“Fuck Bush” is one of the least productive, most commonly spoken phrases in campus-antiwar political conversation. Other catchphrases include, “It’s a shit storm over there,” or “We should just bring the troops home.” Sometimes the liberally minded will offer a pseudo-solution: “We should be building schools and educating the youth instead of bringing guns and tanks.” Again, this statement is beautiful but rather useless when unattached to any action.
So what does it actually take to up and educate the Muslim children of the isolated mountain regions of the Middle East – the very regions where the Taliban was born? Greg Mortenson, a mountain climber turned humanitarian from Berkeley, Calif., proves building schools may be a more arduous undertaking than waging a strategic war. But he also demonstrates the products of determination: beautiful, unrelenting possibilities. Despite language barriers, limited resources, culture clashes, Middle Eastern political disapproval and personal struggles, Mortenson built 55 schools across the most dangerous regions of the Middle East. He then co-wrote his story with Portland author David Oliver Relin in the recent nonfiction novel “Three Cups of Tea.”
Mortenson had an unusual family history, having lived in Africa until his high school years, when he moved and became a star football player in the Midwest. Soon, his passion for climbing mountains took over his life, and Mortenson worked part-time as an emergency room nurse to fund his exhibitions.
During a failed attempt to scale the K2 in Pakistan, Mortenson separated from his partners and stumbled into the small village of Korphe. They took him in, cleaned him and served him tea with sugar – an expensive luxury. Instead of going back to defeat the mountain that he failed to summit, the organizationally inexperienced rock climber and part-time nurse vowed to build the Korphe youth a school. His quest became the beginning of a string of humanitarian acts that would eventually lead Mortenson to sit face-to-face with Taliban leaders.
This book is not a technical text available only to the politically aware. “Three Cups of Tea” is a story full of rich detail, drama, truth and new beginnings as entertaining as an imaginative fiction and as triumphant as an epic climbing novel. Patience, action and a few cups of tea brought Mortenson to remote mountain villages where he changed whole communities with education.
The book will instill a sense of inspiration that only truths that should be impossibilities evoke.
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