Lesson 8 Three Cups of Tea (Excerpts) Chapter 12 Haji Ali’S Lesson
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Lesson 8 Three Cups of Tea (Excerpts) Chapter 12 Haji Ali’s Lesson Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin Additional Background Material for Teachers’ Reference 1. Greg Mortenson Born on 27 December 1957, Greg Mortenson is an American humanitarian, writer, and former mountaineer. He and Dr. Jean Hoerni co-founded the non-profit Central Asia Institute and he is its executive director. He also founded the educational charity Pennies for Peace. He is the protagonist and co-author of the No.1 New York Times bestseller Three Cups of Tea, published in 2006. The sequel, Stones into Schools was released in 2009. In the spring of 1958 when Greg was only three months old, his parents moved their family from Minnesota to East Africa to teach in a girls’ school and four years later helped establish Tanzania’s first teaching hospital on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. He and his sisters attended a school where children were from more than two dozen different countries. Mortenson’s mother founded the International School Moshi in 1969. From his parents Greg inherited compassion for the local poor people. At the age of 11 Greg climbed to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. From his parents Greg inherited two things: love for climbing and compassion for the poor and unprivileged. 199 高级英语教师用书 1 After moving back to the U.S., Mortenson served in the U.S. army in Germany from 1975 to 1977 as a medic, and received the Army Commendation Medal. He attended Concordia College, Moorhead, from 1977 to 1979 on an athletic scholarship. After transferring, using a GI scholarship, he later graduated from the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, South Dakota, in 1983 with an Associate Degree in Nursing and a Bachelor’s Degree in Chemistry. He had long dreamed of finding a cure for his younger sister Christa’s epilepsy, and won admission to medical school at Case Western Reserve University, but his father died while Greg was still in college, and the family’s finances were in difficulty. Greg dropped his plans for medical school and returned home to help support his family. In July 1992, Mortenson’s young sister died on her 23rd birthday from a life-long struggle with severe epilepsy. In 1993, to honor his deceased sister’s memory, Mortenson joined an expedition to scale K2, the world’s second highest mountain. Located in the Karakoram Range, K2 is the most difficult peak in the world and the ultimate test for mountaineers. After more than 70 days on the mountain, Mortenson and three other climbers completed a life-saving rescue of a climber, which took more than 75 hours. The time and energy devoted to this rescue prevented him from attempting to reach the summit. After the rescue, he began his descent of the mountain and became weak and exhausted. Mortenson took a wrong turn along the way and ended up in Korphe, a small village. The village head Haji Ali gave him food and the warmest quilt and Mortenson recovered from hunger, cold and fatigue. To pay the remote community back for their generosity and hospitality, Mortenson promised to build a school for the village where there had been no for six hundred years. After a frustrating time trying to raise money, Mortenson convinced Jean Hoerni, a Silicon Valley pioneer, to fund the building of the Korphe School. After talking with Mortenson, 200 Lesson 8 Three Cups of Tea Hoerni asked him to be the director of the Central Asia Institute. The mission of CAI — a non-profit organization — is to promote education and literacy, especially for girls, in remote mountain regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Hoerni appointed Mortenson as the first executive director of CAI. A promise has turned into a long-time mission. After the completion of the school in Korphe, Mortenson went on to build more schools in northern mountain areas in Pakistan. In the process of building schools, Mortenson overcame all sorts of hardships, and on top of these, he survived an eight-day armed kidnapping by the Taliban in the tribal areas of Waziristan, escaped a firefight between Afghan opium warlords and received hate mail and threats from fellow Americans for helping educate Muslim children. Mortenson believes that education and literacy for children, especially girls, in the remote and underserved areas is the most important investment all countries can make to create stability, bring socio-economic reform, decrease infant mortality, decrease the population explosion, and improve health, hygiene, and sanitation standards globally. Mortenson believes that violence should not be fought with violence, but that there should be a global priority to promote peace through education and literacy, with an emphasis on girls’ education. Later his project extended to building schools in Afghanistan. His efforts in building schools in this war-ridden country are documented in his second book Stones into Schools. Up to 2010, the Central Asia Institute has successfully established 145 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which have provided education to over 64,000 students, with an emphasis on girls’ education. In 2010 the New York Times reported that Mortenson’s approach of building schools as a way of improving the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan is being embraced by the U.S. military. Top military officials are reading his book Three Cups of Tea, and General Petraeus has had 201 高级英语教师用书 1 meetings with him. The article reported that in 2009 Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, attended the opening of one of Mortenson’s schools in a remote village of Afghanistan. Mortenson received the Star of Pakistan, Pakistan’s highest civilian award granted by the Government of Pakistan in 2009. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. In November 2009, U.S. News & World Report magazine featured Greg Mortenson as one of America’s Top Twenty Leaders in 2009. Mortenson has won dozens of awards, and has been granted honorary doctorates by more than a dozen universities. Greg Mortenson’s wife is Dr. Tara Bishop, a clinical psychologist, whose father was a National Geographic photographer and a climber. They live in Montana with their two children. 2. Three Cups of Tea “Three Cups of Tea is one of the most remarkable adventure stories of our time. Greg Mortenson’s dangerous and difficult quest to build schools in the wildest parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan is not only a thrilling read, it’s proof that one ordinary person, with the right combination of character and determination, really can change the world.” — Tom Brokaw “Greg Mortenson represents the best of America. He’s my hero. And after you read Three Cups of Tea, he’ll be your hero, too.” — U.S. Representative Mary Bono Three Cups of Tea has been a freshman, honors, or campus-wide required reading selection in over eighty universities and hundreds of schools. It is also required reading for senior U.S. military commanders, Pentagon officers in counter-insurgency training, and special Force deploying to Afghanistan. More than two hundred communities have used 202 Lesson 8 Three Cups of Tea Three Cups of Tea as a “One Book” common read, and it is being published in over thirty-one countries. (Source: “Afterword” of Three Cups of Tea) In Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time, Greg Mortenson, and journalist David Oliver Relin, recount the journey that led Mortenson from a failed 1993 attempt to climb the world’s second highest mountain, to successfully establishing schools in some of the most remote regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. By replacing guns with pencils, rhetoric with reading, Mortenson combines his unique background with his intimate knowledge of the third-world to promote peace with books, not bombs, and successfully bring education and hope to remote communities in central Asia. Three Cups of Tea is at once an unforgettable adventure and an inspiring true story of how one man really is changing the world — one school at a time. In 1993 Mortenson was descending from his failed attempt to reach the peak of K2. Exhausted and disoriented, he wandered away from his group into the most desolate reaches of northern Pakistan. Alone, without food, water, or shelter he stumbled into an impoverished Pakistani village where he was nursed back to health. While recovering he observed the village’s 84 children sitting outdoors, scratching their lessons in the dirt with sticks. The village was so poor that it could not afford the $1-a-day salary to hire a teacher. When he left the village, he promised that he would return to build them a school. From that rash, heartfelt promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time. In an early effort to raise money he wrote letters to 580 celebrities, businessmen, and other prominent Americans. His only reply was a $100 check from NBC’s Tom Brokaw. Selling everything he owned, he still only 203 高级英语教师用书 1 raised $2,400. But his efforts changed when a group of elementary school children in River Falls, Wisconsin, donated $623.40 in pennies, inspiring adults to begin to take action. The 283 foot Braldu Bridge was completed in 1995 and the Korphe School was completed in 1996. Since then, he’s established 78 schools. In pursuit of his goal, Mortenson has survived an armed kidnapping, fatwas issued by enraged mullahs, repeated death threats, and wrenching separations from his wife and children. Yet his success speaks for itself. 3. Characters in Chapter 12 of Three Cups of Tea Mortenson: Greg Mortenson is the co-author of the book.