books.

Three Cups of Tea.

I just finished the book. I've been reading it for three months now. I know, don't judge.

Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin tell the story of Mortenson's efforts to establish schools for boys and girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan's most remote and extremist-ridden areas. Much of the story takes place in the mountain regions of these countries, areas that have only in the last three decades or so been observed for their tendencies to produce extreme Islamists. Mortenson was turned on to the region as a young mountain climber trying to scale K2.

The book is a NY Times best-seller. But can I be honest? It's not written very well. Hence the three months it took me to read it.

Luckily, the actual story is so engaging it pushes you through the pages. I think the reason it took me such a long time to finish is because I got caught up in the telling of the story, not the story itself. A big mistake. I feel a little snooty but the amount of typos, both spelling and grammatical, was staggering to me, especially for a book published by Penguin. I don't know much about the company but I guess I expected better.

But, putting my complaints aside, never have I read of such a character as Greg Mortenson, a man so devoted to peace that he gave an immeasurable part of his life to serve the children of a distant land he now calls his home. His second home. He lives in Montana with his family. Granted, I haven't read Gandhi's bio (that's on my list) or Mother Teresa's, or those of any of the thousands of lives that have worked for the lives of others, but Mortenson is an impressive humanitarian. There's no disputing that.

I can't say this book jolted me into some supreme awareness or produced some momentous revelation. I started it in August and until November 6, today, I was really kind of putting it off. But what the story did give me is something I think is essential. It wasn't so startling to make me jump into immediate action but it produced what I think might be a more enduring lesson in humanitarianism. It made me realize that I am not Greg Mortenson, nor will I ever be. I do share many of the same goals as him, though. He worked to give young people an education, something my friends and I have attempted in a different capacity since 2005 by raising money for education in a small village in El Salvador. Mortenson's story reinforces that this stuff's hard work. And it takes time and failure and tears and uncomfortable, sometimes dangerous experiences to get you close to where you think you need to be to make things better. Then once you think you get to your goal, you actually have another thousand bigger goals to accomplish to make everything work. But that is SUCH an important thing to learn. It allows you to not get as discouraged, to have determinacion. Valor. Persistencia. Espíritu. Esperanza, hope.

Mortenson's goal was to educate children in these regions of little opportunity, to give them a chance at a brighter future. In doing this, he launched a battle against terror, arguably more effective than the one waged with guns because one of the byproducts of his work has been an eradication of extremism at its roots. The lesson in this book is that there are alternatives to war, there are peaceful means out there. And yes, they are hard options. But they are present and, whether it's in Pakistan, El Salvador, or right here in the United States, peace can be used to solve problems.

If you can sift through the "blehh" writing and see the forest for the trees, you can love this book like I do.


Check out Three Cups of Tea's Web site. There are donation opportunities and more information about the organization Mortenson helped start.