“Trading Books, not Bombs”: The Importance of Educating Women and Listening

Everybody’s worried about Pakistan and Afghanistan, and that includes me.  Should America have a military presence there at all?  What’s the point if we’re after Al Qaeda, and Al Qaeda isn’t a nation and can just keep moving to new shelters in new countries? Should we do more?  Should we do less?

How about doing something different?

Everyone’s also reading Three Cups of Tea, and that also includes me.  It’s the story about “One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace
One School at Time” in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and that one man is American Greg Mortenson.  The style is as abominable as the famed snowman, with similes stacked as high as the Himalayas — and the same irritating affect and effect this sentence is designed to provoke.  But the message is important, inspiring, simple, and action-oriented: illiteracy, poverty, and violence are viciously interconnected, and we must think big and long-term and then show “compassion in action, not [just] talk” to break this vicious circle.  Only then will we find peace, and keep it.

Mortenson is walking his talk in the impoverished and war-ridden Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he has come to focus on the education of women.  “If the girls can just get to a fifth-grade level, everything changes,” he says.  Mortenson believes that “education is the only long-term tactic to combat poverty”, but because children must “survive long enough to benefit from school,” his Central Asia Institute (CAI) builds not only schools but also infrastructure for clean water and other sanitation needs.

Mortenson is not unique in holding these views, for all that his vocabulary is distinctive. Dr. Paul Farmer has been publicizing “the structural violence of poverty” and working to improve health around the world, with a particular focus on Haiti.  Economists for decades have been lecturing about the importance of education in increasing labor productivity and reducing poverty. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen believes that educating women can change culture for the better.  Nobel laureate Theodore Schultz did much to develop the field of “human capital” and talked about the high social returns to more investment in the education of women. Oprah Winfrey financed a girls’ school in Africa.  Nobel laureate Gary Becker created a field of economics he tagged “Crime and Punishment”, using cost-benefit analysis to show that the unemployed and unemployable are more likely to break the law because they foresee no legitimate means to a viable future and therefore have little to lose.

Mortenson goes further than his noble predecessors.  He extends the reach of illiteracy and poverty’s violence well beyond what these two conditions do to the poor, the economy, and crime within countries.  Those sad stories interest him, but he also worries about the consequences for global war and peace.  Poverty doesn’t just savage the poor, he says, it also creates terrorists that savage people from different economic classes and countries around the planet. Mortenson believes that “terror doesn’t happen because some group of people somewhere like Pakistan or Afghanistan simply decide to hate us.  It happens because children aren’t being offered a bright enough future that they have a reason to choose life over death.”

When Oprah announced her plans to build a new school in South Africa, she was verbally attacked by some fellow Americans who thought her money should stay in the United States.  “We have plenty of poor here,” they said, “ and charity should start at home.”  Her reply?  “In the United States, it’s against the law not to go to school.” Unlike many regions of developing countries, we already have plenty of schools.  We just lack the energy and ambition to use them well. Americans are spoiled.  We’re casual and lazy about education.  But the children in Pakistan and Afghanistan (and Africa) really want to learn. They are thrilled by new books and uniforms.  They want a better future, and they know education is the way to get there.

Mortenson has earned respect, affection and support from people of many different religious beliefs, because CAI schools teach math, languages, history and science, and refuse to preach “ism”’s.  This practice is quite the reverse of some religious (madrassa) schools, and even though the students in both the secular and the religious schools come from the same hardscrabble beginnings, the results are quite different. As journalist and colleague Ahmed Rashid observes,  “[M]adrassa students were ‘the rootless and restless, the jobless and the economically deprived with little self knowledge.  They admired war because it was the only occupation they could possible adapt to.  Their simple belief in a messianic, puritan Islam which had been drummed into them by simple village mullahs was the only prop they could hold on to and which gave their lives some meaning.”   CAI students climb up the economic ladder and are optimistic about their futures – unless war makes them fear for their lives.

Mortenson believes that “The only way we can defeat terrorism is if people in this country where terrorists exist learn to respect and love Americans, and if we can respect and love these people here.  What’s the difference between them becoming a productive local citizen or a terrorist?  I think the key is education.”

“[M]ilitary victory is only the first phase of winning the war on terror and I’m afraid we’re not willing to take the next steps,” he worries. “ If we truly want a legacy of peace for our children, we need to understand that this is a war that will ultimately be won with books, not with bombs.”

At the height of the Cold War, industrialist Cyrus Eaton urged Americans to “trade bulls, not bullets” with the Soviet Union.  Like Greg Mortenson, he acted on his beliefs, giving Khruschev some sperm from one of his award-winning bulls (and being surprised with the gift of a troika, three stallions, and a trainer in return).  Few people seriously listened to Eaton in the 1950s; many more reviled him as a “commie lover”.  Mortenson has received more than his fair share of hate mail because of his alliterative substitutes as well.  Let’s hope people are listening more today.

Mortenson’s friend, champion, and helper Haji Ali once told him that the first cup of tea an American shares with a Balti is as a stranger; the second, as a friend; and the third, as family.  “Doctor Greg,” he continued, “you must make time to share three cups of tea.  We may be uneducated.  But we are not stupid.  We have lived and survived here for a long time.”

Mortenson learned to slow down, to listen rather than assume.  One of the Pakistani poor’s greatest assets is patience, and “building relationships”, he realized, is every bit as important as “building projects”.

We need to learn these lessons, too.  Ours is a half-cup nation at best.  We should slow down, ask and listen.  But will we?  “What can be better than a future world made safe for us all by education?” Mortenson asks his audience.  Here’s hoping we answer “Nothing!” And then do something.