In Chapter 13, Mortenson said, “I realized that everything, all the difficulties I’d gone through, from the time I’d promised to build the school, through the long struggle to complete it, was nothing compared to the sacrifices he was prepared to make for his people. Here was this illiterate man, who’d hardly left his little village…Yet he was the wisest man I’d ever met.” Why does Mortenson consider Haji Ali to be the “wisest man her ever met”?
What advice does Haji Ali give to Mortenson (Ch. 15) that he incorporates into the Central Asia Institute (CAI) plans for building new schools? Do you think this advice would serve Mortenson well if he were building schools in the United States?
Mortenson (Ch. 16 &17) “also came to know a religious leader in Baltistan, Syed Abbas Risvi, who agreed with him that education was important but pointed out that the children in the area needed something else, too…” What does Mortenson hope Westerners will understand in the example of Syed Abbas?
Much of the book is a meditation on what it means to be a foreigner assimilating with another culture. Discuss your own experiences with foreign cultures-things that you have learned, mistakes you have made, misunderstandings you have endured.
