How Greg Mortenson is a Girl’s Best Friend

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How Greg Mortenson Is A Girl’s Best Friend

By Kathryn O'Hehir

A mullah and a monk walk into a bar in Chicago. The mullha orders coffee, the monk green tea. The bartender scratches his grey beard and says, “I have black tea and black coffee, but do yous know you are in a bar?

“Oh, yes,”

The old bartender makes the rare pot of fresh coffee and goes in back to see if there is a new box of tea, the bags he had were beer soaked. He keeps one eye on the odd pair. Both bald as eggs, the monk in saffron, the mullah in brown robes, both wearing prayer beads. The monk was counting his absent-mindedly, the Mullah tapping his feet to the music.

The bartender served them and said, “$7.50.”

The mullah and the monk look at each other. The monk has no pockets, but the mullah has a purse and gives him a 100 rial note. The bartender looked at the money and said,

“We don’t take that.”

So the monk put his beads on the counter, pushed them toward him.

“We don’t take those, em, either.”

The monk and the mullah look at each other, and the mullah takes out a small gold ring. Puts it on the counter.

At this point the old bartender, who has seen it all, gives up.

“It’s on the house. I’d never be rude to religious men, but I have to tell you, you’re not exactly good for business.”

They drank their tea and coffee. The monk put his hands together and bowed. The Mullah nodded his head and they headed for the door.

“Hey, you forgot your money and your beads.”

The monk turned and said, “Give them to Jesus when he shows up. He likes red wine, he should fit right in.”

The mullah said, “The 100 rials is worth $10. Keep the change.”

~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You don’t have to draw a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed to have a sense of humor about religion, including Islam. Like Greg Mortenson, who as an educator, I admire greatly, I was born into a strong Christian family. In mine, the rituals of Irish Catholicism filled my childhood until the late ‘60s, when my parents stopped dragging us to church except Christmas and Easter.

My father was Irish Catholic, my mother Scottish Protestant. My mother converted and always believed in it far more than my father, but she had delivered 8 healthy children, and women still die in childbirth, so perhaps that is why she had such strong faith. Knowing she was Catholic, my mothers’ OB gave her birth control without telling her what it was. He said, you are too old for more children, and you need to take this medication for the next ten years. “It will protect your uterus,” were his exact words.

Once the neighbor lady pointed out that the “medication” was birth control, she kept taking it. She had common sense as well as faith, which showed me there are always exceptions to “the rules.” Even religious ones.

Also like Greg, my years devoted to teaching in Asia has exposed me to different cultures and belief systems. It is quite natural to adopt the best parts of other religions you are exposed to for long periods — you begin by augmenting your existing beliefs; but over time, you convert in your heart, if not on paper.

My mother converted. Why shouldn’t I?

I began studying Buddhism in Minneapolis after my therapist at the U of M, Sheila, taught me meditation techniques for anxiety and anger management 20 years ago. It worked. So well, I began to read, and read and read.

For me, it all began to make sense after I read Peter Matthiessen’s book, The Snow Leopard. I was living in Amsterdam then, grieving my father’s sudden death, and my being layed off from the Minnesota State and Community College system.

Pity, in hindsight, it was the best paid, best insured teaching job I ever had for 11 years. Thanks to their strong faculty association union. They taught me much about teaching, and I had the unwanted by anyone task of advising the student newspaper when I wasn’t teaching English composition or literature.

The Dean hired me for my B.A. in Journalism, and M.A. In English. The current paper was so bad, he and another administrator would throw them away after being put in the teacher’s mailbox. It was my first real teaching job out of college.

My office was at the end of an enclosed hall where the staff rooms, photo lab and production rooms were. My door was usually open and I had drug a big comfy chair in there where many faculty and student butts left their pocket change in its big cushions while visiting.

My student editors would check the chair cracks when they needed quarters for the Coke machine. That’s when they weren’t weighing their boobs on the postage meter over and an argument about whose were bigger at 10 p.m.

They came in my hotel room one night during a student newspaper convention in Minneapolis because there was a porno movie with only women with really big breasts. Their room wouldn’t let them put anything on the bill, but mine could. I fell asleep with those two bouncing and howling at the bottom of my bed over the sex scenes and bad acting.

Welcome to student advising.

Those two won first place in investigative reporting (for campuses of our size) in the annual national newspaper competition. The Native American students were being ripped off by their advisor (a colleague) and had the courage to expose the financial fiasco that I knew would make me a leper to half the small faculty, but they didn’t have my job. The Native American students came in our office with financial records. Our staff verified them, and published the results.

I had the college president sitting in my big comfy chair in her raincoat, while I had to explain how I thought it all happened. I needed the signature of the VP for Academic Affairs to spend newspaper funds. That advisor didn’t need second signature, a policy that changed immediately.

That was 20 years ago. That is why I needed anger management training. I have seen and advised the coverage of charitable organization’s going awry before. Putting my reputation in the hands of my students because I trusted them to do the right thing. They were fair. They went and interviewed the advisor, I did insist on that.

…back in the day, 1991

She blew them off until the paper came out. No worries, she kept her job as long as I did. We were layed off together, due to budget cuts as we were the last 2 English hired. It was a hard lesson, but I would do again.

Lao Tsu said, “If you care about what other people think, you will be their prisoner forever.”

What happened to Greg Mortenson was not my first financial media rodeo. However, in Mortenson’s case, my experience told me the financial documents I retrieved showed no wrong doing, but sloppy bookkeeping, which is no crime. We’re talking Pakistan here, as if there were a CPA on every corner. It’s ASIA. Funds are handled differently and when operating in a foreign country, you operate by their rules. Indigent porters do not take check or credit card.

Getting layed off was both storm and rainbow. It hurt, but it was worth it. The Buddha says, “Things change.” And they sure do.

But by cutting that teather, and giving me access to a rather large retirement fund, (it was the tail end of the ‘90s dot.com boom and Clinton) I was only 46 when my father died suddenly.

I said, “Fuck it,” took half the money and moved to Europe where I lived 4 years between London (too expensive) and Amsterdam, which was much more affordable.

…The Future Coffee Shop, sadly no longer in business, but the Brandenberg’s, Eff and Jacqueline, still own the company “Futrola” and have Tommy Chomg as their spokesperson. Legalizing cannabis has been a blessing for this Dutch family, who treated me like family. The green door to the left was my front door, and my Mt. Everest stairwell.

Jacqueline (Jacq) Brandenberg, and Tommy Chong in Amsterdam (2015)

There I met a woman, Meike, who had raised her 4 children next to an Ashram in India. After years of studying Hinduism, she had become interested in Buddhism. I lived above a green Coffeeshop named “The Future,” and we often had coffee, chatting with the two Dutch owners, Lydia and Jacqueline. Eff was the boss, Jacq’s husband and Lydia’s brother, he ran the headquarters, M-F they ran the shop. Both tiny, blonde and tough as nails.

They taught me Dutch. They could all speak English, but when chatting, they always spoke Dutch. I had to learn if I wanted to be part of the conversation, and the shop was often nearly empty during the day. The Red Light District was around the corner, where on Friday night Meike and I would go have dinner — she loved Spanish food and Margaritas. Walking home, a little tipsy, Meike a lot of tipsy, we locked arms like sisters and would have to push ourselves through the throngs of men in the tiny little side street, where women stand behind glass tapping coins at customers.

We weren’t going to walk a mile out of our way to avoid them, so we treated them like the junkies. Acted like they were invisible, never making eye contact.

Meike would come up, both half-drunk, literally mountain climbing my almost verticals stairs to the third floor where my studio was. I would get behind Meike because she was smaller, and in better shape. My apartment was full of tulips almost all year round.

We would smoke joints and talk religion, and we laughed, a lot. Like when Meike had all her teeth pulled and was waiting for dentures. I cooked pasta in that night, and wouldn’t share joints with her because she slobbered all over it.

“Keep it,” I said.

We laughed so hard about that til we cried. Basking in a women’s friendship where you can visit even with no teeth. I had to have all mine pulled in Mexico, ($500) and in subsequent visits we still went to dinner, crying over crusty bread we both loved but could not chew.

Meike gave me the courage to go to Asia for the first time. I wanted to go to Nepal. She had been there and advised me regarding food, and getting sick, she said, “hot is better than cold, and don’t buy off street vendors even if your new local friends do. Take stomach medicine with you.”

It was only $500 r/t to Katmandu twice a week on a discount Dutch airline, refueling in Doah in the middle of the night. I was a bit nervous with my American passport. I did not know we would lay over and go through security again in Doah. The only difference was men and women were completely separated and they took me behind a curtain to wand my body.

Not knowing anything about Arabs then, I was shocked at the price of cigarettes! I thought don’t these people know this is a Duty Free shop? Cheap cigs and booze are a staple of Duty Free, but not in Doah.

After I arrived in Katmandu, I made immediate arrangements to get to Pokhara, at the foot of Fishtail (Machcapuchure) mountain. with giant Annapurna in the backdrop. I was looking for a Sherpa, Tukten, from Peter Matthiessen’s book. He was hired out of Pokhara, and I had hoped to find him.

Like Greg, it was here where I saw in your face poverty. People using ditches as toilets and yet bands of school children in blue and white uniforms would pass me going down the hill in the morning as I was walking up.

“HALLO! Where-are-you-a-from?”

Squeaky clean white socks with book bags and bottled water.

Late in the afternoon after a day’s outing, I would go to the fake Hard Rock Café of Pokhara for dinner and cold beer. It was next to a lake, but they never had any fish.

“So sorry Madame! No fish today.” When I asked were there any fish left in the lake, the waiter shrugged his shoulders, he was not a fisherman he was a waiter.

From the terrace I could see the lake to my right and the main dirt road that separated the village. I watched these 3 boys “playing.” One was 10, the other two were 5 or 6. They were playing a game with rocks. My friend Shambu came over to my table for a chat. I asked him about the kids. He told me it wasn’t really a game, the older boy was teaching the younger how to count with rocks. I asked why? Shambu shrugged and said, “Many people very, very poor. No money for books, uniforms. They barely have enough to eat.”

When I finally ran out of money and had to return to the U.S. (And my senses, according to siblings) I taught in Arizona for several years, but I have this bad habit of changing schools if they drive me crazy. It’s how I keep my sanity. If you can’t change the system, you need to find another. The pay is so low for teaching, we vote with our feet.

Nepal stayed with me. I spent two years writing Tukten Sherpa’s biography. My students were reading The Snow Leopard, 4 parts over 4 weeks. I told them they could skip over all the Buddhist stuff, and just stick to the journey. I learned if you tell students not to read something, they make a bee line for it. Even at 7:30 a.m. Tuesday/Thursday, they got it. All of it.

I was sharing my research with them at the time, and one morning I came to class breathless, I had just received an email with Tukten’s military records I was dying to read, but I had class. We were in a really crappy, windowless English classroom, with an old fashioned projector screen with a string to pull it down that I never used, as there were no bolted projectors then, you had to order AV.

We were on Part III which was a lot about Tukten, so I asked them if they wanted to hear about his personal life which they did, so I sat on my desk and started to read the email from a Gurkha officer named Raj Gurung who had translated them for me. From behind me, The projector screen began to rattle inside its casing. It was loud over my head. I looked up at it. It seemed solid, no loose screws or cracks in the wall, I began to read again, and the damn thing started rattling again. By now I asked two of the boys to get up on chairs and check it, to see if it was falling down.

It was normal. They pushed and pulled on it, but it was anchored firmly to the wall.

Ok, it was a 90 minute class, so back to the book, how did this new information change, if it did, your opinion on Tukten as a character? They were pretty animated and we’re having a good discussion when the screen began to rattle again.

A male from the back of the room said to a dead quiet and stunned class,

“That’s gotta be Tukten. The book says he had mysterious powers.”

My instinct was to agree with him, but I am in front of a class. What do I say? By now it was the end of class and I reminded them their rough draft was due in one week, and I went home after school and called Peter Matthiessen, who had so generously been helping me. He was very interested in learning more about Tukten’s story. I read him the email and was so excited.

On Thursday, at 07:15 a.m., I am alone in the room getting ready, erasing the white board, organizing my handouts. I would look up at the projector casing, and almost got up on a chair; but thought, nah, the boys checked it, it’s fine. Couldn’t shake this weird inkling. I was afraid of it, a little.

The students were all there and we began to finish up the discussion on Part III when the projector screen started spinning inside the casing. I mean whirling and spinning at high speed. We all stopped and stared at it. You could hear a pin drop in that classroom. From the back if the room, the same male said,

“He’s baaack.”

Teaching isn’t just an art. Sometimes it’s a road trip into the unknown where we all go on a wild literary ride. And that’s why I do it, and how strongly Asians pull on me to be here. They actually came and got me, and here I will stay.

I admire Greg because I saw what he saw. And I saw it in his book Three Cups of Tea, first. I knew it was true because I had seen it myself, and felt the same wish to help. I’ve given over 7,000 formal speaking examinations to Chinese people, and teach about 100 students a year.

But that is nothing compared to Greg setting up an entire school system where there was none before. I. I am hoping 3 Cups of Tea is translated into Chinese. it still sells world-wide. It is only Americans who have an issue with Greg. Anyone who has ever worked with him knows he is as good as his word.

And his book is true. All of it.

Rhyiad, 2014

That’s a whole ‘nother story…

When I read The Cups of Tea, I knew exactly how Greg felt when he saw those kids outside having class. I have seen it too. As an American, we are raised, or Greg and I were raised, to help people if we could. Our parents’ role molded that spirit of community service is learned by watching them donate time and money to good causes. For my parents it was the Kidney Foundation of the Upper Midwest, who were instrumental in helping my father get a match for a life-saving kidney transplant, rather new in the 1970s. He never had spoke in public before, but he did the Kiwanis and K of C speaking circuit, explaining dialysis and how transplantation was not a cure, but well worth investing in more research.

You don’t have to believe me when I tell you Greg Mortenson is a girl’s best friend, but that doesn’t make it any less true. I admire what he has done with his life.

He is still my hero, and friend.