The Vunarability of Greg Mortenson
Anyone likely to stumble on this blog has probably already heard about the
CBS 60 Minutes’ attack on Greg Mortenson and the Central Asia Institute (CAI). As Greg was kind enough to write a foreword to my book
Himalayan Portfolios; Journeys of the Imagination I owe it to him to try and provide my own perspective on this disaster.
The Foreword. My interest in Greg's work goes back to an encounter in 2001 with one of his earliest schools in Pakistan. The school was at Hushe, the jumping off point for my trek to the K2 area. In October of 2006 I asked Greg to write a foreword. At that time the CAI was beginning to grow but
Three Cups of Tea had not yet hit the mass market. Greg immediately responded with enthusiasm and gave me an outline of his linkage to the mountain photography of Barry Bishop, the father of his wife, Tara. The foreword that emerged (after several months) combined the story of the building of the bridge across the Braldu River and the creation of the first school at Korphe with his photographic interest. My book contains a picture of the turbulent, churning, exploding waters of the Braldu River taken on my first Pakistan trip — 1994, the year before the bridge was built. In conclusion Greg described my book as “a tribute to the mountains we both cherish” and a “source of restoration and hope.”
Inside the government school at Hushe
The Impending Crash. I met Greg briefly in 2008 and then in New York at the 2009 Book Fair (an unbelievable zoo), and later that year talked to his staff at the Banff Mountain Book Festival. It was evident that to keep the fund raising going he has been ignoring health problems. There had been a recent stay in a hospital. I wrote urging him to not let the new book overwhelm him and to pace himself for the long term future. Others had made the same argument. But he was faced with the urgency of the times and the strange nature of the book selling business in which everything depends on a short seasonal time frame. Book selling was his basic way to solicit funds for the CAI. He did not let up on his unbelievably full schedule. I expected a crash. As it tuned out his deteriorating health was just a part of the disaster. As of now he is being stabilized in the expectation of
heart surgery.
The heavy load of talk, travel and interviews must have left little time for long term planning. As I saw it, there was a need for an anthropological record of what had been achieved to aid future planning and an accessible data base of schools. Each school was a experiment in a new cultural context but based on the same premise (I wrote to him about that and cited the work of my friend Dick Salisbury who had created a data base of climbing expeditions in Nepal
"Himalaya by the Numbers".) I worried about Greg’s move from the relative uniformity of Baltistan into the ethnic and cultural mix up of Afghanistan. His work must encounter constantly shifting political agendas, people who have reconstructed their past histories, and experts at diverting NGO funds to their own pockets. The CAI was changing into a bigger organization that could not be expected to work with the one-man-band approach that had been so successful in the beginning. Greg’s role needed to be redefined.
Greg's Finances. The 60 Minuite program makes a number of charges, including the claim that Greg’s finances and the money donated to the CAI have become mixed in a bewildering way. On this I have no information. Knowing his schedule, I can well believe that finances exploded in ways that were beyond the competence of the CAI and Greg to handle. The problems are like and unlike those that arise when a star college professor writes a highly successful text book or develops a patentable product. In such cases there are the precedents of custom plus a history of legal opinions and IRS rulings that provide guidelines as to where the money raised should go. In Greg’s case the mixture is unique. I can only express my firm belief in Greg’s dedication. I am totally unconvinced that personal gain was a motive. However, the characteristics that make for success in building schools in remote areas are probably not those appropriate for financial management. I can only hope that a panel of friends and experts will resolve this matter with the CAI and present their solution in a way that can be easily understood by the public.
Fictionalization: The other main charge against him was that to a significant extent he had faked the stories in the book. I was completely baffled. It was said that he had not even been in Korphe in 1993. This did not make sense. Before the bridge was built there was only a cable linked the village to the main trail to Askole. There was no possible reason why Greg or any Westerner would visit the village. The account given in the book explains his encounter. On his way back from K2, debilitated and utterly exhausted, he failed to take the turn to Askole. That is to say, he continued onwards instead of turning right to reach the bridge across the turbulent Braldu River and to follow the right side of the Braldu to Askole. (Korphe is on the left side of the Braldu.) Going the other way towards K2 the branch towards Korphe would be passed without attention by a traveler walking as part of a group. Having followed the main route from K2 to Askole myself, I can attest that for a lone walker this error was completely possible. I have made such trail errors many times. In 1994 on the way to the Biafo Glacier we continued on the Askole side of the river, but I remember the other side of the river in 2001 as being a flat plain with few distinguishing marks except for some large climbing boulders that were probably near the bridge. If the area floods in some years the trail probably gets wiped out from time to time so the present markings would not be a guide to the situation in 1993.
In an
interview with David Heald, Editor of
Outside Magazine, Greg has affirmed that this mistake over the trail did happen in 1993, but he admitted that he was only a few hours in Korphe, not overnight as it says in the book. This was enough to see the poverty of the place and to realize that the health and education of the villagers was of no interest to the government. If he had not observed this neglect, why would he have returned? However, the main events in the book concerning the promise to build a school took place the next year. He reached Askole by way of the cable, met up with his fellow climber and they both continued to Skardu and the K2 Motel and from there to the USA. He admits that he did not then return to Korphe that year as it says in the book, but the following year. I assume the account of building of the bridge to replace the cable in 1995, thanks to Horni’s funding, is essentially correct.
Why? Greg claims that the fictionalization was driven by the need for compression. I conjecture that there was a draft that gave the visit as brief and placed the promise to build a school in the next year but the narrative became so involved that the text was re-cut. Greg claims the essential facts were preserved. (The question as to who suggested the departures from the truth — whether the Viking-Penguin editor, his co-author Relin or Greg himself — is irrelevant.) Bio-Pics, such as Gandhi, do this sort of fixing all the time to provide a coherent story and no one worries. Travel books, from Marco Polo onwards, and autobiographies are often loose with the facts. But, as a scientist I have difficulties: I have a gut horror of invented data. News reporters claim to meet higher standards. Journalists may omit some facts as irrelevant and they tend to seek out representative cases and voices to give shape to their story, but if they fabricate the roof blows off. The authors invoked this standard for
Three Cups of Tea when they presented the story as reported by Relin. Why did they then depart from the journalism standard?
The Message. A Pakstani novelist,
Bapsi Sidhwa, has argued that Greg made the right choice: artistic truth trumps literal truth. As a landscape photographer I can understand this argument. A black and white photograph is by its nature a representation that requires considerable artistic judgment in printing. My interpretation, however, is a little different. I believe that Greg saw the book as a means of communicating a message rather than as a work of biographical art. This left him vulnerable to making a most unfortunate mistake. Extreme examples of the dramatization of a message are the New Testament gospels. They are inseparable from an evolving Jewish typology. The more powerful the typology, the more the temptation to manipulate. And Greg’s typology is powerful and urgent. If it were not so he would not have maintained his punishing schedule year after year. The grievous error was in not realizing that communicating the truth of the message depended on the truth of the narrative. The reason the book became a best seller is because the message that peace could be brought to a devastated world through the education of girls and women was accepted. The virulent response once the 60 Minutes program was aired is because, in part, people feel betrayed by the departure from the truth.
The question has been raised about the number of schools created and some failures and miscalculations have been cited, but there is plenty of evidence that schools do exist and that successes have been achieved. As
Nicholas Kristof wrote in the New York Times. “The furor over Greg’s work breaks my heart.”….“But let us not forget that even if all the allegations turn out to be true, Greg has still built more schools and transformed more children’s lives than you or I ever will.”
Greg is not the first pioneer who has been damaged by his own idealism. As he tries to pick up the pieces after his surgery and work out a considered response to events I hope he will be able to follow his own words in the foreword to my book and turn to the mountains as “a source of restoration and hope.”
PS. Sales Report. Three Cups of Tea, as of May 8, is #24 on the New York Times extended paperback non fiction list. It was #17. It would seem that the general public may have a better take on the crisis than the media commentators, most of whom have no direct experience of the complications of working in the villages of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Updates: There have been significant developments in the CAI during the last year. The
ikat.com site of the CAI has provided an updated picture as a
Journey of Hope supplement. One interesting development is the cooperation with other NGO aid agencies concerned with education, including the
Agha Khan Development Foundation mentioned in my last Blog. Various setbacks are motioned and the site includes responses to recent criticisms.
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CBS 60 Minutes: Story
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhAb37yZ0o0&feature=youtu.be
Bozman Chronicle: Story
http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/article_4d3125cc-67d7-11e0-b861-001cc4c002e0.html
Outside Magazine: Interview with Mortenson by Alex Heard, editor.
http://outsideonline.com/adventure/travel-ga-greg-mortenson-interview-sidwcmdev_155690.html?page=6
CNN: Interview with Alex Heard, Peter Bergan, Nikolas Kristof
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2011/04/18/exp.ac.mortenson.controversy.panel.cnn?iref=allsearch
New York Times: Story: Edward Wong on the Wakhan Corridor. “Two schools in Afghanistan, One Complicated Situation. “
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/weekinreview/24mortenson.html
Dawn: Article by Bapsi Sidhwa: “I stand by Three Cups of Tea” (Dawn is a Pakistan newspaper)
http://www.dawn.com/2011/05/01/i-stand-by-three-cups.html
New York Times: Op Ed: Nikolas Kristof. “Three Cups of Tea’ Spilled”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/opinion/21kristof.html
Mortenson’s Medical Condition: doctors report
http://www.ikat.org/wp-includes/documents/CAI5-2-11-Release.pdf
