Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin

Saturday, August 29, 2009

"Three Cups of Tea" by Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin is an amazing book chronicling Greg Mortenson's efforts over the past 15 years to build schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan mainly to educate girls. He was a mountaineer who attempted to reach the top of K2 in 1993 and failed. On his way down he was lost alone for couple of days and was saved in the end by his porter Mouzafer and the people of a village called Korphe in rural Pakistan. Being really moved by their kindness, he wanted to do something in return and ended up deciding to build a school for the girls in that village when he saw them trying to have an informal classroom in the open exposed to the extreme cold weather and wind.

When he returned to U.S. he wrote some 580 letters seeking donations for his endeavor from every famous person he has heard of and received a total of one response (from Tom Brokaw) and a cheque for $100. His applications to all kinds of foundations didn't get him any funds either. Eventually late Dr. Jean Hoerni, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur/millionaire funded his project and wrote a single check for $12,000 to get him started. That is all the money it takes to build one 5 room school building in that region. Learning his ropes little by little and working with the local villagers he built a bridge first to get the supplies to that village and then the school which took 3, 4 years. Having completed that project, he found his calling and decided to keep constructing schools all over that area and so far has constructed about 75 schools educating more than twenty thousand children.

In this journey or perseverance there are descriptions of talks he tried to give where only 3 people showed up to fill the 200 chairs laid out welcoming audience, experience of individuals inviting him over with a promise of a large donation only to be let go with nothing, meetings with Donald Rumsfeld, military officials and politicians, one kidnapping, couple of fatwas on his head by mullahs opposed to his work (or trying to extract bribes to let him build schools in their village), U.S. military promising few million dollars if he can work with them giving away names of people he works with in that region, stories of his failures in personal life to eventually settling down with a wife and two kids, etc. While Mortenson had supported the war against Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001 attacks, pretty quickly he had come to realize the way U.S. is going about this war and the unnecessary digression into Iraq is not serving the original cause at all. He concludes that this is helping Al-Qaeda and Taliban recruit a large number of uneducated poor young man to their cause. Having witnessed the alarming rate at which middle East oil money flows into the region creating new Madrassas wherever he travels in those parts of the world, he is frustrated by an incredible opportunity being missed by the west.

Republicans are formidable opponents when they have to pull down someone. Instead of meekly attacking the opponent's areas of weakness, they usually go after and demolish the best strength of the person or issue they need to pull down weakening the opponent dramatically. How they went after John Kerry in the 2004 election by destroying his military credentials with "Swift boat veterans for truth" is one good example. Recently creating the "death panel" phrase & discussion to smear Democrat's health-care reform effort is another great example. I wish they'd have applied that model to destroy Taliban's fame and credibility in Afghanistan & Pakistan by spending a large amount of money to construct schools and hospitals filling voids that exist rather than trying to bomb them all out. There are few simple statistics in the book. One points out that the Raytheon missile guidance system on the tip of each guided missile being fired on various Al-Qaeda and Taliban hide out is about $820,000. Constructing one school costs about $12,000. It costs $1 per day to educate one child in those parts. One teacher's salary per day is $1 again. Instead of debating endlessly how much of torture can be allowed while interrogating detainees, if the U.S. energy & resources are spent on simple school construction, hospital building, etc. I am sure results will be phenomenal in the long run.

This book's site is at http://www.threecupsoftea.com/ His outfit has been named Central Asia Institute a decade back which has a website at https://www.ikat.org/

I thought about attaching the PDF brochure posted at https://www.ikat.org/publications/2008JOH.pdf and then decided against it since it is close to 10MB in size. Do try these links.

Having read the book and checked out the site, I am tempted to stretch myself and send out a 5 figure donation since education has always been my cause for philanthropy. But the tone on the website and Greg's dozens and dozens of speaking/fund raiser engagement posted on the site seems to indicate that the institute is on good financial footing now. Book talked about how the CAI had only one employee (Greg) who was getting paid just $30K with its head quarters in Greg's basement until 2003. In the last few years it seems to have moved to a small office with 4 staff. Looking at the charity watch website http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=10411 it looks like the institute probably has high fund raising costs since it is basically a one man show with Greg flying around all over U.S. trying to give talks to raise money. His compensation for 2007 is just about $100K. Still overall this feels like a genuine article worth supporting. I think I will try to attend one of his talks in the NJ area coming up in the next month or two to get a better feeling before I write a cheque.

Though I like contributing to organizations like http://www.ILPnet.org and https://www.ashanet.org/, building schools in rural areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan appears to be a cause even more deserving since unlike India (where ILP and Asha operate), these areas are rife with active Islamic militant extremist organization recruitment activity.

Drop me a line telling me what is your favorite charity, why and how much you support it.

-sundar.