Three Cups of Tea

I had to confess to my friend, Tom, that I am as anal as he is. Well, almost. I realized that I obsess about keeping my ipod full of books. It holds about 10. Most books are broken into two or more parts. As I finish a part of a book, I load in a part of another book. This means that I sometimes forget why I bought a book by the time I read it. What ever prompted me to get Three Cups of Tea? I'd look in Amazon to remind me. Oh, yea, the book about the guy who built schools in Pakistan. Yea, okay, maybe later. Reading one of these books on the proverbial shelf becomes difficult. I guess I just have to trust my own judgement. I probably bought it for a good reason. (See On the Wealth of Nations and its fate to know how wrong that thought can be.)

I shouldn't have worried about this book. It has elements of two books that I liked, Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder and The Places Inbetween by Rory Stewart. The Mountains book is about Paul Farmer, who sets up a TB clinic and hospital in Haiti. I always see a man looking at what he wants and not seeing anything else. All his actions support his goal; total blinders. It is so inspiring you want to wade knee deep in mud and filth to join him in his battle. The Places book has an equally focused man trying to reach his goal. He just wants to walk across Afghanistan. The thing that makes it similar to Three Cups of Tea is the location. Stewart's quest isn't humanitarian, he just wants to cross the country after what happened on 9/11. Maybe he wanted to learn more about Muslims and where they live. I know I learned more about how rugged that country is and how difficult it is to get anywhere. I knew about that country and Pakistan when I read Tea thanks to this book.

Three Cups of Tea is about Greg Mortensen, a mountain climber. He fails when climbing K1 or K2 in Pakistan. On his way down the mountain, he gets lost. The head man in a village finds him and cares for him as well as he can. While there, Mortensen sees the poor state of the children's school and the fact that girls aren't allowed in the school. The girls still do all they can to learn, writing their lessons in the dust. He vows to return and build a school. His single-mindedness is amazing. He will build this school, despite that fact that he has no money. He is a nurse who lives to climb. This is an exciting story. It's fun to listen to how he keeps his promise to build a school. God love scope-creep. As he finds funding, which is a trick in itself, he build more schools. And on and on.

One of my many favorite sayings is "Nothing Is Easy." I used to have NIE written on the white board by my desk in the Learning Center. You may think it will be a piece of cake, but you forget all that is entailed in baking that cake. Mortensen learns that little lesson all through this book and his adventure. There is one interesting obstacle after another on the way to completing the first one. One advantage that he has is that he has an amazing facility with languages. It's almost like the writer of Born on a Blue Day. Mortensen can learn the rudiments of a new language in a truck on the way to meet the head man in a different village in Afghanistan. Enough to get him started in his discussions about building a school there with a man who has been known to tie a person he didn't like to two trucks and drive in two different directions.

Fearless, single-minded, hyper-focused and dedicated to solving the underlying issues of poverty in northern Pakistan and then Afghanistan. It's an amazing story. Please read it.