Terror, Terrorism and Tea

Terror, Terrorism and Tea

I will lead off this review of Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin with these words spoken to Greg Mortenson toward the end of the book. The two men are in northern Afghanistan where Greg has come at risk of life and limb to fulfill a promise he`d made many years before: to build schools for the children of this remote region. Here are the words of Sadhar Khan:

â€œLook here, look at these hills. There has been far too much dying in these hills. Every rock, every boulder that you see before you is one of my mujahedeen, shahids, martyrs, who sacrificed their lives fighting the Russians and the Taliban. Now we must make their sacrifice worthwhile. We must turn these stones into schools.â€

The book is an amazing account of what one man with a vision and a determination to keep a promise can do to change the world. As this book was completed 24,000 students, girls and boys studied, balanced secular curriculum in schools throughout northern Pakistan and Afghanistan built my Greg Mortenson and his small band of intrepid adventurers.

These schools where built with extremely limited funds, 10,000 dollars builds a school, a penny buys a pencil and one dollar a day supplies a teacher. Greg accomplished all of this without the aid of government money.

While today the Central Asia Institute, the organization Greg Mortenson built from an office in the basement of his modest home in Bozeman Montana, is fairly well funded, at the beginning of his odyssey he wrote over 500 fund raising letters without response. He had no money of his own, often sleeping in his truck or in a small apartment with nothing more than a sleeping bag on the floor for a bed.

He traveled all over northern Pakistan and Afghanistan in a jeep usually with only one or two people with him. He did this without protection except for the enormous love and respect he earned from the remote villagers who saw a man who kept his promises unlike their own governments and those of the western world.

Greg often found himself in tight spots, but he showed a remarkable intelligence in finding ways out or through these difficult moments. Getting into northern Afghanistan proved particularly difficult and he made the final stretch to the Home of Sadhar Khan hidden in a truck filled with raw unprocessed goat hides on the way to a tannery.

At times while I read this book I had a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes from the sheer joy of Gregâ€™s accomplishment in places where the Pakistani government often feared to tread. He did this without weapons, using only his enormous humanity and his ability to connect to ordinary people and to understand the aspirations of these people to see their children educated so that they could break the cycle of poverty and war and live more fulfilling lives. In the process he taught us all, citizens and governments alike, that it is not with guns or weapons that we regain our security and peace, but in the giving up of those weapons and instead investing in the simple tasks of lifting up communities and villages one school at a time.

Nick Grimshawe.

Beautiful Summer Morning Top 5 Inspirational Books for Week ending August 02 2008

1. The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
TW #1 LW #1 # of Weeks 14

2. Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin
TW # 2 LW #2 — # of W 26

3. A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (Oprah’s Book Club, Selection 61) By Eckhart Tolle
TW # 3 LW #3 # of Weeks 23

4. Money, and the Law of Attraction: Learning to Attract Wealth, Health, and Happiness by Esther and Jerry Hicks
TW #4 LW — # of W 1

5.Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin
TW # 5 LW — # of W 1

Well that’s a wrap for this week.

If you come across a book you think should be reviewed in these pages, please send me a note in the comments section of this post and I will do my utmost to find it and review it.