Three Cups of Tea

If you haven't read Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time, I urge you to put it on your reading list for 2009. The book, first released in 2006, recounts the circumstances that led climber Greg Mortenson, after a failed attempt to summit K2, to promise the tribal leader of the isolated Pakistani village of Korphe that he would return one day to build a school to educate the impoverished village's children. The climber made good on his promise, and in subsequent years the Central Asian Institute, under Mortenson's leadership, has established 78 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, with a special emphasis on educating girls. 

David Oliver Relin, the reporter who co-wrote Three Cups of Tea with Mortenson, penned these words in the book's introduction: "So this is a confession: Rather than simply reporting on his progress, I want to see Greg Mortenson succeed. I wish him success because he is fighting the war on terror the way I think it should be conducted. Slamming over the so-called Karakoram 'Highway' in his old Land Cruiser, taking great personal risks to seed the region that gave birth to the Taliban with schools, Mortenson goes to war with the root causes of terror every time he offers a student a chance to receive a balanced education, rather than attend an extremist madrassa."

 

"Turn from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it," the psalmist advised (Psalm 34:14). Mortenson is pursuing peace. May we go and do likewise.