Balti people’s ritual of sharing tea: with the first cup, you are a stranger; with the second, you are an honored guest; with the third, you are family. As Theresa talked about the book’s central themes with her fellow high school faculty, a discussion emerged about how the lessons from Greg’s journey could benefit Convent & Stuart Hall’s high school students. With the book as their foundation, a small group of faculty planned a series of discussions to weave into coed events already on the calendar. Julia Arce (Convent theology and English faculty), Sergio Vasquez (Stuart Hall theology and Campus Ministry) and Kate McMichael (Convent theology and Campus Ministry) led the effort, which started with assigning Three Cups of Tea as the summer reading for all high school students. The events throughout the first semester followed Greg’s description of the Balti people’s ritual of sharing tea: with the first cup, you are a stranger; with the second, you are an honored guest; with the third, you are family. “ We wanted to use the book as a way to talk about the journey we take toward a heart that will serve others, that will educate, as Mortensen did,” Julia says.
The First Cup of Tea
The Mass of the Holy Spirit in September is one of the schools’ first opportunities each year to come together as a community and reflect on the year ahead. This year, during a co-ed gathering after the Mass, high school students heard from student and faculty speakers who helped introduce the themes from Three Cups of Tea. Beyond the symbolism of sharing tea and building relationships, they talked about the transformation of spirit—the internal journey you take to becoming the person you are meant to be. Greg Mortensen, they explained, started his journey thinking the best way to honor his late sister was to place her necklace at the top of the mountain; after meeting the Balti villagers and seeing their need for a proper schoolhouse, he realized he could honor his sister better by improving education in such rural areas. Convent senior Frankie Incerty, one of the student speakers, talked about a time when she felt the same tranformation—during a service immersion trip to New Orleans with a dozen other students. Francesca admitted that as they arrived there, more than six years after Hurricane Katrina, she was frightened to venture out into the city, afraid of what she might see. But after a few days of meeting the people and working with them, she realized she was only really afraid that she hadn’t been there long enough to make a real difference. “This was a great way to introduce the idea of transformation as a process, anchored in community,” Sergio says. “We invited them to look inward … Real change can’t happen without first looking at your interior life.”
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Students made sandwiches to give out to the homeless they met on Community Service Day.
The Second Cup of Tea
After his initial commitment to help Pakistani villagers build schools, Greg Mortensen found raising money and finding supplies for the task to be an enormous and dangerous challenge. But ultimately, he wrote, his ability to build 64 schools in that region over the course of 15 years was the product of the relationships he sustained. Such a powerful message segued nicely into the high school Community Service Day on October 28, Julia says, because the focus of service activities here is not just in blindly helping others, but in getting to know those who we serve, and recognizing them as equals. “This book reflects our best intentions—to take risks for others, to grow our bodies and minds and to have the courage to depend on others,” Julia says. After a short assembly that included words from San Francisco Archbishop George H. Niederauer, students dispersed to various service sites. The seniors went to the Sacred Heart School in Atherton for a panel discussion about immigration issues and then worked with Stanford graduate students who are undocumented. Other students made sandwiches and served the homeless, worked with senior citizens in the neighborhood, and toured national park areas with rangers to understand what would be lost if they weren’t maintained (and then got their hands dirty maintaining them).