Collegiate Times

"Here (in Pakistan and Afghanistan), we drink three cups of tea to do business; the first you are a stranger, the second you become a friend, and the third you join our family."

These are some of the best known words of Greg Mortenson's best-seller "Three Cups of Tea: One man's mission to promote peace... One school at a time," a novel inspired by his work building schools for children in the Middle East.

The International Relations Organization at Virginia Tech, along with the Students for Nonviolence Club and the Center for Student Engagement and Community Partnership at Virginia Tech, brought his Pennies for Peace campaign to campus to help raise money for school supplies for children in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

At the time of his speech, John Welch, a senior majoring in international studies and French, announced that the campaign at Tech had raised more than $1,000.

The idea to invite him began with Megan Mirmelstein, a senior political science major and president of the IRO.

"I lost two very close friends on April 16 ... and after reading Greg's book I knew that they would just be so passionate about his project," Mirmelstein said. "That was when I wrote the letter asking him to come."

As a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and a strong advocate for peace through education, he was seen as the perfect speaker to represent the newly formed Students for Nonviolence Club, and Mortenson expressed his deepest sympathies to the family members of those lost on April 16 who were in attendance.

A packed Burruss Auditorium sat in enthralled silence as he regaled them with his stories of attempting to climb Pakistan's K2, the world's second highest mountain, and his experiences of building more than 78 schools in volatile zones of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

He joked with the crowd about his early tendencies to micromanage projects.

"By the end of the first year, we really hadn't made that much progress on the school," Mortenson said. "Once I let go a little bit ... the school was built six weeks later."

Mortenson was also a loud advocate for the education of the women and girls of villages as a means of promoting peace.

"It is seen as incredibly shameful if a boy's mother does not give her blessing for him to embark on jihad, and it is shown that women who are educated are less likely to support fundamentalist or extremist forms of anything," said Mortenson. "I always go back to the African proverb, "If you educate a boy, you educate an individual. But if you educate a girl, you educate a community."

His belief in promoting peace through education and understanding has inspired more than 3,000 schools throughout the U.S. to create Pennies for Peace campaigns and inspired James Dubinsky, director of the CSECP, to make him an "honorary Hokie."

Mortenson proudly donned his new Tech baseball cap, took questions from the crowd and signed copies of his book for the throngs of Blacksburg residents and members of the Tech community.