Greg Mortenson
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"Greg Mortenson" is an American humanitarianism/humanitarian, professional speaker, writer, and former mountaineer. He is a co-founder and former executive director of the non-profit Central Asia Institute and the founder of the educational charity Pennies for Peace.

Since 1993, he has been working in Pakistan, and later in Afghanistan and Tajikistan to promote education, and build schools, especially for girls. The dedication of both Mortenson and CAI's to improving the lives of thousands of girls has been documented by respected philanthropists beginning as early as 2001.

Mortenson is the co-author of The New York Times Best Seller list/The New York Times Bestsellers, Three Cups of Tea, which stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 220 weeks. Three Cups of Tea has been published in over 29 languages. Mortenson is also the author of Stones into Schools/Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

More Greg Mortenson on Wikipedia.

We're trying to plug in democracy. You can't do that. You can't just tell people to vote. You have to put in education, and land ownership.

Once you educate the boys, they tend to leave the villages and go search for work in cities. But the girls stay home, become leaders in the community and pass on what they've learned. If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygiene and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls.

They raised 62,340 pennies. These kids, in all their purity and innocence, were reaching out to kids halfway around the world.

Many of these schools and mosques are doing good work to help Pakistan's poor. But some of them seem only to exist to teach militant jihad.