Ever since I can remember, my dad, Greg Mortenson, has been going overseas to help people. He builds schools and promotes education in really remote parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan. He wrote a book called Three Cups of Tea. Maybe you’ve heard of it.

My dad travels for work a lot, but my brother, Khyber, and I know that what he’s doing is important. There are people out there in the world who don’t have a house, food, education. The kids where he works have grown up with violence, war, and poverty. I don’t think any kid likes war. And our kids are going to have the exact same experiences unless we step up to the plate.

So I look at it from a perspective of how I can help. I want to help.

I first got involved in my dad’s work with Pennies for Peace, which helps raise money for Central Asia Institute, the organization my dad founded. Pennies for Peace was actually started by kids at a Wisconsin school where my grandmother was the principal. They wanted to help my dad raise money—one penny at a time—to build his first school.

In Pakistan and Afghanistan, a penny can buy a pencil. When a child learns to read and write, they have better opportunities in life. They can become good citizens and are less likely to wind up being violent or going to war. And when they go to school, they have hope, which is everything.

I started helping when I was five or six years old. I set up a lemonade stand to raise money for Pennies for Peace and my black-belt project for Tae Kwan Do was raising money for Pennies for Peace. But another way I help my dad is with music.

Singing is one of my favorite things. Music is one of my favorite subjects at school and I have had voice lessons since I was five. The CD was my mom’s idea, and I thought it would be cool. My voice teacher is Jeni Fleming, she’s a professional jazz singer, and we did a song called Three Cups of Tea, like the book. I had some ideas for phrases and words and then Jake, Jeni’s husband, did the music and the lyrics.

It’s about drinking three cups of tea with people: first cup you’re a stranger, second cup you’re a friend and by the third cup, you’re family. The song’s also about how even a penny can make a difference. My favorite part is:

“If I give a penny for a pencil

My hero writes a word.

Her words become great tools

His stories make wise the fools.

I believe it’s just three cups away.”

Jeni and I recorded the song in Nashville. We sell the CD online and the money buys supplies for the kids.

That was in fourth grade. I’m much more of a social person than my dad so since then I have been singing and speaking at some of my dad’s lectures. I’ve also done two videos about Pennies for Peace. And I helped with the Young Readers’ edition of Three Cups of Tea and sometimes go on the book tour with my dad.

I think working with my dad has brought out the best in me. I can let other kids know about what’s going on and talk about education and peace. Once they know about it, they always want to help. And I can tell them about the schools my dad builds because I have seen them.

I’ve been to Pakistan, although not nearly as many times as my dad. The first time I was eight months old. I was there again when I was three and then when I was ten The last time we traveled as a family, all together, and we visited a lot of the schools.

Life for children there is much more difficult than it is for us. Kids get up while it’s still dark out to do chores and help with tea and breakfast. Then they walk to school. Some have to walk really far and they don’t have good shoes. After school, they walk home, do more chores and their homework. Their chores are much harder than ours. Sometimes I even complain about emptying the dishwasher. But they’re carrying heavy buckets of water from the river, working in the fields and taking animals up really steep mountains to graze.

The schools CAI builds are pretty plain. They have chalkboards and desks and the students have notebooks and textbooks, although sometimes they have to share. Most of the schools also have a well for clean drinking water. I told my dad they needed playgrounds and now a lot of them have swings and slides.

All the kids wear uniforms. When we visit the schools I like to wear the uniform, too. For girls, it’s a shalwar kamiz, with white pants and then either a green or a blue shirt like a tunic, and a dupattas, or head scarf.

When we go there, I also like to visit my friends in their homes. We always visit Hussein. He drove a Jeep for my dad for many years. He lives in a mud-brick house with his six kids, his wife, and his parents. It’s like a lot of houses in Pakistan, with rooms around a courtyard. People sit and sleep and eat on the carpets on the floor. There’s a ladder up to the flat roof, where his family dries apricots, cherries, and corn in the sun. The animals, the cows and goats, are in a shed.

The last time we visited I also got to see my friend Jahan. She’s Haji Ali’s granddaughter and she’s in Three Cups of Tea. We sketched portraits of each other and I showed her how to use a computer a little bit.

Greg Mortenson with kids Amira and Khyber and wife Tara Bishop

Family is very important there. Actually, I think family is the most important thing in the world. I can live without my friends, although it would be hard. But my family, that’s definitely No. 1. People know about my dad, but my mom is really strong and smart and we’re very close. Khyber is my little brother and he is shy and sensitive. He worries a lot about the kids in Afghanistan getting hurt by land mines and war. And then there are my grandmothers. They help us out a lot and they’re both incredible.

When I think about other things that are important in life, after family, No. 2 is basic needs, knowing I’m going to be fed; No. 3 is friends and No. 4 would be my future, what path I choose. How will I go the right way? Most kids don’t know the way and having goals for the future, to figure out what kind of path to take, is important. A big part of that is education.

No. 5 would be helping other people. I want to do something that helps other people, like working with children and music or starting a school and following in my dad’s footsteps. Not many people know this but we have a long history of educators in my family. Not only my dad, but my great grandpa was a teacher in Norway and my grandma started an international school in Tanzania. I feel it’s my responsibility to do that, whether through music or something else.

I try to help other people as much as I can. When I talk about Pennies for Peace, I tell kids that they can collect pennies for any humanitarian cause, either CAI or something right where they live. I learned from my dad you don’t have to do things half a world away. In Montana, I help with the animal shelter. After Hurricane Katrina, I suggested to my class that we raise money for the victims. And I write letters to kids who have parents in the military, serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. I tell them to be strong. I know that it’s hard when your parents aren’t there every day and sometimes miss birthdays and school concerts. I know. So I think we should all reach out to each other and support each other.

I think, too, that for me and Khyber, giving up our dad is kind of a way of doing community service. He’s gone a lot. Ever since he wrote Three Cups of Tea, he gets thousands of requests to speak at schools and other places. And of course he travels to Pakistan and Afghanistan for work. So I don’t get to see him as much as I would like.

We worry about him sometimes. Some of the places he goes are dangerous. But he’s smart about things and he has an amazing staff. They all go and drink lots of tea with the people who want to build schools. He makes friends everywhere. So there are lots of people looking out for his safety. They’re like a big family. It’s like having lots of uncles.

My parents have encouraged me in all of the things I love — music, theatre, Tae Kwon Do. And I’ve learned from them that helping out in the world is important. Especially for us here in the United States. We have so much compared to the rest of the world.

About Greg Mortenson

Whenever Greg Mortenson talks about his humanitarian work promoting education as a path to world peace, he cites his children, Amira and Khyber, as his primary motivators. He also draws inspiration from the children who attend the more than 90 schools he has built in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Seeing a child write his or her own name for the first time “is a very incredible experience, because it means that now that child has an identity,” he told students at the University of Delaware in September, according to the UDaily. “ It also is very precious when your own children learn to read and read their storybooks to you,” he said.

Since the 2006 publication of his book, Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time, Mortenson has spent a lot of time on the road, promoting his book and raising money for his organization, Central Asia Institute, in addition to his overseas trips for work. Periodically, his family joins him on the road. But his hectic travel schedule means he’s missed some key turning points in his children’s lives.

Yet his children are with him every day in many ways. Sometimes they are literally there, participating in school visits or presentations. Other times, he relies on his belief that doing his part to build a better future, where peace and knowledge override war and ignorance, will make the world a better place for his children — and all children.

The villages where Mortenson builds schools — usually high in the mountains, far off the beaten path — often lack the basic amenities Westerners take for granted. Many of the children grow up in homes without electricity, clean drinking water, or enough food to eat. And many of them, especially the girls, weren’t even going to school before Mortenson came along.

An estimated 120 million children in the world don’t go to school, 78 million of whom are girls. There are lots of reasons why, including religious extremism, gender discrimination, slavery, and war. But Mortenson believes education needs to be the world’s top priority. And he believes kids play a key role in making that happen.

CAI’s Pennies for Peace program is aimed at getting kids involved in raising money to help pay for the schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. A penny buys a pencil. And Pennies for Peace “is going bananas,” Mortenson said. Thousands of children in the United States participate, raising money for CAI or other community-based nonprofit projects in their own hometowns. They’re making a huge contribution.

And so as Mortenson is inspired by children, he has found a unique and successful way to also help young volunteers to find ways to make the world a better place.