101 Things Update - Week 3

Well, this week was a total bust. Nearly. Besides keeping up the calcium tablets (borrrrrrrring) and finishing Three Cups of Tea (which I am about to write a post on... so I might post this after I have posted that so that I can link it to this... (later: Done! Linked!)), the whole exercising four days a week thing totally went out the window because I had a cold all week. And we all know what my reaction to being unable to exercise is - drown my sorrows in food! Yeah, I know, I'm so unbelievably smart... S-M-R-T!

So I've decided that a little bit of public humiliation might help me along. I know I'm crazy for doing this, but I'm going to add another tab to track my food and my exercise in the hope that it keeps me honest. The jury is still out on whether I will post my weight and/or measurements... Perhaps I shall post them as "today I weighed X" (literally using the letter X) and then the following week post "today I weight X minus . Could work. If I decide I hate doing it or I'm too embarrassed by it I can always delete the page.

Actually, I just realised that I DID exercise this week - I shovelled a ute load of 20mm aggregate over my mum's driveway and worked up quite a sweat doing it. So, it wasn't a dead loss!

Aaaaaaaanyway, besides finishing my first of fifteen unread books, it also occurred to me that I have been going great guns in the blog posting department, and so I might highlight that in green and start counting them.

So, in summary:

#35: To exercise 4 times a week in the lead-up to the wedding - more or less a total bust, with the exception of weilding a shovel to resurface my mum's driveway to stop her slipping over and twisting her OTHER ankle

#24: To blog at least twice a month for a year - Well, considering I have racked up a blistering EIGHT (including this one) posts this month - a record for me - I'm off to a good start. And even if I don't do it twice a month exactly, I can still claim that I averaged twice a month. So I'm fairly confident that I can highlight this one in green now

#65: To read all my unread books before buying more - One down, fourteen to go.

#49: To lose 1kg per month until under 75kg but over 70kg - it just occurred to me that if I'm planning on meticulously counting my exercise and food in a public forum, that I may as well commit to losing the weight along with it. They logically go hand in hand, really. And my jeans are getting a little tight after my birthday week and then my week of no exercise...

Book Review - Three Cups of Tea, by David Oliver Relin (with Greg Mortimer)

#65 on my list of 101 Things to do in 1001 days is to read all the unread books on my shelf... okay, shelves... before purchasing any more of them.

The first cab off the rank was Three Cups of Tea, by David Oliver Relin, first published by Viking Penguin in 2006.

It is a story about Greg Mortensen, an American trauma nurse-mountaineer (or perhaps that should be mountaineer-trauma nurse, given the latter only occurred to subsidise the former!) who failed to summit K2 (for all you un-adventurous lowlanders, K2 is the second-highest summit on Earth after Mount Everest, and has the reputation of being the more difficult of the two to climb. One in four die attempting to summit it, a fatality rate second only to Annapurna) in the early nineties, and who, on his way back down the mountain, exhausted and delirious, took a wrong turn and ended up in a remote Pakistani village.

His meeting of the villagers and their hospitality towards this infidel in his moment of need set him on a path to his new calling in life - correcting the vacuum of education and government support by building schools and other life-improving infrastructure (water pipes; sewing facilities for women; very basic first aid clinics in villages (training someone to administer antibiotics, electrolytes and to dress wounds) etc) in Pakistan, and later in Afghanistan.

After leaving Pakistan, Mortensen (or Dr Greg, as he later became known) couldn't shake the image of the Pakistani children doggedly holding school classes outside in the cold, using sticks to do their sums in the dirt. He had made a promise to the village elder that one day he would be back to help the children, and kept his word. He particularly saw the necessity of providing education for girls, which was completely lacking in this impoverished corner of a largely Muslim country.

Having had plans drawn up, he determined that a school could be built for just USD$12,000, but Mortensen struggled badly to raise funds. Everybody was interested in supporting high-profile charities to build schools for the Buddhist Nepalese children (probably because the profile was raised by Sir Edmund Hillary through his philanthropic work), and nobody was interested in helping the unknown entity that is the Muslim Pakistanis. He wrote over five hundred letters to various celebrities who could very well afford such a sum asking for assistance, and was ignored by all. Eventually, scientist Dr Jean Hoerni, a self-made millionaire from the computer industry and fellow lover of mountaineering, bankrolled the first school and eventually enabled the founding of the Central Asia Institute.

Following several false starts and setbacks, with the help of a handful of locals passionate about bettering their childrens' futures, and finding support in the oddest of places, Dr. Greg and the CAI built 55 schools over the following decade (more have been built since). During this process he had jihads declared on him by conservative regional Muslim leaders, and by the Taliban. More than one school was destroyed due to the fear (shared and perhaps incited by the conservative leaders) that Mortensen was attempting to Christian-ise their children (rather, his schools taught a general-purpose, secular curriculum), with especial concern over the fact that he wished to educate girls. Wiser leaders were able to see that by educating their children, particularly girls, they were empowering the next generation to live better lives, and as such the jihads were effectively overruled by high-level religious leaders and by the high courts of Pakistan.

Published in 2006 but not taking off until it was released in paperback a couple of years later, Three Cups of Tea spent 69 weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers List (non-fiction), and it is easy to see why it held the attention of a nation in the years following 9/11 and the capture of Saddam Hussein.

Mortensen's mission to give as many children of this new generation of Pakistanis and Afghans a non-extremist, secular education rather than the extremist Muslim education provided by Saudi-funded, Taliban-run schools is one man's way of ensuring that the next generation does not have the hatred for the Western world that this one does; that they do not resent the West for the destruction wreaked on their country and to their families during the War on Terror.

In case you were wondering, Mortensen did support the American occupation of Afghanistan, but was wise enough to see that there was no surer way to guarantee ongoing hatred for the West and to set ourselves up for future terrorist attacks than by not providing assistance where it was required, especially when the need was caused by the destructive forces of US (and local) military action, and therefore reinforcing the Taliban's anti-Western message. It helped me see that there is a massive difference between a conservative Muslim and an extreme one, and that there is as such much resentment in the region for the Taliban's extremist actions.

This is a well written, inspiring and interesting book, and gives you a rarely-seen insight into rural Pakistan and a different perspective on what the people of the region think of the Taliban. I did not see it as pro-Muslim mission or publication, but rather, a religion-neutral, pro-education, pro-opportunity, pro-humans one, and I recommend reading it.

101 Things Update - Week 2

Well. Two weeks into 101 Things and I'm doing well in some areas and absolutely failing in others.

#1: To declare my 29th year "Year of the Cupcake" - I turned 29 this week *shudders* and already the first cab is off the rank with these gluten free carrot cupcakes with orange cream cheese frosting. I made them for my birthday party because I have several gluten intolerant friends. Given how I feel about cupcakes and also given how tricky gluten free baking can be, I think I really grabbed the bull by the horns on this one. Consider Year of the Cupcake to be declared!

#21: To learn to make a Cosmopolitan - done, also for my birthday party. Not very hard at all, and to those not in the know they appear to be a little bit fancy!

#35: To exercise 4 times per week in the lead-up to the wedding - Week 2 and I'm slipping. Now, I'm going to use the excuse perfectly understandable reason that because it was my 29th birthday this week, and this coincided with my time off with Grant, that of course I wasn't going to spend my time at the gym, particularly as I was about 500km from the gym I am a member at.

But, to my credit, I went out of my way to walk everywhere. So, when we went to the pub for tea on my birthday and then to the movies, we walked. Not so bad! Also, to my credit, I bought a new pair of gym pants and a singlet with a shelf bra in it from Kmart on sale for a total of $21. This counts towards exercise of course. HAHAHA I'm kidding! Not even **I** am that delusional! But what it does mean is that I can go to the gym on 4 consecutive days without the stench killing other gym-goers. Score!

#45: To take calcium tablets each day - I think I'm doing okay, and don't recall missing (m)any, but we'll find out when I get to the bottom of the jar. It's not actually that straightforward, though, because I have a different jar in Adelaide and quite often when I'm in Melbourne I'm too lazy to go down to the car and get mine out. But don't tell mum that, because it means that I'm taking hers...

I'm also not going to bother updating this one every week because it's borrrrrrrrring.

#65: To read all my unread books before buying more - Still reading Three Cups of Tea. Still loving it. If I remember to bring it away with me this week I may have even more of it read soon! Again, I won't bother updating this one unless I have finished a book, or to let you know what the next book I'm reading is.

#74: To delete crap photos from SD cards, hard drives etc - in progress. Have started on the 8GB SD card currently in my digital SLR, mainly because I ran out of space on it the other day. No, there aren't that many photos on it, but I shoot in raw so I can - one day - more effectively use photo editing software. But I still have quite a lot of photos to get through, both on this card and on one or two others I have.

#78: To learn to blow-dry my hair - I probably should have mentioned this last week but one of my lovely bridesmaids Emma and I had a play with our hair last weekend and we did okay. Although if I posted on the Saturday night, which I think I did, it hadn't actually happened yet. We're learning to do the smooth thing, and we're learning what kind of curling tools do what to our hair (the answer isn't always "they curl it!", surprisingly...). We have a ways to go yet but we'll get there. My intention behind #78 was to have nice hair for our wedding, and to carry a useful skill away from it. And for all you doubters, it IS a useful skill when you have hair as unruly as mine. Of course, I generally go with the "embrace the mess" theory rather than going down the long and winding path of Taming the Beast...

#79: To use up all the dregs of my beauty products - I've finished one old bottle of moisturiser and started on another old one. I think I stopped using both of them because I was developing a mild sensitivity to them (!), so I'm only using the dregs on weekends and my regular moisturiser during the week. I find that if I use the same type of moisturiser all the time I get a little sensitive to it, so I change moisturisers every time I run out so that I'm not consistently exposing myself to the same ingredients. And it seems to be working, because neither of those moistureiser dregs have caused much trouble. Yet...

So, progress has been made! Somehow I doubt that next week will be quite as exciting for you, dear reader.