Three Cups of Tea

The apartment has been moved into. With the amazing help of Sarah, Kristin, my Mom, and Ty my room is almost done. I have a few posters and wall decorations to tack up and a rug to arrange, but other than that my desk, futon/bed (btw, not such a good idea. I thought it would be cool to have a “chair” in my room…yeah, not so much.), Issac Newton quote, lamp, and amazing tree of life wall scroll are up. The room feels so much more like a home than any of my previous ones have. And the apartment too. I like these apartments. They aren’t real big, which is nice, but seems to have more room than the Carpenter Wells one did…and so much less noisy.

I feel like we are failing our original goal of reviewing books on this blog. I have read at least three since my last review, but oh well. You do what you can. A couple of weeks I read Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. The book was a non-fiction account of Greg Mortenson's journeys into Pakistan and Afghanistan to build schools for the rural children. It was a really inspiring book--Mortenson is married with two children, but still spends months over in Pakistan and Afghanistan building these schools for the other children there. I honestly couldn't do that. I guess what was also cool was the book started at the very beginning. Mortenson was a mountain climber, and attempts to reach the summit of K2 (pictures of this mountain can be found in a previous post). He fails (due to a medical emergency) and gets lost coming down. He stumbles across a town called Korphe, and the people warmly take him in and care for him. He picks up the local language and gets to know the people, only to find that the town's children do not have a school. The children meet on the top of a hill, in the cold, to practice lessons from a once-a-week teacher (I believe) in the mud. So...the book takes off from there. It was interesting to read about how Mortenson manages to get the funding for the school, only to go back and realize that they have no ways of getting the supplies to the village, so they have to build a bridge first. It's a very good comparison of our Western mentality in comparison to the mentality of the villagers of Korphe. I am not by any means saying that the villagers were stupid. I rather admire their practicality, and how hard the elders worked to build a village for their children. But also, it was amazing to read about how different people in all of these areas of the world made the schools possible. Though Mortenson was the one to go to Pakistan and Afghanistan to initiate the schools, he, by no means, accomplished this alone.

The cover of the book says "one man's mission to promote peace...one school at a time.", but this isn't correct. It was not the work of one man, but many.

So I guess, I would end with saying that it is truly amazing to see how the work of many can be brought together to create so much goodness in the world.

The book also started each chapter with a quote, and many of them were very good. Not going to lie, sometimes I enjoyed the quotes at the beginning more than the actual story (it dragged), so I will end this post with one.

"Why ponder thus the future to foresee,

and jade thy brain to vain perplexity?

Cast off thy care, leave Allah's plan to him--

He formed them all without consulting thee."

--Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat