“Here, we drink three cups of tea to do business; the first you are a stranger, the second you become a friend, and the third, you join our family, and for our family we are prepared to do anything even die.”
This quote is from my non-fiction book, Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to read, but my mom, my sister, and several others strongly recommended it. Now I’m someone who will strongly recommend this book to others.
Three Cups of Tea was about its co-author, Greg Mortenson. Greg was a mountain climber and while he was climbing the mountain K2 in Pakistan he got lost. He ended up in a small village called Korphe. When he saw how the children of Korphe had no school and just sat outside when they could, he promised the village chief he would build them a school. Greg returned to America and the book follows his life from getting the funds to build that one school to finally building 81 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, plus the many water systems and vocational centers. Various things went wrong for him, but even after 9/11 and the war began, he kept going. The area was extremely dangerous for Americans, but it didn’t seem to faze Greg. This book is a huge testament to how one person can make an immeasurable difference to thousands of people.
The book talked a lot about how terrorism can be stopped, or at least slowed, through education. A lot of children and young adults in Pakistan go to schools that support terrorism and other extremist groups because that’s the only schools there are for them to go to. The schools Greg helped build provide “balanced nonextremist education,” that gives the students what they need to be something other than soldiers and terrorists. A quote from the book says, “Working over there, I’ve learned a few things. I’ve learned that terror doesn’t happen because some group of people somewhere like Pakistan or Afghanistan simply decided to hate us. It happens because children aren’t being offered a bright enough future that they have a reason to choose life over death.” Greg gives them what they need to have a bright future.
Another thing Mortenson stresses is educating girls. Girls are scarcely educated at all in Pakistan and the vast majority can neither read nor write. By the end of the book, two of the girls from one of the villages have made it all the way through school and are requesting scholarships for college. They make it through college and have big plans for the future. One of them wants to return to the village to give all the girls the chance to come to the city and change their lives. The other was going to become a health care worker, but then she decided to go for broke and start her own hospital. In her own words, she wants to be, “superlady.” I think it’s really inspiring how one man can cause two girls to gain so much confidence and make them able to become leaders to make sure other girls can have what they did. These girls don’t just want to be able to read for the fun of it, they want to do something big.
I think this book was really inspiring. People always say that one person can change the world. But when it comes right down to it most people don’t truly believe that they can make a difference. Greg showed that one person really can do that. I think that’s a big theme in this book. This one man, Greg Mortenson, helped many kids to get an education. Then they can teach others and help in ways they couldn’t have before. The effects keep rippling so that eventually it’s not just one person, its thousands or millions of people who are doing what they do because of one person.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Friday, August 21, 2009
Response to "The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed"
Ok, so I have to admit, I came very close to falling asleep several times while reading this. Don’t get me wrong, Mary Wollstonecraft was a great writer, and this was a great piece, but it seems to me it took her 22 pages to say what she could have said in about half as many. I suppose that might be a slight exaggeration, but not too much.
Even though she’s a little too long winded for my taste, I found myself getting lost in the language and style she used. Not many people write like that anymore. Words like epithet, propriety, and pernicious are scarcely ever used. I loved how smooth and sophisticated it sounded, but I had a mammoth list of words to look up by the end.
Speaking of words, I think Wollstonecraft had a powerful message about the oppression of women. She made many valid points about how women are treated. However, she wrote this 217 years ago and things have changed a lot since then. Women are no longer educated only to be docile housewives; we have the same education as men. That isn’t to say that women are always treated equally and with respect, but it’s not nearly as bad as it was in 1792.
Although it’s a lot different now, instead of writing it off as irrelevant to today’s society , I took it as an insight to life during Mary Wollstonecraft’s time. She says that,
“Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should be beautiful, everything else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives.”
That, to me, sums up much of this whole piece and much of the lives women had then. Women didn’t need to be smart or do anything for themselves. All they needed was to be pretty and socially graceful so that they could get a man to protect them. They didn’t need anything else but a man, it was their ultimate and only goal.
All this talk about how life was for women in the 1700’s made me extremely grateful for how it is now. I don’t have to be perfect on the surface, nor do I have to agonize over gettin’ me a man. I can get a good education and know that I can survive on my own. If I want to be a superficial socialite I can do that, but I don’t have to. Mary talked a lot about how it would feel to be free, and I get to feel that way every day. I am so lucky, as are all women in our society.
I found it interesting that Wollstonecraft compared both women and men to children and different times. First she talks about husbands attempt to keep their wives in a state of childhood. Then she goes on to say that many man are overgrown children themselves. Being a girl, I tend to agree more with the second statement, but then I started thinking and realized that both can be true sometimes. Some wives are content to play Homemaker Barbie and live as if life is a fairy tale. On the other hand, a lot of men just never seem to grow up.
So while I had my various thoughts and my ups and downs with Mary Wollstonecraft, I did like her piece and her writing. She made a lot of good remarks that spurred thoughts of my own. It’s was little out of the ordinary for me, but that’s what makes it special.
Even though she’s a little too long winded for my taste, I found myself getting lost in the language and style she used. Not many people write like that anymore. Words like epithet, propriety, and pernicious are scarcely ever used. I loved how smooth and sophisticated it sounded, but I had a mammoth list of words to look up by the end.
Speaking of words, I think Wollstonecraft had a powerful message about the oppression of women. She made many valid points about how women are treated. However, she wrote this 217 years ago and things have changed a lot since then. Women are no longer educated only to be docile housewives; we have the same education as men. That isn’t to say that women are always treated equally and with respect, but it’s not nearly as bad as it was in 1792.
Although it’s a lot different now, instead of writing it off as irrelevant to today’s society , I took it as an insight to life during Mary Wollstonecraft’s time. She says that,
“Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should be beautiful, everything else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives.”
That, to me, sums up much of this whole piece and much of the lives women had then. Women didn’t need to be smart or do anything for themselves. All they needed was to be pretty and socially graceful so that they could get a man to protect them. They didn’t need anything else but a man, it was their ultimate and only goal.
All this talk about how life was for women in the 1700’s made me extremely grateful for how it is now. I don’t have to be perfect on the surface, nor do I have to agonize over gettin’ me a man. I can get a good education and know that I can survive on my own. If I want to be a superficial socialite I can do that, but I don’t have to. Mary talked a lot about how it would feel to be free, and I get to feel that way every day. I am so lucky, as are all women in our society.
I found it interesting that Wollstonecraft compared both women and men to children and different times. First she talks about husbands attempt to keep their wives in a state of childhood. Then she goes on to say that many man are overgrown children themselves. Being a girl, I tend to agree more with the second statement, but then I started thinking and realized that both can be true sometimes. Some wives are content to play Homemaker Barbie and live as if life is a fairy tale. On the other hand, a lot of men just never seem to grow up.
So while I had my various thoughts and my ups and downs with Mary Wollstonecraft, I did like her piece and her writing. She made a lot of good remarks that spurred thoughts of my own. It’s was little out of the ordinary for me, but that’s what makes it special.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Response to "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
This essay really brought up a lot of confusing and intriguing, yet alarming questions.
One of these questions is whether or not the internet is a good thing. We take it for granted are rarely question it, but there are lots of both pros and cons. It boils down to which there more of. The internet is great for research, social networking, sharing information, and just having fun. But it’s not all good. We’ve grown accustomed to the instant gratification of having exactly what we want to see pop up in a matter of seconds. Getting everything right away seems like a good thing, but when it goes beyond computer to our lives, we start to lose patience.
An additional question is if writing on the computer is bad or not. Personally, I do almost all my writing on the computer. Even today, I wrote this entirely on the computer without picking up a pen once. In this essay, Friedrich Nietzsche is quoted saying, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” So what makes writing better? How do we want to sound?
Another quote from the essay says, “The more pieces of information we can ‘access’ and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.” That may be so, but is it really more productive when you’re not actually thinking of it, you’re just finding it? Are you a productive thinker or a productive finder?
In the part of the essay talking about Frederick Winslow Taylor’s theories, it was stated that his system would create “a utopia of perfect efficiency.” Taylor himself is quoted saying, “In the past man has been first, in the future the system must be first.” This shocked me, and I immediately thought, “No way, that’s awful! It’s not utopia, even if it is much more profitable!” I know it happens daily, but it’s angering to think that anyone would put being efficiency and money ahead of people. Is that really what our society wants to be? Is that what we want to be known for?
This brings me to another equally frightening question: are we turning into computers? No, I’m not asking if we’re going to become plastic and sprout keyboards, I’m talking about our minds and the way we live. If we’re turning our lifestyles into swift, emotionless assembly lines, how will that affect our mentality and our daily life? I’m sure the people who invented computers didn't realize the potential consequences that could bleed into civilization, but now that we are aware of them, we need to do something to ensure that they don’t happen. It’s quite possible that I’m overreacting about all this, but it’s equally possible that there is an immense problem extending beyond our grasp.
All of these are important and difficult questions. I don’t have all the answers, in fact I’m not sure I have any at all, but I believe that all these questions are worth giving some serious thought. Maybe, sometime in the future, we can figure out the answers, and if we can do that, we just might find a solution.
One of these questions is whether or not the internet is a good thing. We take it for granted are rarely question it, but there are lots of both pros and cons. It boils down to which there more of. The internet is great for research, social networking, sharing information, and just having fun. But it’s not all good. We’ve grown accustomed to the instant gratification of having exactly what we want to see pop up in a matter of seconds. Getting everything right away seems like a good thing, but when it goes beyond computer to our lives, we start to lose patience.
An additional question is if writing on the computer is bad or not. Personally, I do almost all my writing on the computer. Even today, I wrote this entirely on the computer without picking up a pen once. In this essay, Friedrich Nietzsche is quoted saying, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” So what makes writing better? How do we want to sound?
Another quote from the essay says, “The more pieces of information we can ‘access’ and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.” That may be so, but is it really more productive when you’re not actually thinking of it, you’re just finding it? Are you a productive thinker or a productive finder?
In the part of the essay talking about Frederick Winslow Taylor’s theories, it was stated that his system would create “a utopia of perfect efficiency.” Taylor himself is quoted saying, “In the past man has been first, in the future the system must be first.” This shocked me, and I immediately thought, “No way, that’s awful! It’s not utopia, even if it is much more profitable!” I know it happens daily, but it’s angering to think that anyone would put being efficiency and money ahead of people. Is that really what our society wants to be? Is that what we want to be known for?
This brings me to another equally frightening question: are we turning into computers? No, I’m not asking if we’re going to become plastic and sprout keyboards, I’m talking about our minds and the way we live. If we’re turning our lifestyles into swift, emotionless assembly lines, how will that affect our mentality and our daily life? I’m sure the people who invented computers didn't realize the potential consequences that could bleed into civilization, but now that we are aware of them, we need to do something to ensure that they don’t happen. It’s quite possible that I’m overreacting about all this, but it’s equally possible that there is an immense problem extending beyond our grasp.
All of these are important and difficult questions. I don’t have all the answers, in fact I’m not sure I have any at all, but I believe that all these questions are worth giving some serious thought. Maybe, sometime in the future, we can figure out the answers, and if we can do that, we just might find a solution.
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