Stones into Schools: (Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan)
Greg Mortenson, 2009
Penguin Group USA
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780670021154
Summary
Just as Three Cups of Tea began with a promise—to build a school in Korphe, Pakistan—so too does Mortenson's new book. In 1999, Kirghiz horsemen from Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor rode into Pakistan and secured a promise from Mortenson to construct a school in an isolated pocket of the Pamir Mountains known as Bozai Gumbaz. Mortenson could not build that school before constructing many others, and that is the story he tells in this dramatic new book.
Picking up where Three Cups of Tea left off in late 2003, Stones into Schools traces the CAI's efforts to work in a whole new country, the secluded northeast corner of Afghanistan. Mortenson describes how he and his intrepid manager, Sarfraz Khan, barnstormed around Badakshan Province and the Wakhan Corridor, moving for weeks without sleep, to establish the first schools there. Those efforts were diverted in October 2005 when a devastating earthquake hit the Azad Kashmir region of Pakistan. Under Sarfraz's watch the CAI helped with relief efforts by setting up temporary tent schools and eventually several earthquakeproof schools.
The action then returns to Afghanistan in 2007, as the CAI launches schools in the heart of Taliban country and as Mortenson helps the U.S. military formulate new strategic plans in the region.
Stones into Schools brings to life both the heroic efforts of the CAI's fixers on the ground—renegade men of unrecognized and untapped talent who became galvanized by the importance of girls' education—and the triumphs of the young women who are now graduating from the schools. (From the publisher.)