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Once in a while, one reads a story that proves the old adage that real life can prove far more unusual than fiction.

Greg Mortenson was an amateur American mountain climber, living out of a Volvo in Berkeley, barely getting by while working as a nurse in hospital emergency rooms. In 1993 he went to Pakistan as part of an expedition to climb K2, the world’s second highest mountain — 100 feet or so shorter than Mt. Everest, and many times as dangerous. He and two fellow mountaineers nearly made it to the top when disaster struck. One of the them fell, and had to be carried for two days across some of the most difficult rocky and icy terrain in the world, with little food or water, barely alive. On the way back to camp, Greg got lost and nearly died from the cold.

He stumbled into a remote village in the Karakoram mountains, where he was taken in and restored to his climbing team. He promised to return one day and build a school in gratitude. When he got back to California, he began a quixotic attempt to raise funds for the school. He mailed hundreds of letters, until one found a recipient eager to help — Jean Hoerni, a retired venture capitalist in Seattle. With a check for $12,000 — the cost of a single school, materials and construction — he made his way back to Pakistan.

What happens next is best told in the book. Suffice it to say that nothing was easy. Every step of the way — buying the goods, transporting them nearly 1,000 miles by truck, carrying them for days to the village — was a mini-adventure. Countless problems, whether bureaucratic, personal and physical (the first village also needed a bridge to bring in the materials for the school) arose. The reader soon learns that the force of an engaging personality can never be underestimated.

There are many heroes in this story in addition to the indefatigable Greg Mortensen. One set of heroes are the many elderly illiterate villagers, who live many days by foot from a road and never attended a school, but who nonetheless believe in the power of education to transform the lives of their children and grandchildren. The interest in schooling for girls in deeply conservative Muslim villages is one of the many surprises the reader encounters. In one case, the leading Shia cleric in the area, after carefully watching every one of Greg’s moves to ensure that he is not an intelligence agent, summons him for a meeting. Unexpectedly, he embraces the schools project. Few stories so effortlessly undermine stereotypes and inspire confidence in the power of human beings to effect positive change.

Since that first school went up in the village of Korphe, Greg Mortensen’s Central Asia Institute (CAI) has built over 50 more schools in the remote mountainous regions of Pakistan — and more recently, Afghanistan. The word of mouth from village to village about these schools has only increased the demand for them. In one case a shepherd from Afghanistan, wandering across the border into Pakistan, managed to find Greg and ask for a school for his village too. Years later, he was obliged.

Three Cups of Tea, published in 2006, is still a bestseller. For more information on this incredible saga, try the www.ikat.org website. (Photo courtesy Greg Mortensen and the Central Asia Institute.)