Three Cups of Tea

23Jun08

I thought (and argued) Life could never be as interesting as fiction. But after reading Three Cups of Tea, I’m afraid I’d have to say I was wrong. It describes how a single person can change the world, yes that isn’t an overstatement. How a single person can change the world.

It’s about Greg Mortenson, a climber who after his failed K2 expedition went on to conquer even greater heights. He started on a mission to build schools in the most neglected areas of Pakistan and later Afganisthan, especially in the era of 9\11 when that whole area had an equal amount of hatred and Uranium in its atmosphere as was oxygen, and America was suffering from Islamophobia.

Three Cups of Tea

Its about how a single person, with just a car to call his own and strong determination can change lives of thousands of people half the world away forever.

Mortenson not only had failed to summit K2, he had returned home broke. And because he was anxiuos about spoiling things by leaning too heavily on Marina(his girl friend), he still spent the majority of his nights in La Bamba (his car). He had become known to the police. And they roused him in the middle of the night with flashlights and made him trace sleepy orbits of Berkeley Flats, half awake at the wheel, searching for parking spots where they wouldn’t find him before morning.

The first village he chose was Korphe, and with all the difficulties in the way, it would take more than a Man to not loose his determination. It would have been much easier to settle down for the fact that he was just another climber who was passing through that village, who took services of the people and payed them in return, who saw their children’s illiteracy and ignorance and could do nothing about it, but he instead decided that he would do something about it.

“Do you see how beautiful this Koran is?” Haji Ali asked.

“Yes.”

“I can’t read it”, he said. “I can’t read anything. This is the greatest sadness in my life. I’ll do anything so the children of my village never have to know this feeling. I’ll pay any price so they have the education they deserve.”

“Sitting there beside him,” Mortenson says, “I realized that every thing, all the difficulties I’d gone through, from the time I’d promised to build the school, through the long struggle to complete it, was nothing compared to the sacrifices he was prepared to make for his people. Here was this illiterate man, who’d hardly ever left his liitle village in the Karakoram,” Mortenson says. “Yet he was the wisest man I’ve ever met.”

Being an American made it only worse, people double checking his actions from every aspect was a common thing. The episode where he was suspected and was shut in a room for four days, send shivers down your spine.

For four days, as he’d become increasingly depressed, he’d refused everything but rice and tea.

And oh the Joy when Jean Hoerni, Greg’s first sponsor who believed in him, saw a picture of the school that Greg had completed in Korphe. Jean wanted to see this in his hospital bed suffering from myelofibrosis, a fatal form of leukemia.

He turned back to Hoerni and saw him hunched over the phone, ordering an overseas operator to locate a certain number for him in Switzerland. “Salut”, Hoerni said finally to a childhood friend from Geneva. “C’est moi, Jean. I built a school in the Karakoram Himalaya,” he boasted. “What have you done for the last fifty years?”

Later, Greg Mortenson became the executive officer of Central Asia Institute(CAI) established by Jean Hoerni which is still on its mission to promote peace by building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The idea of using Education to fight against terrorism instead of bombs is wonderful.

I do it beacuse I care about kids. Fighting terror is may be seventh or eighth on my list of priorities. But working over there, I’ve learned a few things. I’ve learned that terror doesn’t happen beacause some group of people somewhere like Pakistan or Afghanistan simply decide to hate us. It happens because children aren’t being offered a bright enough future that they have a reason to choose life over death.

Being the CEO of CAI, Mortenson didnt confine himself to working in his office in Montana, US. He often visits Pakistan and Afghanistan risking his life for the well beingness of children who others even didnt knew exist.

Mortenson lay prone in the cool mud, trying to think his way out of the firefight, but there was nothing to be done. Several new gunners joined the battle, and the intensity of fire above their heads surged, tearing the air into shreds. “I stopped thinking about escape and started thinking about my kids,” Mortenson says, “trying to imagine how Tara(his wife) would expalin the way I’d died to them, and wondering if they would understand what I was trying to do–how I didn’t mean to leave them, that I was trying to help kids like them over here. I decided Tara would make them understand. And that was a pretty good feeling.”

Cheers to man who dedicated his life for the welfare of the children half world away, but we could really give him something more than just cheers. Skip a starbucks, dont watch a crappy movie or Imagine an extra dinner and donate that amount to CAI. Nothing is less, it costs 1 USD to support a child’s education for a month. Im leaving links to CAI and some other important ones below.

Links:

CAI’s official website where you can donate

Greg Mortenson’s official website

Greg Mortenson’s Blog

Three Cups of Tea official website

Note: The quotes are taken directly from the book.

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Tags: Books, CAI, central asia institute, education, greg mortenson, pakistan, Review, three cups of tea