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| Stones into Schools: Inspiring Read |
After that we are going to hear from our mission team of 20 volunteers that returned Sunday night from a building project in a village outside Chichicastenango, Guatemala. Several of our members were on the team and came back glowing.
Other members attended the conference in Denver on Sexual Traficking. They were not glowing, but rather seem to be gritting their teeth.
Greg Mortenson, author of "Sones into Schools," was a world-class mountaineer whose follow up to "Three Cups of Team" is gripping enough for a tv miniseries: mountains "at the top of the world," war, poverty, oppression of women, the Taliban and US military, and Mortensen's cohort "the dirty dozen" plus his own struggles and breakdowns--wow! Amazing.
The Central Asia Institute (www.ikat.org) co-founded by Mortenson, a Montana boy, sees its mission in transformation via building schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The goal of his local team is to encircle the Taliban with girls schools, combating fanaticism with moderate, secular education and a paradigm shift.
After that, "Stones into Schools" we have a long list of books we are considering for summer study. The first one will be "The Dressmaker of Khair Khana," another true story.
Our group has former Peace Corps volunteers, graduate students, international aid workers, missionaries, former military, doctors, teachers, non-profit workers--all have traveled abroad, all are committed Christians of the United Methodist persuasion. As John Wesley told early Methodists: "Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, to all the people you can for as long as ever you can."