The nurmadhar watched Mortenson's state carefully, and ordered one of the village's precious chogo rabak, or big rams, slaughtered. Forty people tore every scrap of roasted meat from the skinny animal's bones, then cracked open the bones themselves with rocks, stripping the marrow with their teeth. Watching the ardor with which the meat was devoured, Mortenson realized how rare such a meal was for the people of Korphe, and how close they lived to hunger.
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Many Westerners passing trough the Karakoram had the feeling that the Balti lived a simpler, better life than they did back home in their developed countries. Early visitors, casting about for suitably romantic names, dubbed it "Tibet of the Apricots."
The Balti "really seem to have a flair for enjoying life," Maraini wrote in 1958, after visiting Askole and admiring the "old bodies of men sitting in the sun smoking their picturesque pipes, those not so old working at primitive looms in the shade of mulberry trees with that sureness of touch that comes with a lifetime's experience, and two boys, sitting by themselves, removing their lice with tender and meticulous care."
"We breathed an air of utter satisfaction, of eternal peace," he continued. "All this gives rise to the question. Isn't it better to live in ignorance of everything--asphalt and macadam, vehicles, telephones, television--to live in bliss without knowing it?"
Thirty-five years later, the Balti still lived with the same lack of modern conveniences, but after even a few days in the village, Mortenson began to see that Korphe was far from the prelapsarian paradise of Western fantasy. In every home, at least one family member suffered from goiters or cataracts. The children, whose ginger hair he had admired, owed their coloring to a form of malnutrition called kwashiorkor. And he learned from his talks with Twaha, after the nurmadhar's son returned from evening prayer at the village mosque, that the nearest doctor was a week's walk away in Skardu, and one out of every three Korphe children died before reaching their first birthday.
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After their familiar breakfast of chapattis and cha, Haji Ali led Mortenson up a steep path to a vast open ledge eight hundred feet above the Braldu. The view was exquisite, with the ice giants of the upper Baltoro razored into the blue far above Korphe's gray rock walls. But Mortenson wasn't admiring the scenery. He was appalled to see eighty-two children kneeling on the frosty ground, in the open.
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Mortenson watched, his heart in his throat, as the students stood at rigid attention and began their "school day" with Pakistan's national anthem...They sang with sweet raggedness, their breath steaming in air already touched with winter.
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After the last note from the national anthem had faded, the children sat in a neat circle and began copying their multiplication tables. Most scratched in the dirt with sticks they'd brought for that purpose. The more fortunate, like Jahan, had slate boards they wrote on with sticks dipped in a mixture of mud and water.
Three Cups of Tea Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
