Three Cups of Tea: Ticket to Education

What does she hope to accomplish with all of these new experiences? "Education," she says. "That's what I will bring home to other women in my village."

On a crisp day, recently, leaves were crunching under the wheels as Naseer was learning to ride a bike. With her host family rallying around, she was visibly frustrated as the bike teetered unsteadily beneath her after her umpteenth try.

So she gave up: "I felt like a child. I fell a lot and started to get so mad at myself."

In her village, with rocky roads, no one owns a bike and no one in her family had ever learned to ride one. But after weeks of watching bikers cruising Bozeman, she'd fancied that freedom and asked her hosts for the lesson – so she was embarrassed to give up.

But early the next morning Mr. Lawson walked outside to find Naseer riding the bike on her own, with an ambitious look in her eyes.

"She's just a quietly determined individual," Mrs. Lawson observes.

That quiet determination of a woman wanting to learn as much as possible – over a few cups of tea or on a bike – is just what Mortensen had in mind when he built his first school for girls in the developing world, and when he brought Naseer to the US.