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Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time
Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
Penguin Books
2006, 349 pages, $15.00, paperback

Imagine a teenaged Muslim girl bursting into a meeting of 30 men that includes the leader of her remote Pakistani village, an American journalist and the director of an American non-profit. She approaches the latter and demands 20,000 rupees for her tuition to medical school.

This really happened.

In 1993, Greg Mortenson got lost while descending from a failed attempt to climb K2 in the Himalayas. He landed in Korphe, a village where life was hard but where “they also lived with a rare kind of purity.” The village lacked a school building, and the children scratched their lessons in the dirt.

Mortenson was so moved by the villagers’ generosity that he promised to build them a school. They’d heard such promises before, from foreign climbers who passed through, used the people as laborers, and never returned. But Mortenson kept his promise and eventually founded Central Asia Institute, whose mission is “to promote and provide community-based education and literacy programs, especially for girls, in remote mountain regions of Central Asia.”

I began this book with trepidation, thinking it might have an evangelical twist. However, Mortenson had no agenda other than humanitarianism, to help people so they can help themselves. Through great sacrifice (living in his car for a year) and adversity (being kidnapped by the fierce Waziris who, when they found out his mission, contributed hundreds of rupees), Mortenson has done more to promote peace and fight terrorism than the Bush administration.

While addressing Congress in 2002, Mortenson said, “Working over there, I’ve learned a few things. I’ve learned that terror doesn’t happen because 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.”

Mortenson is a true hero. But he is not alone, for heroes too are the many men, women, and children who try so hard to survive and improve their lives amidst the tragedy of war and oppression that strikes their home.

Jahan, the Muslim teenager, received $400 on the spot from a smiling Mortenson to continue the education that he had made possible.

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