by Cate Montana
BOZEMAN, MT - KORPHE, Pakistan – For 600 years the tiny village of Korphe remained isolated from the rest of the world, perched high on a cliff over the Braldu River deep in the inaccessible reaches of northern Pakistan’s Karakoram mountain range. The people of Korphe toiled for a meager existence, channeling melt waters from the glaciers into rocky fields and apricot orchards. The nearest doctor was a week’s walk away. The village children suffered from a form of malnutrition, and one in three babies died before reaching their first birthday.
In September 1993, the world of Korphe changed, and so did the life of an exhausted American mountain climber. Separated from his team after a failed summit attempt on K2, the world’s second highest mountain known to climbers as “The Savage Peak,” Greg Mortenson was lost and didn’t even know it.
At the end of his descent and his strength, he wandered near the tiny village. By the time he reached its walls he was surrounded by at least fifty wide-eyed children. No foreigner had been there before, but the nurmadhar, or village chief, stood at the outskirts gate and welcomed him.
The days spent slowly recuperating as an honored guest in Haji Ali’s primitive but gracious household impacted Mortenson deeply. But it was his eventual visit to the village’s school that changed his life. On a vast open ledge eight hundred feet above the Braldu, eighty-two children, four of them girls, knelt on the frosty ground, scratching multiplication tables in the half-frozen dirt with sticks.
Watching the children studying with no supervision, getting an education through sheer will, on the spot Mortenson made an equally tough commitment. He told Haji Ali he would come back to Korphe and build a school for them, no matter what.
Promises and lessons
 |
Sleeping in his old burgundy Buick as a way to save rent money for a return to Pakistan, Mortenson threw himself into fundraising the estimated $12,000 it would take to build the Korphe school. Over the course of a year he contacted 580 U.S. celebrities and philanthropists and filed for 16 grants. All the grants were refused, Tom Brokaw sent a check for $100, and a group of elementary school students at one school raised $623.45. Finally a former climber and businessman heard about his cause and cut him a check for the full $12,000.
As an American in Pakistan, language barriers, custom barriers, and religious barriers blocked Mortenson every step of the way. Korphe was cut off from the world by the Braldu and there was no bridge to get building supplies across. Finding reliable contractors and suppliers was a nightmare. Determined to milk every penny of his funds, Mortenson micromanaged everything. Three years later Korphe’s school was only four walls constructed to the roofline, perched on the high plateau.
“One day Haji Ali approached me with a ‘Son we need to talk look,’ and pulled me aside,” says Mortenson. “Often when an elder is admonishing you or trying to teach you a lesson it kind of becomes like a proverb. So he used a very poetic and yet very harsh language with me and he said, ‘We've been here for hundreds of years and we’re grateful to Allah for what you're doing to bring the candle of light to our people. But you need to do one thing. You need to sit down and be quiet and let us do the work.’ And then he took my plumb line, my receipts, and my records and everything I had. He had a latchkey around his neck and he locked it all up in an earthen locker in his house along with his prayer beads and British musket gun. Then he came back and said, ‘Everything will be just fine.’ And of course I was horrified. But in six weeks the school got built.”
