Three Cups of Tea by Mortenson and Relin: A Reading Response

Introduction

Greg Mortenson grew up in Tanganyika, now Tanzania, the son of Lutheran missionaries. He says his parents wore their faith lightly, but from them he learned to appreciate people different from himself, to live simply and to care deeply about people who are impoverished. When Mortenson was just 11, he and his father hiked to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, and though he battled altitude sickness on his way to the top of Africa's tallest mountain, that first expedition gave him a hankering for more mountain climbing. This paper presents my reading response of the different chapters of the book Three Cups of Tea by Mortenson and Relin in a concise and comprehensive way.

Three Cups of Tea by Mortenson and Relin: A Reading Response

As an adult living back in the United States, in 1993 Mortenson joined an expedition to the Himalayan mountain called K2. It is the second-highest mountain in the world after Everest and has a reputation for being more difficult and dangerous to climb. He never made it to the top. Coming back down, he got separated from his porter, became lost and ended up in a small, very isolated mountain village in northern Pakistan called Korphe. The people there took him in and showed him typical central Asian hospitality, especially manifested in taking time to drink tea with him. As the village chief said to him, "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" (Mortenson and Relin, pp. 89-156).

Reading chatpers 10 and 11 I come to the point that Mortenson discovered that the children of Korphe had only a part-time teacher whom they had to share with a neighboring village, and they had no school building. The children met out in the open for class and scratched out their lessons with sticks, writing in the dirt. He promised to come back again and build them a school. And he kept his promise.

Once the school in Korphe was built, word spread to other villages, whose people asked Mortenson if he would do the same thing for them. He couldn't say no. Eventually he formed a not-for-profit organization, the Central Asia Institute, to oversee the work. Word continued to spread, and villages in Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan implored him to do the same for them. At great risk to his own safety, he took on that challenge as well. His big breakthrough came in April 2003, at the outset of the Iraq war, when a cover story about his work appeared in Parade magazine (written by journalist David Oliver Relin, who collaborated with Mortenson on this book). After this national exposure, money--which had always been in short supply--started pouring in.

In the chapter 10 it appears that the subtext to this remarkable story is about how best to deal ...