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"Before Greg Mortenson reveals the most powerful piece of advice ever imparted to him by his 12-year-old daughter, Amira, he wants to chat a bit about whether or not he&amp;#039;s a bad dad. A former mountain climber and emergency room nurse, Mortenson, 51, has spent the past 16 years as a full-time humanitarian. He builds schools for desperately poor children in ruggedly remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, gently but effectively persuading village elders to embrace equal education for girls in a part of the planet not always open to that notion. The only downside to this world-mending work, chronicled in the hugely popular book Three Cups of Tea, is that he spends five months a year far from his wife, daughter, and 8-year-old son, overseeing projects abroad or crisscrossing the country giving fund-raising talks.  &amp;quot;One thing that&amp;#039;s been difficult,&amp;quot; Mortenson says, &amp;quot;is I get a fair amount of criticism \u2014 e-mails and letters saying that I&amp;#039;m a bad father or a poor husband because I&amp;#039;m on the road so much, off wandering around doing my own thing.&amp;quot; Amira Mortenson disagrees with the detractors; in fact, she&amp;#039;s steamed. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s a really good dad!&amp;quot; she says indignantly. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s not doing his own thing \u2014 he&amp;#039;s helping lots of people!&amp;quot; Mortenson, a rumpled and bearish man with the hint of paunch that can haunt a former college football player too busy for fitness, smiles at his daughter&amp;#039;s spirited defense. Sweet and wry, he&amp;#039;d shun the spotlight if he didn&amp;#039;t see a good use for it.  The two of them are taking a quick break in a hectic, two-week national tour introducing a pair of new books coauthored by Mortenson: a children&amp;#039;s picture book, Listen to the Wind, illustrated by artist Susan L. Roth, and a young reader&amp;#039;s edition of Three Cups of Tea. Now kids can discover for themselves the gripping and inspiring story that&amp;#039;s kept the original book on best-seller lists for more than two years and learn how Greg Mortenson found his highest calling at the lowest point in his life.  In 1992, Mortenson&amp;#039;s youngest sister, Christa, who suffered from severe epilepsy, died suddenly at 23. Heartbroken, Mortenson decided to honor her memory by leaving her favorite amber necklace at the top of K2, the world&amp;#039;s second-highest peak. But less than half a mile from the summit, after more than 10 punishing weeks of climbing, he turned back to help rescue a fellow mountaineer in trouble. On a five-day hike back to the main road, Mortenson was separated from his team and took a wrong turn off the trail. Lost, sick, and deeply disappointed, he stumbled into a tiny Pakistani village ringed by jagged peaks, so isolated that no foreigner had ever visited. The people of Korphe, farmers and herders, welcomed him and nursed him back to health. The village had no school; the children met outdoors on a patch of bare ground, even in the frosts of autumn. A part-time teacher shared with a distant village came only three days a week, but the kids \u2014 78 boys and four girls \u2014 still gathered every day to study. A few had slates they wrote on with mud-tipped twigs, but most scratched their lessons in the dirt with sticks. No books, no pencils, no paper, no roof \u2014 just a fierce desire to learn. &amp;quot;I promised I&amp;#039;d build them a school,&amp;quot; Mortenson says, &amp;quot;and fulfilling that promise led me to my life&amp;#039;s work.&amp;quot; Since then, the nonprofit organization he heads, the Central Asia Institute (CAI), has built 78 permanent schools and four dozen temporary schools, trained hundreds of teachers, and transformed the lives of more than 30,000 kids in Afghanistan and Pakistan \u2014 two-thirds of them girls \u2014 with no other chance at an education.  Amira, a seventh grader at the Headwaters Academy in Bozeman, MT, the family&amp;#039;s home base, has joined Mortenson between semesters for some precious dad-daughter bonding time. She&amp;#039;s also addressing civic groups, bookstore audiences, and schoolchildren about Pennies for Peace, a CAI initiative that involves kids&amp;#039; contributing to schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan as they study the countries they&amp;#039;re helping. &amp;quot;I think it&amp;#039;s important for kids to know they can make a difference, no matter how small they are,&amp;quot; she says. Last year American children raised more than $900,000 \u2014 in pennies \u2014 primarily for books, pencils, and other supplies.  Sitting with her dad in the offices of his publisher, Amira, poised and polite, concedes that he&amp;#039;s been away for some milestones in his children&amp;#039;s lives: She can&amp;#039;t recall his ever being home for Father&amp;#039;s Day, and last Christmas was his first with the family in five years. &amp;quot;He missed the first time I read a book...&amp;quot; she begins, and Mortenson seamlessly picks up the litany: &amp;quot;...learned how to walk, tied her shoes, rode a bicycle.&amp;quot; She turns to him with a grin. &amp;quot;He almost missed my birth!&amp;quot; Mortenson got home just in time, and had an excellent excuse: He&amp;#039;d been kidnapped for ransom and held for eight days on Pakistan&amp;#039;s turbulent western frontier, then released unharmed after he befriended his captors. He was also the subject of two fatwas, death sentences issued against him by Islamic clerics angry because he insists that girls be allowed to attend CAI-supported schools. (Other Muslim clergymen rushed to his defense and had the edicts lifted by a religious court.)  &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s still away a ton,&amp;quot; Amira says, &amp;quot;but he&amp;#039;s in lots less dangerous places now.&amp;quot; She misses him and worries when he&amp;#039;s traveling, she says, as do her brother, Khyber \u2014 named after the mountain pass between Pakistan and Afghanistan \u2014 and mom, Tara Bishop, a psychotherapist. &amp;quot;But we know that he&amp;#039;s doing something important, and that always cheers us up. And he has gotten to do things with us that are important \u2014 he was at both of our birthdays this year, and he got to go to Khyber&amp;#039;s father-son breakfast at school. My mom and dad have always taught us to follow your heart and dreams,&amp;quot; Amira says, &amp;quot;and that&amp;#039;s what he&amp;#039;s doing.&amp;quot;  His children have taught him equally important lessons, Mortenson says. &amp;quot;I was in Pakistan after the tragic earthquake in October 2005,&amp;quot; he recalls. &amp;quot;Over 74,000 people were killed, and 18,000 of them were kids. When I came back, I was devastated. Amira, who was 8 at the time, said, &amp;#039;Daddy, do the kids have anything to play with?&amp;#039; I thought, What are you talking about? They&amp;#039;re in mourning. She said, &amp;#039;You need to get them skipping ropes!&amp;#039; And she was right.&amp;quot; Dad and daughter teamed with Gold&amp;#039;s Gym and raised funds to gather 10,000 jump ropes to send to the earthquake survivors. &amp;quot;The kids started to play,&amp;quot; Mortenson says, &amp;quot;and they exuded joy that spread to their parents and transformed communities where there had been only shock and devastation. It was quite profound to see. I&amp;#039;m kind of shy and quiet, and I&amp;#039;m very serious. My kids have taught me that there&amp;#039;s fun and beauty in little things. So I try to consult with my daughter all I can.&amp;quot;  Amira&amp;#039;s pleased that Mortenson acted on her suggestion and that he values her worldview. &amp;quot;You do need to remember the good and fun things in life,&amp;quot; she agrees. &amp;quot;But, Dad,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;I think the best advice I ever gave you is, &amp;#039;Don&amp;#039;t dance in public!&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Mortenson ducks his head and chuckles as his daughter expertly executes a tween eye roll. Yes, Mortenson&amp;#039;s a hero and all; this past March he received the Star of Pakistan, one of that country&amp;#039;s highest civilian honors; sure, a bipartisan congressional group recently recommended him for the Nobel Peace Prize. But he&amp;#039;s still Dad, a tad dorky in the move-busting department.  The next morning, Mortenson is talking to 600 middle school kids about the &amp;quot;f&amp;quot; word. &amp;quot;Of course, the word I mean is &amp;#039;failure,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; he tells the girls and boys gathered in the gym of the Robert R. Lazar Middle School in Montville, NJ. &amp;quot;Here in the United States, we don&amp;#039;t like that word. But I think it&amp;#039;s important to discuss it.&amp;quot; He wants these kids to know that taking the wrong turn put him on the right path; that what he thought was his most colossal flop, the failed assault on K2, led to his biggest success. But at first, he tells them, he wasn&amp;#039;t sure he&amp;#039;d be able to make good on his promise when he returned to Berkeley, CA, his home then.  &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t have a clue about how to build a school. So what did I do first, Amira?&amp;quot; He hands the microphone to his daughter, standing beside him in a Pennies for Peace T-shirt and jeans, totally comfortable with being part of a tag team performance. &amp;quot;You wrote to 580 celebrities,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;and you got only one answer.&amp;quot; A $100 check arrived from newscaster Tom Brokaw, a fellow alumnus of the University of South Dakota, where Mortenson earned degrees in nursing and chemistry.  To raise money, Mortenson worked double shifts as a nurse, and briefly lived in his car. Two more crucial donations set him on his way. First, physicist Jean Hoerni, an early developer of the microchip and a mountain climber, heard about Mortenson&amp;#039;s quest and offered enough to buy building supplies for the school; later he would provide seed money for CAI. And then, Amira tells the assembled students, kids just like them pitched in. In the spring of 1995, Mortenson visited Westside Elementary School in River Falls, WI, where his mother, Jerene Mortenson, was principal. When he described the children of Korphe writing in the dirt, one fourth grader offered to break open his piggy bank. He and everyone else at Westside went on to collect 62,345 pennies for the school, and Pennies for Peace was born. &amp;quot;You might think a penny isn&amp;#039;t worth anything,&amp;quot; Amira says to her rapt middle school audience. &amp;quot;But one penny can buy a pencil for a kid in Pakistan or Afghanistan. A few more pennies can buy paper and books. And 100 pennies can pay a teacher&amp;#039;s salary for a day.&amp;quot;  The Korphe school opened in the summer of 1997, after a series of frustrating delays. A local proverb helped Mortenson summon patience, he tells the students, and shaped his philosophy of philanthropy. &amp;quot;Haji Ali, the village chief and my mentor, told me, &amp;#039;Here we say, Take the time to have three cups of tea. The first cup you&amp;#039;re a stranger, the second cup you&amp;#039;re a friend, the third cup you&amp;#039;re family.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Mortenson&amp;#039;s interpretation: The best way to help people is to slow down, listen carefully to what they want instead of imposing your ideas on them, and make them equal partners in the enterprise. Patience and consensus-building have paid off: &amp;quot;In the village of Chunda, Pakistan, it took us eight years and thousands of cups of tea to convince the religious leader to allow one girl to go to school,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;When the Chunda Girls&amp;#039; School opened in 2007, there were 74 girls enrolled \u2014 and now there are almost 300.&amp;quot; Amira has visited Pakistan three times with her parents \u2014 always in extremely safe areas, she notes. &amp;quot;Over there, going to school is a privilege,&amp;quot; she tells the New Jersey students. &amp;quot;Who here doesn&amp;#039;t like getting out of bed and going to school in the morning?&amp;quot; Hands shoot up. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t, either. But over there, the kids wake up at four in the morning, do their chores, like herding goats and yaks, and then they walk sometimes two miles to get to school. My biggest heroes are the girls in Afghanistan, because they go through so much for the chance to have an education.&amp;quot;  Some risk their lives. Since 2007, the Taliban and other militant groups have bombed, destroyed, or shut down more than 500 schools in Afghanistan and more than 200 schools in Pakistan, nearly all of them educating girls. Young women are warned to stay away from classes or be shot. An empty Afghan girls&amp;#039; school was blown up the week of this assembly. But only one CAI school has been attacked. &amp;quot;The main reason is that our schools have so much local community support,&amp;quot; Mortenson says. CAI schools are always a partnership: Mortenson waits to be invited by a village, then involves community members, including clerics, in every stage of planning and building. Local residents match CAI funds with donated labor and resources, and they help run the school. &amp;quot;Our best security is the relationships we have with local community elders,&amp;quot; Mortenson says. At the one CAI school in Afghanistan that was closed by Taliban gunmen, the local militia leader, who has two daughters in another school, brought 100 of his men to battle the Taliban, and reopened the school two days later, leaving behind 12 armed guards.  There&amp;#039;s another proverb Mortenson loves to quote, one he learned growing up in Tanzania, where he spent the first 14 years of his life with his parents and three younger sisters. His late father, Irvin Mortenson, founded a teaching hospital there, and his mother started a school. Mortenson credits them with his enthusiasm for education and public service. &amp;quot;In Africa, they say, &amp;#039;Educate a boy and you educate an individual. Educate a girl and you educate a community.&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  Several global studies show that sending girls to school significantly decreases infant and maternal mortality rates, helps stabilize population growth, and improves the quality of health and life for everyone in the community. And, Mortenson emphasizes, educated mothers are less likely to condone their sons&amp;#039; joining terrorist groups. He sees a direct link between building schools in an unstable part of the world and security at home.  In 1995, at a dinner in San Francisco honoring Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Mount Everest, a pretty young woman tapped Mortenson on the shoulder and struck up a conversation. When she told him her late father, Barry Bishop, had been a member of the first U.S. team to climb Mount Everest, Mortenson was intrigued. When, at the end of the evening, she swapped her pinching party pumps for what he calls combat boots, he was smitten. &amp;quot;Looking at her in that little dress and those big boots, I was positive she was the woman for me,&amp;quot; he says. Tara Bishop gave him a ride home, and they talked half the night. Mortenson was 37; Bishop was 31. Six days later they were married. Two weeks after that, he was back in Pakistan, gathering supplies for the Korphe school. His bride understood. Unfazed by his extensive travel, she asked only that they relocate to Montana, where her mother lives.  &amp;quot;Early on in our relationship, Greg said, &amp;#039;If this ever doesn&amp;#039;t work for you, all you have to do is say the word,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; says Bishop, speaking by telephone from their home in Bozeman. &amp;quot;And I genuinely believe that. If I said, &amp;#039;Please, get a nine-to-five job,&amp;#039; he&amp;#039;d find some way to do it. But this is really his soul work. I&amp;#039;m definitely not a saint, because I do have my days when I&amp;#039;m not very gracious about it, but I&amp;#039;m happy to support it.&amp;quot;  The absences were harder when the kids were small, she says. He&amp;#039;d be away for three months at a time, and communication was trickier. But since he acquired a satellite phone four years ago, Mortenson has been able to call home nearly every day. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t talk very long, but it really helps,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Sometimes, to get connected, I have to hike two or three hours up a mountain. One time I called home from a hilltop in Afghanistan in the middle of a winter storm and I finally got through \u2014 it can take an hour \u2014 and Tara was in tears. I said, &amp;#039;What&amp;#039;s going on?&amp;#039; She said, &amp;#039;Greg, can you call back in 10 minutes? I&amp;#039;m almost at the end of a movie.&amp;#039; She and Amira were in bed watching a video.&amp;quot; Tara confirms the story, adding dryly, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m glad he called back.&amp;quot;  In a new book, Stones into Schools, scheduled to come out in December, Mortenson will focus on his work in Afghanistan, picking up his story where Three Cups of Tea left off. (&amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know how I&amp;#039;m going to finish it,&amp;quot; he says with a slight sigh. &amp;quot;I guess that&amp;#039;s what the middle of the night and weekends are for.&amp;quot;) This is a good time for assessment. &amp;quot;In the areas where we&amp;#039;ve been working for years, we&amp;#039;re seeing the results of the first wave of literate men and women,&amp;quot; Mortenson says. Thanks to CAI scholarships, hundreds of them have become teachers and eight are in medical school, including two women. Since CAI sent Aziza Hussain for two years of training to become the first maternal health-care worker in her Pakistani valley, maternal deaths from childbirth have dropped from between five and 20 a year to zero. In Ishkashim, Afghanistan, where a new girls&amp;#039; high school will serve 1,800 students, CAI is also funding a pipeline carrying clean water. Five to 10 percent of CAI&amp;#039;s budget goes to projects that improve the health of communities: Sick, malnourished kids can&amp;#039;t study.  That&amp;#039;s an issue of great concern to Amira Mortenson. In fact, at her urging, CAI has launched a free school-lunch pilot program. She was inspired, she says, by what she saw two years ago when the Mortensons were guests at the opening of a girls&amp;#039; school in Pakistan. Male dignitaries sat at a big table with piles of food; honored women guests sat in a separate, smaller room, but were still well fed. Then, after everyone else had eaten, the leftovers from the feast were taken away, and the students were fed. &amp;quot;Forty or 50 girls got only five plates of food,&amp;quot; Amira recalls. &amp;quot;They huddled around the plates, eating with their hands, just rice with a little bit of meat sauce. They offered me some, too! I thought, You girls are starving, but you&amp;#039;re some of the kindest people I&amp;#039;ve met. So I decided to start a lunch program. At least that way they get one meal a day. Now they don&amp;#039;t have to worry about going to bed hungry.&amp;quot; Her father explains that the village is working out a rotating schedule so that every household brings lunch for the girls one day. &amp;quot;Even the poorest families will take pride in preparing food to help feed the girls.&amp;quot;  Amira thinks of helping others as just another part of life, like her tae kwon do classes (she&amp;#039;s a Montana state champ), her collection of penguins (plush, ceramic, whatever), or her love of singing. (To raise funds for CAI schools, she recorded a song called &amp;quot;Three Cups of Tea,&amp;quot; written by her teacher. She&amp;#039;s thinking about a career that involves music and disabled children.) Amira&amp;#039;s delighted that she and her dad are collaborating on the lunch program. &amp;quot;And Khyber is following in our footsteps,&amp;quot; she says proudly. &amp;quot;He wants to start a no-land-mine program.&amp;quot; Afghanistan is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. On a visit to Pakistan&amp;#039;s border, Khyber saw Afghan refugee children who&amp;#039;d been maimed and crippled by the devices. &amp;quot;He wants to design a video game or board game to raise money for the kids who are victims.&amp;quot;  Getting involved in their dad&amp;#039;s work is exciting and satisfying, Amira says. It keeps them feeling close to him when he&amp;#039;s far away. And it&amp;#039;s good training for taking over the family business: following your heart.  How You Can Help Want to help Greg Mortenson and his daughter Amira in their quest to educate girls and boys in remote villages of Pakistan and Afghanistan? To donate, visit the Central Asia Institute&amp;#039;s website, ikat.org (ikat is a beautiful silk fabric woven in Central Asia, prized for resilience, strength, and beauty). Or go to penniesforpeace.org.  If you buy Three Cups of Tea, the young reader&amp;#039;s edition of the book, or the children&amp;#039;s picture book Listen to the Wind online at amazon.com, Amazon will donate about 7 percent of your purchase to CAI. \u2014Judith Stone is the author of When She Was White: The True Story of a Family Divided by Race. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/inspirational-stories/a16483/education-for-girls/>