Greg MortensonStones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Education in Afghanistan and Pakistan

I saw that Greg Mortensen had written Stone Into Schools when I traveled through the Salt Lake City airport. I could not wait to get home and order it through Amazon. After reading Three Cups of Tea, I wanted to know what happened afterwards. I wasn't disappointed. Please Buy this book, and if you haven't read Three Cups of Tea, buy it and read it first  Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time . Stones Into Schools begins where Three Cups of Tea leaves off. Mortensen has helped numerous villages in Himalayan Pakistan build schools.(See my review Three Cups of Tea). He is approached by tribesmen from a literal ends-of-the-earth place in Afghanistan to build them a school so their children can have hope for the future. As what Greg has done filters through the rural areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, more and more tribal elders approach him and his colleagues to build secular schools throughout the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan where the central governments have all but forgotten the population. (The only education is through Taliban Madrassas.) The elders want their daughters as well as their sons to go to school and don't like the Taliban message. It is clear these people don't want a hand out; they want a hand up. ("Give me a fish, and I eat for a day; teach me to fish, and I eat for a lifetime.")This exceptionally well written page turner follows Mortensen's adventures as he and his Afghani colleagues build schools in Pakistan, Afghanistan and in Pakistani Kashmir after the devastating earthquake; places in the world that are hot beds of fundamentalism, war and hatred. The work expands to forming women's centers where women learn skills. His approach points out a new, but very old way of making peace in the world. Listen to others, help them build what they think they need, not what we think they need to have. Live with them, honor them relate to them one person at a time on day at a time. Sit down and have tea. We too have much to learn from them. Mortensen's work comes to the attention of the American military. They finally get the message and under Petraeus command long needed changes start to happen.The lessons of these books are profound and simple. The book touches one's heart and soul. They are lessons we all need to learn. One man can make a difference one moment at a time, one person at a time; failure can bring success of immense proportions. And more.This book is also about Greg's imperfections and about being human. We are living in difficult times where fear and anger and ignorance are causing us and our children to become depressed and disenfranchised. Gandhi said," My life is my message." Mortensen's life is his message. It is a message we sorely need to hear and our children need to learn.Buy this book and after you buy this book buy Three Cups of Tea and the young adult's edition of Three Cups of Tea  Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Journey to Change the World... One Child at a Time ( The Young Reader's Edition) 8 and Listen to the Wind  Listen to the Wind for your children. Talk to your children about their observations and understanding of these books. Help them find ways that they can help not only Greg and the peoples of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but in their own neighborhoods and cities. Then maybe, just maybe we can become better human beings and change then world.Talk with your friends get them to buy the books and have a book club discussion. Better still go to the Three Cups of Tea website ([...]) and click the link that take you to Amazon.com so more contributions can be made and schools can be built. Then get your mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers and their friends to buy this book. Just by buying this book each of us can make a difference and have a great reading experience.As a postscript a year and 1/2 ago I was traveling alone in rural Kashmir on the highway that skirts the Pakistani Indian border . There were Indian troops stationed 50 yards apart on the hilltop that skirted the highway. As a photographer I frequently got out and walked and took photos. One that was particularly compelling was of 2 Kashmiri women walking. One had a bag on her head, and she showed me her book that she was reading with great happiness. It was the Koran which had previously been only the province of men to read. I learned first hand the thirst for learning of these women.addendum: Greg has recently come under great scrutiny due to the unkept finances of Central Asian Institute.I have no idea of the truth of this matter, but hopefully the message this book gives will not be lost in the mayhem that is sure to follow.1/26/2013 Unfortunately it has come to pass that this is a work of fiction. It is still worth the read.

Greg Mortenson is an obsessive. A good kind of obsessive, obviously. Known as "Dr. Greg" throughout large stretches of Pakistan and Afghanistan, Greg Mortenson was first obsessed with a couple of things: climbing mountains, and his little sister's Christa's courage and determination at living with epilepsy. After her death, Mortenson decides to climb K2 as a final tribute to her, but is distracted by a life-saving errand before he can summit the mountain. On his way back, having failed to fulfill his obsessive need to memorialize his sister, he gets lost and almost dies before meeting the villagers of Korphe, Pakistan, and, before he leaves their company, forms his new obsession. His new obsession, which combines facing insurmountable odds with improving the lives of little girls, is still playing out, and it demonstrates many things, starting with the power of one person to change the world for the better. If American citizens cannot control the expenditure of their tax dollars to make war in Afghanistan, we can at least contribute money to the Central Asia Institute to fund a far more efficient project that spreads the extraordinarily liberating results of basic education for children, especially girls. That at least 33% of the children going to school in their new buildings should be girls is written into the contracts CAI signs with the communities it builds schools in. And there's evidence that a tendency to obsession is an inherited trait, as Mortenson's father spent twenty years building a hospital in Africa, one whose every department would soon be headed by an African. Giving up is not a Mortenson trait.Three Cups of Tea told the story of the Central Asia Institute's first years, and touched hearts, minds, school children in possession of pennies, and adults with checkbooks across this country. Mortenson was building primarily in Pakistan in Three Cups of Tea. In Stones Into Schools, he invades Afghanistan (in the middle of a war) with the help of a star member of his Dirty Dozen employees and acquires new Afghani personnel, who, it occurs to me, are just as likely to be obsessives as Mortenson is. Accomplishing what CAI accomplishes is not a job for wimps or dawdlers. Both books are adventure tales of the highest order--the dangers are real, the army of school builders is brave physically, culturally, and politically. To obsessives, educating the children, is so much more important than living a comfortable life, or even living past the end of the week. Mortenson tells more of the story himself in Stones, and I prefer the style of the second book to the first. In Three Cups of Tea, David Oliver Relin produced the final text, and its stylistic felicities do not triumph over the sheer length of many of his sentences. Mortenson and his research assistants in Stones are more merciful to the reader who wants to arrive at the predicate of the sentence with some idea of that the subject was.Each of these books is an adventure story, a travelogue with the texture and richness of a good novel, with sympathetic and admirable characters, a history lesson about a part of the world most of us know little about, and a wonderfully inspiriting account of a gently obsessive man's arrival at the top of a much tougher mountain than K2. Read both books and applaud, and send some money if you can.

The first book on Greg Mortenson's adventure humanitarian work was aptly titled `3 Cups of Tea' after an explanation of a local custom by his Mentor Haji Ali, the chief of Pakistan's northernmost village of Korphe, who had said, "The first time you share tea with a Balti villager you are a stranger; the second cup that you share is an offer of friendship; and the third cup of tea means that you are now part of the family and we can even die for you". This custom is loosely accurate for the rest of Pakistan too.The second book has been very adequately titled `Stones into Schools' after a former Mujahideen Leader of the northeastern Afghanistan, Commander Sadhar Khan, who once pointing out to the grave stones scattered on a field in thousands explained, "These stones remind of thousands of Afghan children killed since late 70s. Now it is the time to turn the stones into schools". It offers even more of what I call adventure humanitarian work.Both the books will appeal to readers interested in finding out root cause of the current problem of terrorism, the ways to fight this evil and the ways not to fight this evil. This book continues to be primarily about Greg Mortenson's humanitarian work with respect to girl education in the remotest, and may I add most adventurous and "the last best parts" of Pakistan (Karakorums, Himalayas, and Neelum Valley) and Afghanistan (Pamir). In the process however, it touches in a great educating and a graphical way on various topics that are at the center of American foreign policy as it walks the reader through Afghanistan - Pakistan border territories, Mujahideens and the Afghan-Soviet war (1980s), Talibans (1990s and up to now), war lords, a brief history of Afghanistan and of Wakhan territory, Indo-Pakistani affairs, Afghan and Pakistani quaint ethnicities; cultures; and religious groups.The book also part drives and part hitch-hikes the readers through Pakistan's earthquake of 2005 that killed 600,000 people; majority of them school going students just opening up their books to study when the earthquake or "zalzala" as it is called in Urdu, but given a much deeper name of `Qiyamat' or Apocalypse came roaring down in the morning. Furthermore, you may have read all about the destruction of Afghanistan and its people since late 1970s, but this account is so graphical that you will visualize the tragedy unfolding as if you were living it.I found the book written in a better way than the first one. It is written in a chronological account in the form of a biography that is a good thing to start with. In the process, the spadework for building schools and expansion of girl education program is explained. This is firstly a physical adventure in that, for example, our heroes had to hitchhike for 17 hours on one occasion to reach the farthest Pakistani village hit by earthquake, had to sleep under earthquake wrecked trucks and out on pavements, drive from Kabul to Wakhan under the threat of terrorist attacks, etc. It is a psychological adventure as well in that our heroes had major hurdles dealing with Government officials in Kabul for obtaining some basic permissions to get going in Wakhan territory, had to try convincing Pakistani orthodox parents into sending their high performing daughters for higher studies on CAI scholarships, debating whether they could do something for improving the life of an 11 years old Afghan boy working as a mechanic, etc.I guarantee that even if you are an adventure traveller or a doctor who has experienced dying people around you, `Stones into Schools' is a book that will bring tears of sorrow and tears of joy in your eyes. In the end, you will be left with a feeling of success and of hope, yet an uncertainty glaring at you - whether the power that be will listen to the advice contained in this book by people from so many different areas of life on the best way to fight terrorism and extremism.

Stones into Schools picks up where Three Cups of Tea left off. We are taken into Afghanistan and the world of Taliban, nomadic horseman and living conditions that stretch the limits of human endurance. Once again, this is a rolicking adventure tale that will keep you up late at night racing from one chapter to the next to see how it is all going to work out. It is both entertaining and inspirational, and a story of true sacrifice by so many people for the common good. Your preconceived notions of people living in this part of the world will change profoundly as your move through the chapters and Mortenson's writing style is captivating. I have loaned out Three cups of tea so many times now that it is falling apart. I know that this book will meet the same fate. You will want everyone you know to read this book.

This is a great continuation of the work Greg is doing. The book explains more schools being built and the struggles children, especially girls face to receive an education. It is great to see the pictures in the book. It would have been even better to include more pictures.

After reading Three Cups of Tea I could hardly wait for Stones into School and loved that too. What a wonderful selfless person who proved that one person really can and does make a difference. I bought the child's version of Three Cups of Tea and my daughter is reading it together with her 10 year old daughter and they have been loving it too. If Greg writes any more books, please put me on the list to buy one.

Great story, until I learned it had been largely fabricated.