in Korphe. She reminds him that seven years ago, she told him that she wanted to be a doctor. He promised to help, if she would be the first girl to attend school with the boys. Today she understands that becoming a doctor is an intricate, expensive, long-term process, and she won't hold the CAI to a promise that it doesn't have the resources to fulfill. However, Jahan is ready to attend a maternal health-care program, the first step toward that goal and one that she feels a personal connection to, since her own mother died giving birth to her. Mortenson proudly hands over the $400 she needs to enter the program. ------------------------------------------------- Love and Peace, Fraggle Rocker
interesting article... I have a few comments about this post: First I think it is admirable how this man has helped these kids and the society they live in. Also, I think that any reasonable way we can reduce the number or ability of terrorists is good for America and the world. Secondly, I would like to clear up some things. Although, I do agree that ignorance and poverty probably does influence or fuel the harmfulness that certain religious extremists cause and they probably to a certain degree influence a person to become and stay a religious extremist, I would not go to the length of saying that they cause religious extremism and that if they were taken away it would cause somebody to not be an extremist anymore. For one, one assumption here is that extremism is an ignorant way of being, which it may or may not be, eventhough I do think that you can put together a pretty good argument that it is. Secondly, I am not sure that if you were just to take away poverty for example, you would automatically stop people from being extremists, because it is what they believe in and they might not want to change what they believe, which I know is probably quite a scary thought for most Americans, who see extremism as a disease that must be cured. I don't think that America is wrong for wanting to make these people see the light and to change them, but I do think it is dangerous to look at extremism like a disease of the mind, to think that our way is the best and only way of being and doing things and to assume that everyone wants to be like us, without also doing some critical thinking and realizing that what we might be up against is more than just educating a nation of "backward" people who are little more than "adult-children" and who just need a little "molding" and "support" here and there. Thirdly, This article says that woman provide the children with morals but I would like to point out that in mostly every society men instill values in children also. Fourthly, this article really gives testament to the power of teaching and education, wherever it is practiced or applied.
