Stones for Schools by Greg Mortenson

This moving humanitarian adventure tale continues the story of building schools in remote villages of Pakistan and Afghanistan begun in Three Cups of Tea. Greg Mortenson, his Pakistani partner Safran Khan, and other staff face hardship, danger and almost insurmountable difficulties as they labor to bring educational opportunity to children, especially girls, in some of the poorest and hardest-to-get-to places on the planet. They travel by truck, horse, yak, and on foot. They live on tea and noodles and swallow ibuprofen by the dozen to keep their aching bodies going. They risk encountering Taliban, land mines and natural disasters.

But the real heroines of the story are the girls and women who are hungry for education and often go through incredible struggles and dangers to get it, sometimes encountering family resistance and sometimes outright violence. The hopeful message is that there are a lot of men in what we Americans may think of as ultra-conservative Islamic culture who passionately believe in girls' education and devote their lives to making it happen.

Mortenson's mission began in 1993 when, lost from his group after an unsuccessful attempt to scale K2 in the Himalayas, he stumbled into a Pakistani mountain village where he recuperated from his ordeal and promised to come back and build a school for the village children. From that beginning grew the Central Asia Institute (CAI), which has helped fund dozens of schools, always working with local people to determine what they want, expecting local contributions of land and labor, and requiring that schools serve girls equally with boys.

This book focuses on the most remote and difficult of all CAI's projects, a school for the Kirghiz nomads of the Wakhan Corridor, in the northeastern-most part of Afghanistan, who live at 12,500 feet bounded by three mountain ranges. It takes over a decade and many setbacks before this is accomplished, but along the way, schools are built in many other villages, including in the Kashmiri region devastated by an earthquake in October 2005. The reminder of the suffering and chaos caused by that earthquake is especially poignant in light of the current news coming out of Haiti. Also along the way, General David Petraeus hears about Three Cups of Tea from his wife and the U.S. Army gets interested in CAI's success, seeing it as a model for working with local Afghan communities.

Greg Mortenson now spends much of his time speaking around the U.S. to raise money for CAI's projects, and will be appearing around the country this winter and spring. You can learn more about his speaking schedule and the Central Asia Institute's work at www.ikat.org.