Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way Read Online Free PDF

vigorously, ” says Wilson, “ but he was still able to hike. The doctors were kind of astonished. ” In July 1996, however, while Mortenson was sojourning in South Waziristan, Hoerni underwent emergency surgery to remove his spleen. He nearly died on the operating table. Upon his release from the hospital, his skin remained ashen and he grew increasingly frail.
    Back in 1995, nearly a year after Hoerni had given Mortenson the $12,000 he needed to start working in Pakistan, he paid for Mortenson to fly to Seattle so they could meet face to face. “ They bonded immediately, ” says Wilson. Hoerni admired Mortenson ’ s chutzpa, his willingness to think big. Both men loved the mountains. Both were visionaries, rule breakers, and risk takers — perennial outsiders who had scant regard for societal conventions.
    Hoerni treated Mortenson like a son, and his affection was reciprocated, according to Wilson: “ Greg told me that Jean became kind of a father figure to him, perhaps because his own father had died. ” In the wake of their Seattle rendezvous, Hoerni was so enamored of Mortenson and his humanitarian goals that he gave him $250,000 to build five more schools in Pakistan, even though the Korphe project had barely gotten off the ground. In order to make this donation tax-deductible, Hoerni channeled it to Mortenson through a special account at the American Himalayan Foundation, designated the Hoerni/Pakistan Fund. Then, just a year later in the autumn of 1996, when it became obvious to Hoerni that his death was imminent, he established a stand-alone, tax-exempt charity for Mortenson, endowing it with an additional million dollars. Thus did the Central Asia Institute come into existence.
    As 1996 drew to a close and Hoerni ’ s decline accelerated, Mortenson flew to Seattle to spend a few days with his benefactor before the end. During this farewell visit, Mortenson made good use of his nursing skills to make Hoerni as comfortable as possible, and Hoerni seemed grateful for his presence. On January 12, 1997, not long after Mortenson returned to Montana, Jean Hoerni died, with his wife and daughters at his bedside.
     
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    ONE OF MORTENSON'S childhood heroes was Mother Teresa. According to Three Cups of Tea (page 236), Mortenson “ admired her determination to serve the world ’ s most neglected populations. ” A hospice for the terminally ill that she opened in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1968 captured Greg ’ s imagination as a ten-year-old growing up in the village of Moshi, 275 miles to the north, and his respect for Mother Teresa became greater still when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. Mortenson came to regard her as a role model, even after she faced withering criticism over the shoddy medical care her hospices provided and for lying to donors about how their contributions were used. According to Three Cups,
     
Mortenson had heard the criticism of the woman … . He ’ d read her defense of her practice of taking donations from unsavory sources, like drug dealers, corporate criminals, and corrupt politicians hoping to purchase their own path to salvation. After his own struggle to raise funds for the children of Pakistan, he felt he understood what had driven her to famously dismiss her critics by saying, “ I don ’ t care where the money comes from. It ’ s all washed clean in the service of God. ”
     
    Mortenson ’ s 1993 trip to K2 had ignited in him a powerful ambition to improve the lives of villagers in the mountains of northeastern Pakistan, an ambition inspired in part by Mother Teresa. 4 Hoerni ’ s generosity granted Mortenson an extraordinary opportunity to realize this dream. By the end of 2000, he had built more than twenty schools, with dozens more in the pipeline, an impressive feat by any measure. “ We can construct and maintain a school for a generation that will educate thousands of children for less than $20 ,000 , ” he asserted in interviews and