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GREG MORTENSON REFLECTS
ON A 20-YEAR JOURNEY
by Katie Smith
As CAI celebrates 20 years of educating women and children in Central Asia, we are celebrating more than the hundreds of schools established in some of the most far-flung reaches of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. We are celebrating notable progress in helping women find their voices, in helping communities in these regions connect, and in providing a better understanding of the many cultures, traditions, and communities of these remote areas.
CAI co-founder, Greg Mortenson, took time to reflect on the changes, challenges, and lessons learned during the past 20 years. Many aspects of CAI have evolved since the first CAI-supported school was built in Pakistan 20 years ago. Greg and CAI have made strides to decrease the number of infant deaths and child brides, as well as to increase the number of girls who stay in school past fifth grade. There remains a long journey to provide economic and social equality for women and girls in this volatile region of the world.
A LONG JOURNEY
In the 1990s, when Greg spent time with villagers in the remote regions of Pakistan, the infant mortality rate was heartbreakingly high, young girls were married off as preteens, and there was little knowledge about the importance of nutrition or hygiene. He was inspired by the resiliency of these isolated, mountain people, and he wanted to help.
“ I began to listen to the women as I learned Balti,” says Greg.“ I asked the women what they really wanted. They told me they wanted two things: they didn’ t want their babies to die and they wanted their children to go to school.”
Each village CAI works with has a strong desire for literacy. Communities were desperate for education even though they had no real supplies or teachers. They didn’ t yet understand education, but they knew they wanted to read and write.
“ Education is not just money and jobs; it’ s more than that,” explains Greg.“ It’ s connectivity with the world around them. Literacy is a form of communication, it’ s a quest for knowledge, and its universal.”
“ It’ s even a part of their faith,” he continues.“ The first word of the revelation in the Qur’ an is iqra. It means read and seek knowledge. Education is connecting, it’ s communicating, and it also has a faith element.”
THE FIRST SCHOOLS
The first few schools were rife with the mistakes of a Westerner fumbling to understand a different culture. Many of the lessons learned in the first few schools influenced the methodology CAI still uses to work with villages, build schools, and create new programs.
One of the most influential lessons Greg learned is how to earn buy-in and ownership from the community for each school.“ When I started I was quite naïve. I thought you just go, and you raise money, and you come back, and you get a school built, and you help the teachers,” Greg smiles as he remembers his naivety.
“ You can’ t just plunk a school down. I learned to let the villages get involved, and they taught me the lesson of sweat equity. You aren’ t going to get a school in the village unless the village contributes land and resources and manual labor. CAI does that now with any program they start. There always has to be community input no matter if it’ s a building or a teacher training program or anything else.”
Over the past 20 years Greg learned to adjust expectations based on the needs of the community. After CAI built the first schools, the expectation was for the girls to move through each grade and earn their degrees.
It quickly became apparent that, before CAI could focus on degrees, they needed to focus on basic literacy and keeping the girls in school past the fifth grade. The teachers introduced basic health, hygiene, and nutrition which decreased common illnesses that had kept students out of the classroom.
CAI has learned to adjust to the needs of the communities, increasing programing as education in each country evolves and standardizes. When they installed libraries in the schools, the children loved it. The shelves were continually empty as children brought them home to read to their whole families next to the hearth.
When the organization learned girls went home from school and taught their mothers how to read and write, CAI created women’ s literacy programs for the older women in the villages. Now these programs, often conducted in one woman’ s home for several months, teach hygiene, nutrition, politics, and even managing money and economics.
“ There is a huge difference between the first schools and now,” says Greg.“ When we started out, it was just reading, writing and some math, some English or Urdu. Now, by the time the girls are 18 or 19 in Afghanistan, they are taking 14 classes including economics, geography, history,
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