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The theater at San Diego City College was filled to capacity, and students and faculty stood in the lobby outside knowing they couldn’t even glimpse the stage where Greg Mortenson would present. Still, the people waited just to hear him through a loudspeaker. Mortenson is the co-author of the bestselling book, “Three Cups Of Tea: One Man’s Mission To Promote Peace… One School At A Time.”

Mortenson drew enthusiastic applause from the audience when he appeared on stage. He apologized for arriving late, then talked about the meaning of his book’s title. He gave insights into the publishing business, how his editors had originally urged him to use a subtitle about fighting terrorism because it would help book sales. Mortenson insisted on the subtitle to promote peace and schools.

Mortenson grew up in Tanzania in the 1960s and learned about prejudice and racism in the U.S. In high school, teens called him “African” and put a garbage can on top of his head to beat him up because he was different.

After Mortenson’s sister, Christa, died of an epileptic seizure, he vowed to honor her. An avid climber, he set off to conquer what many consider the toughest mountain in the world. In 1993, Mortenson began his quest to scale the mountain called K2 in northern Pakistan to leave his sister’s necklace at the summit. After 78 days, he failed. He also failed in other areas of his life – relationships, totaling his car, missing an excruciatingly short 29-yard field goal that could have won the game for his school football team. Mortenson began his book with his unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, and his publisher warned him about the American mentality, “You can’t start a book with a failure.” He did anyway.

Mortenson paused and shared with the audience, “There’s an old Persian saying, ‘When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.’”

After failing to reach the top of K2, Mortenson spent time in the village of Korphe in Pakistan. What he saw broke his heart. In a schoolyard without a building or a teacher, 84 children, 79 boys and 5 girls, wrote with sticks in the dirt to study. According to Mortenson, a third of the babies in this region died before the age of one. Men worked for $400 a year. The female literacy rate was under five percent. Mortenson promised one of the students, a girl, that he would build a school for her village.

He went back to the U.S. and wrote letters to celebrities in an effort to raise the $12,000 he needed. After 580 letters, Mortenson received one response – a check for $100 from Tom Brokaw. A school in the U.S. called Westside Elementary in River Falls, Wisconsin heard about his efforts and invited Mortenson to speak. Afterwards, the children and teachers raised over 62,000 pennies in trash containers for the cause. Since then, the organization they founded called “Pennies For Peace” has continued to expand and contributed over 16 million pennies from 700 U.S. schools.

Mortenson sold his car and possessions for $2400. He contacted a renowned climber named Jean Hoerni, who donated the remaining funds for the first school. He received help from the people in the village of Korphe, who provided unskilled labor and some of the materials. Together, they built a school.

Mortenson moved from one end of the stage to the other as he spoke in the college theater. Behind him, slides of the people and villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan brought the audience closer to the remote regions he described with heart-rending detail. He said, “There’s a saying in Africa, ‘If you educate a boy, you educate an individual. If you educate a girl, you educate a community.’ A boy will go off to lead his life. A girl will remain in the community, and her education is passed along.”

He continued, “What works in girls’ education? In third world countries, if you can educate girls to the fifth grade level, you reduce infant mortality. You reduce the population explosion, and you raise the quality of life index. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, some women walk two hours to school to sit on a mat in the dirt to learn.”

Mortenson imparted his experience, “To understand poverty, you have to feel it, smell it, taste it. The think tanks in Washington DC aren’t going to be able to change poverty because they haven’t been there.”

Since 1996, Mortenson’s nonprofit organization called the “Central Asia Institute,” has helped to build over 60 schools in the remotest mountain regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. He said, “Six years ago in Afghanistan, 800,000 children attended school. This year, 5.4 million kids go to school in that country.”

Mortenson told of education’s impact on “jihad,” the term for the religious holy war that has been waged by Islamic extremist groups against the United States and other Western countries. “In Afghanistan, sons need to get the permission of the mother to go on a jihad. Educated mothers won’t allow their sons to join the Taliban.”

Mortenson closed with a staggering statistic. “There are 145 million children in the world that can’t go to school.”

This is an individual who is doing something about it.

For more information about Greg Mortenson and the Central Asia Institute, go to www.ikat.org.