Pancrit

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Greg Mortenson: Three Cups of Tea

By Chris Hibbert

Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea (co-written with David Oliver Relin) tells how Mortenson fell in love with Pakistan after a failed mountain climbing expedition and decided to help the people who rescued him by building a school for their children. After the effort and investment required to build the first, he continued building. According to Wikipedia and the website of the institute he helped found, they have built more than 60 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The book follows his adventures from the fateful climb through fundraising, kidnappings, and fatwas from imams incensed at westerners educating Muslim children.

Mortenson is quite a hero. He does a great job of helping the reader to see the Pakistanis as people, and shows how far a little education can go. The people he deals with are willing to give up a lot in order to make it possible for their children to get an education. Mortenson himself makes enormous sacrifices to continue the work, even when many factions try to prevent the education of their neighbors' girls.

The book is well enough written to have been a New York Times best seller. It's well worth the read.

http://pancrit.blogspot.com/2007/09/greg-mortenson-three-cups-of-tea.html

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