[Note from Kathie MM: For Valentine’s Day, we would like to share a wonderful love story—a story of a love for a people and a place, for peace, and for education, especially for girls. This guest book review by Jillian Zingarelli provides a glimpse at this love story.]
Review by Jillian Zingarelli
Anyone who read number one bestseller, Three Cups of Tea – the collaborative effort by journalist David Oliver Relin and Greg Mortenson – will be excited to see Mortenson take over the narrative wheel in his new book Stones into Schools.
In Three Cups of Tea we learn about the start of Mortenson’s passion for educating children, especially girls, and how it sparked the creation of the Central Asia Institute (CAI). Since 1995 the CAI has helped to build 131 schools throughout Pakistan and Afghanistan, the majority of which are located in some of the most rural and remote areas in Central Asia.
In Stones into Schools the CAI ventures into post-9/11 Afghanistan where it encounters an unrelenting desire by the Afghan people for more schools for their children, even as poverty and bombs threaten their personal security.
How with all of these obstacles do Mortenson and his team (whom he endearingly terms “the Dirty Dozen”) continue to yield successful results? And why of all forms of relief to poverty, starvation, war, etc. do they offer educating girls as a principal means for engaging peace?
In Stones into Schools, Mortenson cites an African proverb he heard growing up in rural Tanzania: “If you teach a boy, you educate an individual; but if you teach a girl, you educate a community.” Education enables both men and women to recognize the ignorance of turning suicide bombers into martyrs, and Islam–a religion that is both inherently peaceful and complex–into a simplistic doctrine of violence and suppression.
If you would like to learn more about the CAI and become involved in their mission in Pakistan and Afghanistan, visit them at www.ikat.org.
What do you think about the idea that educating girls helps to promote peace?
, reading stories about peace, or 
