I am shocked because I just looked at my calendar to date something and realized it’s July 28th already. It’s August on Friday. Where did this entire month go?! It seems like just yesterday I was celebrating my birthday and now one entire month of summer is just about done. Sheesh. This is what happens when you get older, right? Time starts speeding up. Meanwhile, Hayley will tell you that the summer has been really long already – not long in a bad or boring way, but long. I remember when summer seemed like it went on forever too. I miss that.

Last night I finished up my work really quickly because I had other plans for the evening. I curled up on the couch and finished the last 100 pages of the book I had been reading, Three Cups of Tea – One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time. I should have finished it ages ago but I just hadn’t made enough time to sit and read it for long periods of time, but it wasn’t because the book was dull – it was excellent. It’s the best non-fiction book I have ever read.

The basic story is about a mountain climber, Greg Mortenson. He goes to Pakistan and he wants to reach the summit of K2. He “fails” in his attempt, but really it’s hard to call it a failure since the only reason he turned around was because someone else in his party got pulmonary edema and Greg helped carry him back down to base camp. When he gets him down there, his body was too exhausted to even think of turning back around to try again.

Disappointed and mildly delirious with exhaustion, he got lost coming down off the glacier at the base of K2 and wandered into the wrong village, a little tiny village in Northern Pakistan that wasn’t even on the maps at that time, called Korphe. The village elder kept him there to let him recuperate and get his strength back. Greg was a nurse so he helped some of the locals who were sick and he toured the village. On one of his last days there, he asked to see the school and the elder was angry because the Pakistani government had never given them the money they needed. They had no actual school and they shared a teacher with another village nearby, so the kids only had a teacher two or three days a week. He took Greg up to a plateau on a hilltop and he found a circle of kids, all alone, looking at a book of math problems. They had no books so they were copying the work by scratching the equations into the dirt with sticks.

Greg was so upset by the fact that there were kids who were so determined to learn that they would sit completely unsupervised and do their work on the ground instead of playing (while kids back home complained about school), that he promised the elder that he would come back and build a school for them.

The book follows the huge effort it takes for Greg to get back and build the first school and how it ends up that he’s able to build fifty schools by the end of the book, in ten years. I don’t know how many he’s built since then, the book ends in 2003, but I’m going to research tonight after I’m done working to find out what they’ve been doing since then.

It’s a fantastic book, because it really answers that question of “well what can just one person do?” One person launched this whole thing and is now helping 10-15,000 Pakistani kids in impoverished rural areas (not to mention a lot of Afghan refugees as well who crossed over during the uprising of the Taliban) get an education, including girls who were not normally able to go to school at all. And he counters all the war talk by saying that education is actually the best weapon against terrorism because most of the terrorists come from madrassas (extremist schools that teach nothing but a warped version of the Koran) that get their students from places where they have no other options, so they end up being “educated” in extremism and end up completely brainwashed.

If you’re looking fro something good to read, I highly recommend it. It’s an excellent and very inspirational book.