Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Effectively Spreading the Word

The quote I chose was from chapter 4. In the beginning of this chapter Mortenson has just gotten to California after his long trip in Pakistan. He is trying to pull himself back together after his jet lag and long travels on a plane. He has been brainstorming, trying to figure out how he will come up with the money he needs to build a school for Haji Ali's community. On page 45, Relin is saying how the tools that had taken Mortenson all across the continent seem useless for this next task. He is putting his climbing gear away when he begins to wonder what kind of tools it will take to raise all the money for the project. Relin writes, "How could he convince Americans to care about a circle of children, sitting in the cold, on the other side of the world, scratching at thier lessons in the dirt, with sticks? He pulled the light cord, extinguishing the particularity of the objects in the storage space." To me, this quote says a lot. The people back in America haven't experienced what he has just exposed to. No one back home will feel the pull as strongly as Mortenson feels it. He isn't sure what it will take to get the job done, but he knows that he made a promise and he will figure out a way to make it happen.

2 comments:

  1. I like this passage a lot! To me, I feel that some Americans are kind of naive when it comes to this. We aren't really educated on what the school systems are like in other countrys. I think this is something that we should care about and actually play a role in helping

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  2. Americans are often too busy in their own lives to care about other people, especially when they have no emotional attachment to those in need. Mortenson reaches out to those with the most and asks them for help, which in a perfect society should work, but it doesn't. He isn't able to convince then Americans to help the deprived children very readily. He eventually gets the funding but not without a lot of hardship.

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