Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin (Penguin)

Three Cups of Tea is the inspiring true story of a mountaineer turned humanitarian whose life work is educating the impoverished children of Northern Pakistan. His mission is “to promote peace...one school at a time.”

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Greg Mortensen is a registered nurse and an experienced mountaineer. In 1993 he attempted to climb the world’s second highest mountain - K2, located in the Baltistan district of Northern Pakistan which borders Xinjiang, China. He decided to climb the mountain as a tribute to his youngest sister who died of a seizure before her twenty-third birthday. He planned to leave one of her possessions - a necklace, at the summit of the mountain. 

Mortensen never does make it to the summit and gets lost trying to return to base camp. He finds himself in a small village called Korphe, a place he has never heard of and doesn’t recall seeing it on any of the dozens of maps he had studied. It is here that Mortensen meets Haji Ali, the nurmadhar, the chief, who shows the lost mountaineer kindness and compassion. 

Haji Ali tells him the village has no school and shares a teacher with another village who comes to teach at the village three times a week. The rest of the week, the children are left on their own and practice their studies the teacher had given them. 

It is this revelation that sets Mortensen on a new goal. He says to Haji Ali, “I will build a school. I promise.” This man with no experience in fund-raising or how to go about building a school in a foreign country spends his time doing research and talking to people who may be able to help him. He works enough to make a fair sum of money to finance his trips back to Pakistan never once forgetting the promise he made to Haji Ali. 

What started out as a small promise to a man leads to the creation of the Central Asia Institute, which would help build more than fifty schools throughout Pakistan, many of them built especially for girls. Mortensen would also discover how business is conducted in Pakistan. Haji Ali tells him, “Here (in Pakistan and Afghanistan), we drink three dups 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.”

Three Cups of Tea is credited to two authors, Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin, however the book is told in the third person through journalist Relin’s writing. Relin says, “I wrote the story. But Greg Mortensen lived it.” Once the story progresses, it appears as if Relin forgets his objectivity and almost deifies Mortensen into a man who can do no wrong. Many of the passages in the story may be irrelevant but the heart of the story stays with you long after you finish reading it. 

The journey from mountaineer to humanitarian is one that will inspire. Mortensen shows that by determination, one can accomplish anything, even build a school or two in one of the world’s most remote areas. With the rise of the madrassas (Islamic religious schools) teaching fundamentalist Islam and financed by a Arab shieks, Mortensen tries to raise his voice to tell people that the best way to fight terrorism is through education. ~Ernie Hoyt