By Ray Wong Special to ASIA     Greg Mortenson, humanitarian and author of the book "Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace… One School at a Time," arrived late to the theater at City College. It didn't matter, as the standing-room-only audience gave him a hero's ovation upon his appearance on stage.   When Mortenson was three months old, his parents took him from Minnesota to Tanzania in East Africa, so they could work as missionaries for 13 years. Mortenson returned to the United States only to experience prejudice and racism in high school. He was beaten up by teens who called him "African,"even though he is Caucasian. After Mortenson's sister, Christa, died of an epileptic seizure, he vowed to honor her. An avid climber, he set off in 1993 to scale one of the toughest mountains in the world, K2 in northern Pakistan, to leave her necklace at the summit. After 78 excruciating days, he failed.  But he did spend time in the village of Korphe in northern Pakistan. It broke his heart and it changed his life. In a schoolyard without a building or a teacher, 84 children, 79 boys and five girls, wrote with sticks in the dirt to study.		According to Mortenson, a third of the babies in this region die before they’re one year old. Men work for $400 a year. The female literacy rate is under 5 percent. Mortenson promised one of the students, a girl, that he would build a school for her village.He went back to the Unitted   States and typed letters to celebrities in an effort to raise money. After 580 letters, Mortenson received one response – a check for $100 from Tom Brokaw, former NBC-TV anchor and longtime television personality.     A school in the U.S. contacted Westside Elementary in River Falls, Wis., heard about his efforts and invited Mortenson to speak. Afterwards, the children and teachers contributed more than 62,000 pennies in trash containers to the cause. Since then, the organization they founded called "Pennies for Peace" has donated over 16 million pennies from 700 U.S. schools.     Mortenson sold everything an contacted a renowned climber Jean Hoerni, who provided remaining funds for the first school. He also received help from the village of Korphe, which provided unskilled labor and some materials. Together, they built a school.      Mortenson moved from one end of the stage to the other as he spoke to the audience. "There's a saying in Africa, 'If you educate a boy, you educate an individual. If you educate a girl, you educate a community.' A boy will go off to lead his life. A girl will remain in the community, and her education is passed along. "In Third World countries, if you educate girls to the fifth grade, you reduce infant mortality. You reduce the population explosion, and you raise the quality of life index,” he pointed out. “In Pakistan and Afghanistan, some women walk three hours to school to sit on a mat in the dirt to learn." Behind him, slides of the people and villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan brought the audience into the most desolate regions he described with heart-rending detail.  "To understand poverty,” said Mortenson, “you have to feel it, smell it, taste it. The think tanks in Washington D.C. aren't going to be able to change poverty because they haven't been there." Since 1996, Mortenson's nonprofit organization, the "Central Asia Institute," has helped to build more than 60 schools in the remotest mountain regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.  Mortenson talked about education's impact on "jihad," the religious holy war Islamic extremist groups wage against the United States and other Western countries. "In Afghanistan, sons need to get the permission of the mother to go on a jihad. Educated mothers won't allow their sons to join the Taliban." At the same time, he offered this staggering statistic: "There are 145 million children in the world that can't go to school."     For more information about Greg Mortenson and the Central Asia Institute, go to www.ikat.org.