Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace... One School at a Time

#260
Title: Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace... One School at a Time
Authors: Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2006
Country: Pakistan
361 pages

Both emotionally satisfying and deeply engrossing, this is the history of Mortenson's many years of building schools in Pakistan and, more recently, Afghanistan. A nurse by profession and mountain climber by avocation. Mortenson literally stumbles into the school-building trade. I especially enjoyed the parts of the book that describe the futility of making infrastructure decisions without input from the community, and the necessary buttressing or creation of other infrastructures to support the target project. In an early example, Mortenson raises funds for a school but can't get the materials to the site until he builds a suspension bridge. These connections illustrate the importance of collaborative, mutual community projects and serve as an object lesson in village development. It's also a good conversational starting point for combating anti-Muslim sentiment.

Read with Kidder's Mountains beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World and van Bruggen's Flowers on the Cactus: AIDS and Orphan Care in Cambodia for a more comprehensive and far-reaching analysis of the context required to create and sustain superficially simple interventions.