‘Three Cups of Tea,’ Spilled
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NYT
One of the people I’ve enormously admired in recent years is Greg Mortenson. He’s a former mountain climber who, after a failed effort to climb the world’s second-highest mountain, K2, began building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
In person, Greg is modest, passionate and utterly disorganized. Once he showed up half-an-hour late for a speech, clumping along with just one shoe — and then kept his audience spellbound with his tale of building peace through schools.
Greg has spent chunks of time traipsing through Afghanistan and Pakistan, constructing schools in impossible places, and he works himself half to death. Instead of driving around in a white S.U.V. with a security detail, he wears local clothes and takes battered local cars to blend in. He justly berates himself for spending too much time on the road and not enough with his wife, Tara Bishop, and their children, Amira and Khyber.
I’ve counted Greg as a friend, had his family over at my house for lunch and extolled him in my column. He gave a blurb for my most recent book, “Half the Sky,” and I read his book “Three Cups of Tea” to my daughter. It’s indisputable that Greg has educated many thousands of children, and he has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
(More here.)
NYT
One of the people I’ve enormously admired in recent years is Greg Mortenson. He’s a former mountain climber who, after a failed effort to climb the world’s second-highest mountain, K2, began building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
In person, Greg is modest, passionate and utterly disorganized. Once he showed up half-an-hour late for a speech, clumping along with just one shoe — and then kept his audience spellbound with his tale of building peace through schools.
Greg has spent chunks of time traipsing through Afghanistan and Pakistan, constructing schools in impossible places, and he works himself half to death. Instead of driving around in a white S.U.V. with a security detail, he wears local clothes and takes battered local cars to blend in. He justly berates himself for spending too much time on the road and not enough with his wife, Tara Bishop, and their children, Amira and Khyber.
I’ve counted Greg as a friend, had his family over at my house for lunch and extolled him in my column. He gave a blurb for my most recent book, “Half the Sky,” and I read his book “Three Cups of Tea” to my daughter. It’s indisputable that Greg has educated many thousands of children, and he has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
(More here.)
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