On April 6, 2003, PARADE featured a cover story about Greg Mortenson, an American mountain climber who has devoted more than a decade to building schools in some of the most anti-American regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Inspired by the story, PARADE readers donated in excess of $1 million to Mortenson's cause. Last fall, a violent earthquake in Pakistan took the lives of at least 70,000 people. Millions were left homeless. Mortenson recently revisited the region to assess the damage and organize relief efforts. Here is his report.

Last Thanksgiving, I left my Montana home on my 31st trip to the mountain villages of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Since 1993, I've worked in the region to set up schools, so that children in some of the most impoverished and isolated communities on Earth can have access to a balanced, non-extremist education. I've seen a lot of human suffering. But nothing prepared me for the devastation I witnessed on this visit.

In Urdu, the word for earthquake is zalzala. But wherever I went in Pakistan, everyone referred to the events of Oct. 8, 2005, as the qayamat, the apocalypse. That morning, a violent 7.6-magnitude earthquake tore entire towns and villages to pieces. Pakistan's army estimates that the earthquake killed 74,000 people and left more than 2.8 million in the country homeless.

You may have seen images of the earthquake on television. But until you're standing on the ground in Azad Kashmir, it is almost impossible to picture. Entire villages have been erased beneath a sea of rubble, and sprawling tented refugee camps have sprung up everywhere. In the most remote mountain valleys, relief has yet to arrive. Men will walk for a week to procure a shovel, hammer or nails, so they can build a shack to shelter their families. Enduring the Himalayan winter with only thin cotton clothes and canvas tents, hundreds of thousands of children are succumbing to easily preventable diseases.

I hiked through deep snow to several of these valleys, offering what aid our small organization, the Central Asia Institute, could muster. In order not to offend hungry local people or use their precious resources, we ate only biscuits and cold water, and we crammed into small tents at night.

Fortunately, all of our 45 schools in Pakistan survived the earthquake. But the government estimates that 9,400 schools were destroyed in that fatal minute, and an entire generation of students was buried. Farzana, 15, whom I met in a temporary tent school, is one of the survivors. It took two days before she could summon the courage to talk to me about the morning her village of Nowseri, high in the Neelum Valley, was destroyed.

"The big qayamat came while we were in school," Farzana said quietly, wrapping a frayed maroon shawl around the head of her 3-year-old sister, Kurat, as if to shelter her from hearing how 47 of the school's 88 female students died that day. "The earth shook violently, like a man shaking a tree to dislodge apples, and then the roof collapsed on our heads. What I remember most were the horrible screams of my classmates for help." Farzana was pulled from the rubble and ran to the spot where her home once stood. She found her father, Nur Hussein, weeping by the body of her mother, Jamila Khattoon. Later, she learned that her brother Nabil, 13, also died when his school collapsed.

"Now I must raise Kurat myself," Farzana said, shivering in the unheated tent. "Every morning I wake up at 4 a.m. to pray and cook tea for my father, then I study and go to school. My father spends six hours a day walking to an army camp for our daily rations. We only get 20 ounces of flour, a little vegetable oil, tea and salt to keep us alive."

Many people in Farzana's place might feel overwhelmed and give up. But she told me she's determined to continue her education and hopes to become a doctor, since she has learned how urgently her people require medical care. All over northern Pakistan, I met courageous survivors like Farzana-good people who desperately need a helping hand.

Only two days after the earthquake, 12 hulking American Chinook helicopters, diverted from fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, arrived to distribute aid to remote villages. That's deeply appreciated in Pakistan. But it's not enough. So far, the U.S. has delivered an estimated $340 million of the $510 million pledged for relief.

At this precarious time for Pakistan, we must do more. Our own security depends on it. Devastated areas are fertile recruiting grounds for future terrorists. In many places I visited, extremist groups and seasoned Taliban fighters were the only people providing aid. I saw thousands of vulnerable children being fed not only meals but also indoctrination.

Our organization is working to set up tent schools for surviving children in dozens of the most remote villages. We can't begin to replace all they've lost. But we can give them hope for the future through education, and help Farzana and thousands of her fellow students rise from the rubble.

What You Can Do

To learn more about relief efforts in Pakistan, check out the Central Asia Institute (P.O. Box 7209, Bozeman, Mont. 59771, or ikat.org); Oxfam (1-800-776-9326 or oxfamamerica.org); or Mercy Corps, (1-800-852-2100 or mercycorps.org).

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‘The Most Important Lesson I Ever Learned’

In 1993, the people of Korphe, a village in Pakistan, nursed Greg Mortenson back to health after he became ill while climbing K2, one of the world's highest mountains. Deeply grateful, he promised to build a school for Korphe. This adapted excerpt is from the new book Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission To Fight Terrorism and Build Nations... One School at a Time, by Greg Mortenson and PARADE Contributing Editor David Oliver Relin, being published this week. Here, Mortenson reveals a key reason why he has been able to succeed in a region where so many foreigners have failed.

One clear afternoon at the site of the half-finished school, Greg Mortenson was pressing the people of Korphe to work faster than they wanted to, when Korphe's chief, Haji Ali, tapped him on the shoulder. Haji Ali led the former climber uphill for an hour, on legs still strong enough to humble the much younger man.

He waited until Mortenson caught his breath, then instructed him to look at the vista. The ice peaks of the inner Karakoram knifed relentlessly into a defenseless blue sky. A thousand feet below, Korphe, green with ripening barley fields, looked small and vulnerable, like a life raft adrift on a sea of stone.

"You can't tell the mountains what to do," Haji Ali said with an air of gravity that transfixed Mortenson as much as the view. "You must learn to listen to them. And now I am asking you to listen to me. By the mercy of Almighty Allah, I appreciate what you're doing for my people. But now you must do one more thing."

"Anything."

"Sit down. And shut your mouth. You're making everyone crazy."

"Then, in silence, he led me all the way to his small stone home," Mortenson says.

Only after porcelain bowls of scalding butter tea steamed in their hands did Haji Ali speak again: "The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family we are prepared to do anything, even die," he said, laying his hand over Mortenson's own. "Doctor Greg, you must make time to share three cups of tea. We may be uneducated, but we are not stupid. We have survived here for a long time."

"That day Haji Ali taught me the most important lesson I've ever learned," Mortenson says. "We Americans think you have to accomplish everything quickly. Our leaders thought their 'shock and awe' campaign could end the war in Iraq before it even started. Haji Ali taught me to slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects. He taught me that I had much more to learn from the people I work with than I could ever hope to teach them."

Adapted from “Three Cups of Tea,” by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, © 2006, published by Viking Penguin.