Response to "Three Cups of Tea"

“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.