Title: Three Cups of Tea
Author: Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin
Greg Mortensen stumbled (literally) into his life's mission-- building schools (especially for girls) in the remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Reading Three Cups of Tea made me want to write a check and send it off to the Central Asia Institute (Mortensen's NPO). It made me want to support microloans. It made me want to drop everything and teach English in a foreign country. It made me want to be sure that after my kids get a little bit bigger, I do something meaningful with my life, instead of just becoming one of the "ladies who lunch." Of course, I haven't done any of those things yet, but now they're on my radar. My only complaint, since we discussed this for our book group last week, is that we were so uniformly positive in our reaction to what we read-- I like a little bit of contention, myself. But I guess that it's good to be united behind such a great cause.
4 comments:
We just got this book in my book club. I'll have to read it now.
I liked your post about your grey napping pants. I have some too. I could feel your pain when Maren woke up too soon-that Always happens to me!
If you are interested in microloans, this is an awesome program:
www.kiva.org.
There are several books I've read that will stand out with milemarkers in my life. I read Firefly Summer the summer that 3 of my immediate family spent time in the hospital and I spent long lonely hospital hours reading and trying to escape.
This book happened to be the one I impulsively grabbed from the airport bookstore last November on the way to Massachusetts to care for my grandmother while she passed away. In some hard to explain way, his courage helped me to find my own during a terribly difficult time. I loved this book as well and gave a copy to everyone that reads on my Christmas list. I saw this today and it immediately made me think of Greg:
"A visibly pregnant Angelina Jolie told the Council on Foreign Relations that education is the best way to help the plight of Iraqi child refugees in a speech in Washington D.C. on Tuesday. "It is a fact that the best way to heal children in conflict and their trauma is to focus their minds on their future," she told the crowd, which included Gen. David Petraeus. "This population we're talking about is the future of Iraq," she added. "So to reach them now, to help deal with their trauma and refocus their minds on a possible future should absolutely be one of our top priorities. "We need these kids ... to rebuild their country, to stabilize their country and eventually lead their country." Jolie, 32 — who has gone to Iraq twice in the past year — said children there "are desperate for an education." During a trip to a Burmese refugee camp, she recalled how a group of teens - many of whom have dropped out of school due to the conflict — begged her for grammar books, dictionaries and pens." "We need them to grow up and be doctors and lawyers and engineers and teachers," she said. "We need them to rebuild their country, stabilize their countries and eventually lead their countries." The actress did not address the question of the U.S.' long term presence in Iraq but said "the surge does not just mean it works if you get numbers of violence down. It works if humanitarian aide is starting to increase and changes are able to be made."
thanks for that, Maclaine (and I appreciate the link too, anon).
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