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Photo by Erica Nesbitt, '09 |
David Oliver Relin, co-author of the New York Times bestseller Three Cups of Tea, spoke at Whitworth this fall about the book and about the human-rights issues he has brought to light during his 23-year career as an investigative journalist.
Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time, which Relin co-wrote with Greg Mortenson, recounts the journey that led Mortenson to build more than 60 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 1993, while descending from a failed climb of Pakistan's K2 mountain, Mortenson wandered away from his group and stumbled into a remote, impoverished Pakistani village, where villagers nursed him back to health. Mortenson promised to repay the community by building a school. Fulfilling that promise led to his quest to fight Islamic extremism by reducing poverty and educating children, particularly girls, in a region known for its high population of Taliban. Mortenson founded the Central Asia Institute, which promotes community-based education and literacy programs in remote mountain regions of Central Asia.
| "What path will you choose in life? What effect will the path that you choose have on other people in the rest of the world?" |
During Relin's lecture at Whitworth, he talked about Jahan, one of the girls mentioned in Three Cups of Tea, who was the first graduate from a school Mortenson built in the Pakistan village of Korphe. Relin said that Jahan now dreams of building a hospital and becoming its chief administrator.
"I think it's important that we create an army of Jahans," Relin said, asserting that extremists wouldn't be able to defeat such an army.
Relin, a resident of Portland, Ore., focuses on reporting social issues and their effect on children in the U.S. and around the world. His interviews with child soldiers, including a profile of teenager Ishmael Beah, who later wrote the bestseller A Long Way Gone, have been included in Amnesty International reports. His investigation of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and its abuse of children in its custody contributed to the reorganization of that agency. Among his current projects is a novel about landmine survivors in Vietnam.
Relin told the Whitworth audience that the stories he has written during his career are "the stories of the powerless," and he showed pictures of the people he has met during his travels to impoverished and often war-torn places such as Vietnam and the Sudan. He told the audience that they don't have to travel to faraway places, though, to make positive changes in the world, and he encouraged them to look for opportunities to serve their communities.
"We have an obligation. With all of the…excess in our culture, it's such a small thing for us to help," Relin said. "What path will you choose in life? What effect will the path that you choose have on other people in the rest of the world?"
Three Cups of Tea was the common-reading book this year for Whitworth's first-year seminar program. Prior to Relin's lecture, he met with selected students from the program.
Listen to Relin's lecture 
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