Greg Mortenson’s trajectory as a somewhat obsessed, albeit highly productive, humanitarian who has built more than 50 schools in Pakistan begins with a small twist of fate. A drifting and somewhat obsessed mountain climber mourning the death of his youngest sister, he decides to summit K2 to honor her memory. A successful rescue mission of one of his teammates, however, costs Mortenson the summit, as well as his strength. Separated from his porter, weakened and eventually in the care of the village of Korphe, Mortenson’s true journey—and tribute to his sister—begins. 

Korphe has no school. Rather, children gather on “a vast, open ledge eight hundred feet above the Braldu (Valley).” The Pakistani government does not provide a teacher, and the village cannot afford one, so they share a teacher with a neighboring village. He comes three days a week, and otherwise the children are on their own, kneeling on the ground, “left alone to practice the lessons he has left behind.” Making an impulsive promise to return and build a school for Korphe, Mortenson’s life suddenly changes. Living between his car in California and small hotels near Islamabad, learning how to use a computer and to pray in both Sunni and Shia styles, Mortenson builds the foundation for what is to become the Central Asia Institute.

Mortenson also sips tea with Taliban leaders, survives more than one fatwa and a kidnapping, and earns the “permission, blessings and prayers” of the Supreme Council of Ayatollahs, the world’s foremost Shia authority. Most importantly, Mortenson realizes the global importance of balanced education in such poverty- and war-stricken regions as Kashmir, where the only hope for many children is within the walls of madrassas, Islamic fundamentalist schools, an estimated 20 percent of which have radicalized Islam and operate as training grounds for the likes of the Taliban and al Qaeda. 

Journalist David Oliver Relin deserves credit for co-authoring this inspiring story. He accompanied Mortenson to northern Pakistan on three occasions, flying “on helicopters that should have been hanging from the rafters of museums.” The writing posed its own difficulties: neither Mortenson nor the Balti people who inhabit these mountains rely on a linear sense of time. The villagers’ language actually employs no tenses, presenting a serious challenge to establishing a chronology of events. 

Relin traveled and worked with Mortenson for two years, but beyond the introduction, his character is entirely absent from the text, making it impossible to distinguish events or dialogue that he documented from those recreated for him. This creates a subtle lack of clarity, underscored by his admission that, ultimately, he prioritized passion over objectivity. 

“… And after staying up at all-night jirgas with village elders and weighing in on proposals for new projects,” Relin writes, “or showing a classroom full of excited 8-year-old girls how to use the first pencil sharpener anyone has ever cared to give them … it is impossible to remain simply a reporter.” Citing a character in Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American,” he continues, “… Sometimes, to be human, you have to take sides.” 

Participant observation is not new to documentary studies, and in many cases is an author’s most ethical course of action. Relin’s introduction, however, implies that he took this one step further. Perhaps allowing himself into the story’s text or sharing his research methodology with readers may have helped distinguish between documented and retold events, and led to a greater sense of trust in his narration. As it is, those unknown differences between what he observed and what was recounted for him loom like ledges of the deep and rugged valleys Relin tries so hard to describe. 

It is within this stark territory that Mortenson realizes it’s not just Korphe that needs a school. The government allotment for all the remote villages is siphoned off by corruption on its way from the capital, and not just in Pakistan. By the end of the book, we learn that Mortenson is nearly doubling CAI’s operations with a move into Afghanistan. “There has been far too much dying in these hills,’ says Commandhan Sadhar Khan to Mortenson. In Badakshan, a town “as far from Kabul as one could get in Afghanistan,” absolute power resides with Khan; he is as well known for funneling opium tariffs back to his people in the form of small loans or public projects as he is for literally pulling his enemy apart between two jeeps if he does not surrender. “Every rock, every boulder that you see before you is one of my mujahadeen, shahids, martyrs, who sacrificed their lives fighting the Russians and the Taliban,” Khan says.  “Now we must make their sacrifice worthwhile. We must turn these stones into schools.”

Throughout the story, Relin’s narration and syntax can be cumbersome, and the reader’s path is too often strewn with misplaced modifiers not to stumble and swear. Combined with a slight sense of vertigo from the aforementioned hazy timeline and perspective, reading “Three Cups of Tea” can, in moments, feel rather like climbing a mountain. 

That said, who has ever struggled to a summit and not been pleased to have reached the top? Just as no mere words can do justice to the majestic topography of the Karakoram Mountains, neither can slightly imperfect writing diminish the grandeur of this story. One feels humbled and awestruck at the magnitude of what Mortenson has accomplished, and, like a hiker in the center of a vast and jagged valley, ready to get moving.