Three Cups of Tea (57-90)

Greg Mortenson goes to third world countries in the middle east and builds schools. He has to travel great distances by very treacherous means, but does not give up. In this scene he is almost at a village, but has to go through a mountain pass and cross a roaring river.

The jeep stopped next to a zamba, swaying over the Shyok, and Mortenson got out He'd never been comfortable crossing these yak-hair bridges, since they were engineered to support Balti half his weight. And when Akhmalu and Changazi piled on behind him, shaking the structure violently, he struggled to keep his feet beneath him. Mortenson grasped the twin handrails and shuffled his size-fourteen feet tightrope-walker-style along the single braded strand between him and the rapids fifty feet below. The zamba was slick with spray, and he concentrated so successfully on his feet that he didn't notice the crowd waiting to greet him on the far bank until he was nearly upon them

This can be applied to our lives. Although not all of us have life threatening situations that keep us from saving the world, we have day to day struggles that keep us from the right thing. Mortenson didn't have to go to the middle east, he could have found a normal job in America. He chose to go there, he chose to face all of those dangers, so that he could help the lives of the children there. We all should look to Mortenson as an example. We need to take a deep breath and go across our rope bridges to greet the people on the other side, and make a difference in their lives.

Mortenson, Greg, and David Oliver Relin. Three Cups of Tea One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time. New York: Penguin (Non-Classics), 2007. Print.

Three Cups of Tea (1-56)

This book is about the influence of Greg Mortenson, who is an american man who was in the military and was an avid mountaineer. It was on one of his trips to a mountain in Pakistan where he discovered his extreme humanitarianism. He started a group who goes to Pakistan and Afghanistan and builds schools and helps out wherever they can. This passage shows just how influential this man is.

Illiterate high-altitude porters in Pakistan's Karakoram have put down their packs to make paltry wages with him so their children can have the education they were forced to do without. A taxi driver who chanced to pick Mortenson up at the Islamabad airport sold his cab and became his fiercely dedicated "fixer". Former Taliban fighters renounced violence and the oppression of women after meeting Mortenson and went to work with him peacefully building schools for girls. He has drawn volunteers and admirers from every stratum of Pakistan's society and from all the warring sects of Islam

This goes to show how all it takes is one person to do something good for the world. Now take Mortenson's actions and multiply them by the 6.5 billion people living on the planet today, and you would get some serious change for the better. Its amazing how much harm one person can do what they try, but it is nowhere near the amount of good a person could do if he or she really devoted their life to it. Most people havent yet realized that they have more control of the good doings in the world than they think. I really wish everyone would at least do something small benefiting others, not necessarily as large-scale as building schools in third-world countries, but just something. The whole world would be a much better place.

Mortenson, Greg, and David Oliver Relin. Three Cups of Tea One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time. New York: Penguin (Non-Classics), 2007. Print.

Speak What We Feel (1-46)

This passage is from the introduction to Buechner's book, after he talks about how genuine writing is like "sit[ting] down and a typewriter and open[ing] a vein", in the words of Red Smith. He is saying how the best writers put themselves into their stories, instead of making things up that dont apply to them. He says how real writing has a certain risk factor to it, how you have to risk making a fool of yourself

But the four writers these pages are about each did it at least once, and that is the most important single thing they have in common. Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins are both great writers. Mark Twain is a very good but very uneven writer. G.K. Chesterton, for all his wit and intelligence, is a writer who wrote too much for most of it to be first-rate. But what brings them together here is that in at least one work apiece, it seems to me, each of them wrote in his own blood about the darkness of life as he found it and about how for better or worse he managed somehow to survive it, even to embrace it-Hopkins in the "terrible sonnets" of his final years, Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, G.K. Chesterton in The Man who was Thursday, and Shakespeare in King Lear. It is at the very end of King Lear, in fact, that the Duke of Albany says,"The weight of this sad time we must obey,/Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say," and that seems to me to be precisely what Shakespeare himself did in writing this greatest of all his plays and what in their own entirely different ways the other three did after him.

I agree with Buechner's and Shakespeare's point in this passage, how more people need to write and speak more from their heart and less from what society wants them to do. This is something i have been pondering for awhile, and it makes me very excited to read the rest of this book, and learn more about these four great authors and how they applied their own life to their stories and their stories to their own lives.

Buechner, Frederick. Speak What We Feel New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 2001