Three Cups of Tea

Have you heard about this book, or Greg Mortenson? Maybe what’s flicked across your radar is the story of a man who failed to climb K2, instead found, in a tiny village on the edge of its glacier, sustenance so deep and nourishing that he promised to build the people a school, for their children whose classroom was a teacherless hillside, math done with sticks in soft earth.

He has since built 78 schools for boys and girls across the rural areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. When he made his first promise, in 1993, he owned nothing – he lived in his car, worked as a nurse. He had no idea how to raise the $12,000 needed to build a school.

He had no political agenda – he simply built schools, and paid the teachers the people chose among themselves. Of the two fatwa’s issued against him, one was overruled by the Ayatollah’s of Iran themselves, the other by a local shariah court.

While the Taliban is once again energetically blowing up girls schools, Mortenson travels eight months a year here to raise funds and awareness, and four months a year in Pakistan and Afghanistan to check in on existing and future schools.

His vision is so powerful and effective, this book is now required reading for our State Department.

Read this book and let your notions of possible and impossible, and scarcity and abundance be thrown into a swirling, heady, welcome chaos.