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Outside Magazine December 2001

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Seismic Shift (Cont.)

TWO DAYS PASSED, and when Greg managed to get through via satphone again, the situation had further deteriorated. Radical clerics in Pakistan had called for a fatwa against their own government, and there was rioting in Peshawar.

"It might be difficult to travel right now," he said. "Things are rather fluid."

This was Greg's laconic way of saying the region was a mess. We discussed our misgivings about adventuring through the fields of war: Our journey could potentially jeopardize the lives of those who had sworn to protect us, and yet the urge to go was still keen.

Greg, who is 43, came to his life's work through mountaineering. He grew up in Tanzania and served in the U.S. military in Germany from 1975 to 1977. In 1993, already a veteran of several Himalayan expeditions, he went to climb K2. After a grueling 75 days on the mountain, during which time his team managed to summit two men, he stumbled down into a Balti village, emaciated, exhausted, spiritually drained. Nursed back to health by the villagers, he vowed to return, not to climb, but to help the Baltis build a school.

That promise took three years to fulfill. He wrote nearly 600 letters asking for donations, and 12 grant proposals, and got nothing. He had sold his climbing gear and his car, and was about to head back to Pakistan when the phone rang. It was Jean Hoerni, a Swiss physicist who had made a fortune in the microchip industry. Hoerni established the endowment that created Central Asia Institute in 1996.

CAI has since built 19 schools, 15 water projects, and four women's vocational centers in Baltistan, and has launched several dozen community health programs that provide such services as cataract surgery and midwife training. It also supports refugee camps for women and children who have escaped the Taliban.

Doing CAI work, Greg has repeatedly put himself on the line. Five years ago, while visiting water projects in Wuzuristan, 200 miles south of Peshawar, he was kidnapped by a group of warring clansmen.

"Eight men with Kalashnikovs burst into my room at 2 a.m., blindfolded me, and drove me off into the hills," Greg told me when we were first planning our trip. "I was held in a windowless mud room. At first I became deeply depressed. On the fourth day, I decided I needed to at least try to understand why I was a captive."

He asked his guards for the Koran. They brought the Koran as well as a teacher. "I studied the Koran with this man, attempting to gain a deeper understanding of their point of view." Greg ultimately learned that there was a dispute between two local tribes and that he was being held hostage as a potential bargaining chip.

"I told them I was expecting the birth of my first son," said Greg. "This is a big deal in their culture. After eight days I was driven back across the desert and released."

Greg believes that it was only through his willingness to reach across the gulf of understanding that he escaped unscathed. "It was a useful lesson for survival."

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