Three Cups of Tea

I just finished reading Three Cups of Tea which is a story about Greg Mortenson and his passion of building schools for kids, especially girls, in Pakistan. It is a great book and I highly recommend it if you enjoy non-fiction reading which is a lot of what I read. It is a New York Times best seller as well.

Mortenson's passion started back in 1993 after making numerous trips to Pakistan as a mountain climber. Apparently they have some of the most challenging cold-weather mountain climbing. (Learned something new.) He saw a great need for education of the people that lived in the rural areas...just basic education through a 5th grade level. Through a very long process he started building schools in remote villages in Pakistan and supplying teachers for their schools, educating them that America was their friend and improving the health of their communities by teaching simple hygiene and overall improving their very existance on many different levels. He saw the dramatic surge of Taliban run schools who started schools to educate mostly boys in their extremist beliefs of Americans being bad etc... Two models of education with very different outcomes. He is a firm believer that the war on terror should be fought by educating people in the truth, and teaching them how the world can live in harmony with each other, not in extremist ways and views, and not by war.

One section of this book hit me like a brick to the head, I had to read it a couple of times. I'll share just a portion of it with you...

Bashir (a general in the Pakistan military) paused to watch a live CNN feed from Baghdad.... He was struck silent by the imges of wailing Iraqi women carrying children's bodies out of the rubble of a bombed building. As he watched the screen, his shoulders slumped. "I'm a moderate Muslim, an educated man. But watching this, even I could become a jihadi. How can Americans say they are making themselves safer? Your President Bush has done a wonderful job of uniting one billion Muslims against America for the next 200 years.

You have to attack the source of your enemy's strength. In America's
case, that's not Osama or Saddam or anyone else. The enemy is
ignorance. The only way to defeat it is to build relationships with these people, to draw them into the modern world with education and business. Otherwise the fight will go on forever."

Anyway, just something for you to think about and consider because it made me do a double take. What if we spent just as much time, energy and money on education as we put into ammunition?

PS... I have no idea how these goofy lines got here!!!