Napkins folded into miniature Titanic-like vessels filled 800 coffee cups in the Hilton Executive Ballroom Wednesday. Decadent desserts circled tables covered with flawless linens.
Over 800 alumni, donors, staff, nuns and community members filed into the underground ballroom fit with 30-foot ceilings and nearly a dozen shimmering chandeliers for the 15th annual St. Mary’s Academy scholarship fundraiser luncheon.
The keynote speaker for this event was not quite accustomed to such elegance. David Oliver Relin, local author of the best-selling book Three Cups of Tea, has spent the last 15 years traveling to the world’s most remote communities in Southeast Asia and, most notably, the mountainous region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
As the keynote speaker to the all-female academy’s fundraiser, Relin stressed the importance of educating women, relating stories of his own experiences overseas.
Relin opened his speech with a personally inspiring quote from Grace Paley: “‘It’s the duty of the writer to listen to the stories of the powerless and to tell their stories to the powerful.'”
In Three Cups of Tea, Relin relays the stories of tens of thousands of villagers living in the 17,000-foot peaks that adorn the feet of the Karakoram Mountains, through the eyes and hands of Greg Mortenson, the Montana nurse who stumbles into the village of Korphe.
“The people there are caught in a cycle of poverty. You don’t see schools or clinics or roads or electricity,” Relin said. As he spoke, an image depicting tiny houses built into a jagged cliff’s edge and farming plots on 45-degree slants flashed onto the projection screen.
“People are working around the clock like animals to survive,” Relin said, “Therefore it is our responsibility, with all of our excess, to help people break the cycle of poverty.”
As Relin recalled his journey to these remote villages via a reclaimed military helicopter, named French Fluke after its unexpected 50-year lifespan, he explained the importance of educating girls and women in order to end the cycle of poverty and terrorism rampant in the region.
According to Relin, his arrival in the village of Korphe, where Greg Mortenson was working at the time, marks the “transformation of a journalist.”
Relin explained that as he stepped out of the barely-aloft chopper, the villagers embraced him as a hero, and his objectivity as a journalist immediately flew away with the rotating blades of the helicopter.He recalled his journalistic dilemma at the time.
“I want to be accurate, but this is a story I am passionate about that I want people all over the world to know about,” he said.
Relin described the event that inspired Mortenson, which he said would go on to inspire him as well. Mortenson, upon recovery from a climbing accident that led him to the village in the first place, asked where the community’s school was.
The community leader showed him a plateau with 85 children practicing multiplication tables in the dirt with sticks. Only five of the students were girls.
A few years later, Relin said, a school with four walls, a roof, windows, books and pencils stood on that plateau.
“If you really want to transform a society, build a schoolhouse and get the girls to go to it,” Relin said. “The Taliban fear education the most.”
The Taliban are said to be in control of 15 percent of the schools in the region, mostly preying on the most impoverished refugees. Relin tagged this as “harvesting hopelessness.” He also explained that what the news media calls “madrasas” are often these types of schools.
“It is the oil we buy and the gas we use that create radical schools in the most destitute places,” Relin said.
Since seeing and reporting on the plight of these communities firsthand, Relin has become a personal advocate for the 78 Central Asian Institute schools that serve 20,000 girls and boys in the high mountains in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Among lessons learned, Relin said one of the most important is: “If you help people and offer them hope, they like you better.”
His passion for education is not regional, however, as exemplified in one story where Relin recounted his 1993 bicycle tour of Vietnam. Over the course of three years he cycled the entire length of the island interviewing villagers.
Relin reported that the most astonishing sight in Vietnam was a school built on what was once the most dangerous minefield on the entire island.
As his hour came to a close, he imparted some advice to the hundreds of women supporting St. Mary’s Academy on how to end poverty and terrorism. Aside from Relin’s address, the event also featured a speech from local news anchor Laural Porter and a stringed orchestral ensemble performance.
Above all, Relin said women must be continually empowered.
“If we want to get serious we have to institutionalize the creation of strong, empowered, emancipated women,” he said.