Give Peace a Chance

It’s been on my reading list for sometime despite last year’s allegations. During spring break, I was spellbound by Greg Mortenson’s (a former mountain climber) memoir Three Cups of Tea. I thoroughly enjoyed his traipsing but placing adventure aside; is there a nobler goal than that of helping educate young girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan? This book has given an answer to this question, though it has also shown how people want to believe stories of redemption.     


Three Cups of Tea tells the story of how Mortenson was nursed back to health by Pakistani villagers after an unsuccessful attempt to climb the world’s second tallest mountain, K2. As a way to repay the villagers’ kindness, Mortenson promises to return to and build a school for the children. The book recounts how the charity he founded, the Central Asia Institute, went on to build dozens of schools in the region.

Three Cups of Tea became an international bestseller, and Mortenson’s charity, the Central Asia Institute, received millions of dollars in donations, including $100,000 from President Obama. But a 60 Minutes investigation revealed that the central anecdote in the book—the author being nursed back to health by Pakistani villagers —wasn’t exactly true. Though he climbed the world’s tallest mountain, Mortenson didn’t come across the Pakistani village of Korphe until a year later. And he was not, as the book asserts, kidnapped by the Taliban. More troublingly, some of the schools he claims to have built were never built at all.

When the revelations surfaced, it ignited a firestorm of reactions. Readers were, understandably, feeling cheated because they were lied to. But perhaps they need to ask themselves why they were so willing to believe this story in the first place: is it because the story offered them a familiar paradigm—Eastern women are in desperate need of Western saviors. Nevertheless, shouldn’t we put aside our differences and remember when we cooperate to build schools we transform lives and build a better world.   

Did you read the book? What was your take on it?