Central Asia Institute, or CAI, the acronym Jean Hoerni had insisted coining for the fund he started. I smile because in Turkish, which is the other language I know, when the three letters are pronounced as a word it is "Ch-ai", and it means tea.
Who is Hoerni?
First of all, before you get any ideas, his last name is pronounced "her-knee". Without the first ten-thousand dollars he gave to Greg Mortenson, and then a million dollars for the CAI, this tremendous book could not have been written by David Oliver Relin, who co-authored it along with Mortenson.
Hoerni is the greatest analytical genius to come out of Switzerland since Leonhard Euler. No kidding. He invented, among many things, the planar process that allows the manufacturing of integrated circuits that are now ubiquitous. He made millions of dollars as result of his contributions. Just before he died in early 1997, at the age of 73, he is known to have acted in two ways in his deathbed: 1) he insisted a picture of the school Mortenson and his friends built in Pakistan for children, especially girls, be hung on the wall of his hospital room; 2) he phoned a friend of his to tell him mockingly: "I built a school in Pakistan, what have you done in the last 40 years?!"
The result of successful capitalism is always giving back to build healthy communities. This story is a case in point of this belief.
Mortenson and his friends are still working to build and maintain schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They have educated tens of thousands of children, who are unlikely to become poor, helpless, and subdued to do anything they would now wouldn't do. The world is a better place.
Somewhere in the middle of the book, as I was reading one of the many stories of hardship and overcoming obstacles, I added Greg Mortenson as my friend in Facebook. He now has little over ten thousand friends. But if all these friends made a contribution of $10, that's $100K just out of a whim. This translates into five schools; about five hundred lives. Who knows what they will invent or discover in the future that will help millions. Hoerni once lamented to Mortenson, $10K? That's how much my ex-wife spends in a weekend.Get more detail about Three Cups of Tea [With Headphones] (Playaway Adult Nonfiction).
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