Sam Swope

It took 19 hours to fly from my home in New York City to Karachi, Pakistan, an airplane hurtling me through time and space to a land of mosques and woven carpets, military coups and holy wars, turbaned men and women covered head to toe. I was on my way to a conference of English teachers from schools funded by the Aga Khan, the spiritual leader of the Ismaili Muslims, a direct descendant of Mohammed, and a philanthropist as rich as Croesus. His progressive organizations fund hospitals and schools in countries throughout Central Asia and East Africa. (In places like rural Pakistan, where Islamic fundamentalists believe women should not go to school, an Aga Khan School may be a girl’s only option.)

The conference, held last August, was organized by Mohsin Tejani, the principal of an Aga Khan School in Karachi, and Lou Bernieri, Director of the Andover Bread Loaf Writing Workshop (ABL), a three-week teacher workshop held each summer at Phillips Academy in Massachusetts. Because the Aga Khan’s son had gone to Phillips Academy, a relationship between the Aga Khan Schools and Andover developed in the form of an organization called the International Academic Partnership, and since then IAP has brought teachers to ABL from Aga Khan schools in Bangladesh, India, Kenya, Pakistan, and Tanzania. At the Karachi conference, a dozen of these alumns would be giving workshops to approximately forty English teachers from Aga Khan schools in Pakistan.

I was an invited guest, a children’s book author who works as a writer-in-residence in New York City public schools through the Teachers and Writers Collaborative. In Karachi, I was to give poetry workshops and then launch those verses into cyberspace where they’d be designed, printed and bound in real paperback books, using an education website I helped found: www.chapbooks.com.

Before the conference, I didn’t know much about Pakistan. I’d taught immigrant Pakistani children in New York, but never had much luck getting them to describe their "native country" in much detail. (Inevitably, naturally, they were more focused on their adopted country.) I was, however, aware that there had been a military coup ten months before, that General Musharraf was in charge, and that Pakistan had the bomb, as did India, with whom relations were so tense that war seemed a possibility. To travel to Pakistan, I would need a visa and several shots.

Like a good student, I prepared. I read the history of Pakistan’s violent birth in 1947 when the British pulled out of the subcontinent and divided it in two, Pakistan for the Muslims and India for the Hindus, a partition that set off an epic, tragic migration of Hindus fleeing Pakistan and Muslims fleeing India. Thousands of innocents were brutally slaughtered; there was blood on everybody’s hands.

In other books I learned that Pakistan is extremely poor, has violent political factions, and a corrupt political system. Indeed, the country has been described as a terminal patient with a dozen fatal diseases. In addition to internal political terrorist bombings, anti-American sentiment is strong in parts of Pakistan, and the United States Government advises Americans not to travel to the country, at all.

By surfing the Web, I found information on Karachi. The city sits on a swamp at the mouth of the Indus River on the Arabian Sea but isn’t ancient, dating only from the 19th Century. In 1940, Karachi had a population of 300,000; today it has 13 million residents, many of them Indian immigrants, 98% of them poor, and one in 15 addicted to heroin. I also learned the summers were brutally hot, you can’t drink the water, and the mosquitoes can carry malaria. In case something terrible did happen, I would be given "emergency evacuation insurance."

But still: Pakistan! What an adventure!

The plane landed in Karachi near midnight. I was jet-lagged and exhausted, apprehensive as I waited in line to show my passport. Waiting with me were tough-looking Pakistani men, sun-creased with callused hands and missing teeth, laborers who worked in the Middle East and were sent home every other year for a visit. They wore rough versions of the national dress, the shalwar qamiz, a loose, long shirt over baggy trousers. The mustached guard at Immigration was scarily severe. Not many Americans visit Karachi and he studied me and then he studied my passport for long enough that I began to worry. At last he brought his stamp down on the visa with a thud. I was done. I was in Pakistan.

Three other Americans had been invited to the conference: Hazel Lockett, an African American high school teacher from New Jersey and a Co-Director of ABL; Tamarah Pfeiffer, a Native American high school teacher from the Navajo Nation in Arizona; and Richard Gorham, a white male like me and a high school teacher from urban Massachusetts.

We were put up at the Karachi Sheraton, a hotel like any expensive chain hotel you’d find just about anywhere. My room had a balcony overlooking a busy intersection and beyond, the city. Karachi’s buildings aren’t very tall and most are modern, made of poured concrete. Because electricity is expensive, the city doesn’t glitter. There were pockets of blackness. Across the boulevard stood the empty shell of an unfinished luxury hotel, a building started by a past president and halted when the army hanged him. It had been there for years, too expensive to complete, too expensive to tear down.

I went to bed exhausted but so excited that it took a while to fall asleep.

I woke at 5:30 to the call to prayer. Five times a day, these chanting wails sound from minarets all over the city. The prayers are recorded and recited in Arabic, not in the native language, Urdu, and are broadcast through scratchy loudspeakers, but even so they’re haunting and beautiful and lonely:

God is most great. There is no God but Allah. Mohammed is God’s prophet. Come to pray, come to security. God is most great.

I fumbled for the remote and turned on CNN. The Democrats were having their convention in Los Angeles, but it was just as scripted and fake as the earlier Republican one, so I changed the channel to Pakistan’s version of MTV and watched a song acted out in a kind of Arab fantasy with harems.

I opened the balcony door and was met with a blast of humid heat. Thank goodness for air conditioning. After showering, I joined my colleagues for breakfast. I tried the halwa, a Pakistani porridge, but it was a little sweet, so I headed back to the buffet for corn flakes. The others ate croissants, muffins, and omelets but found the eggs’ consistency a little strange. I’d read that fruit juice can be risky, but Tamarah wasn’t worried, and I jealously watched her enjoy a fresh squeezed mango juice.

Tamarah was a mystery to me, both very familiar and "other." She’s German on her father’s side and looks as all-American as I do, but her cultural identity comes from her mother, who is Navajo. Tamarah told us that when she was 12, her parents decided she was spoiled and didn’t appreciate her culture, so they asked her what country she’d like to live in, and when she chose the Philippines, Tamarah was sent to live with a Filipino family and didn’t see her parents again for the next two years. Tamarah didn’t see anything extraordinary in this and in fact seemed grateful to her parents for sending her away.

Tamarah was fearless, ready to go anywhere at any time, perhaps made brave by the "Blessing Way" she’d given herself before she’d left the Navajo Nation. In that ceremony, Tamarah’s 100 invited guests sat in a hogan (the traditional Navajo dwelling) for two days and nights without eating, drinking or sleeping. Various rituals were performed and songs were sung, led by a medicine man, and at one point the guests placed items on Tamara’s body (job applications, for example, car keys) in the hope some of her blessing would rub off on them. When the ceremony ended at dawn, everyone filed out of the hogan and greeted the sun. Then Tamarah threw a feast with "lots of food and lots of drink." All told, Tamarah said her Blessing Way had cost $6,000.

The conference’s opening ceremonies would be that evening. During the day we were to visit an Aga Khan school. A car picked us up at the hotel and our Pakistani diver had the not very Pakistani name of Robinson. "I am Roman Catholic religion," he explained, then proceeded to tell us how hard it is for Catholics (along with Jews and Hindus and Buddhists and other religious minorities) to get good jobs in an officially Muslim country.

Robinson drove fast and kept to the left side of the street, yet another vestige of British colonialism we’d see that week, along with cricket and afternoon tea. Many of the signs were in Urdu, a beautiful script I couldn’t even guess at -- couldn’t make out one single letter! -- and it made me see how scary it is to be illiterate: If you can’t read the signs, how do you find your way from A to B? But English was also everywhere, mostly on billboards and advertising, and when we saw our first McDonald’s, we laughed it seemed so strange.

By far the coolest thing about Karachi’s streets were the buses. They were eye-poppingly colorful, like Chinese New Year’s dragons, mosaics of bright paint and tin that could have rolled out of a children’s picture book. Female passengers sat up front, the males sat in the back or, since it was rush hour, hung out the doors. Taxis and small cars were likewise crammed with more passengers than seemed possible and laborers crowded on trucks atop freshly slaughtered beef or onions or crates of live chickens. Even scooters carried up to three riders, with female passengers always sitting side-saddle, their scarves billowing behind them. And weaving in and out of everything were bicycles, motorized rickshaws, herds of goats, carts pulled by donkeys, and now and then a camel, the sight of which always made me shout with excitement. The air was thick with diesel.

We entered a poor but lively and chaotic neighborhood with an unpaved street crowded with people and small shops, their wares spilling out onto the sidewalk. We parked beside a large closed door in a wall topped with barbed wire. Addicts sleep on this sidewalk every night, I was told. Then the door in the wall opened, and we entered the Aga Khan School Kharadhar.

The cloistered campus was quiet, a different world, with flowering bougainvillea, grass, and trees. Even the air seemed fresher. Nursery schoolchildren greeted us, singing boys with pompoms, smiling girls who tossed rose petals in our path.

We were met by Mohsin, the school’s young moon-faced principal and a co-organizer of the conference. Mohsin’s an impressive guy, one of the first Aga Khan schoolteachers to travel to the States to attend the Andover Bread Loaf Workshop, an experience that changed his life and in small increments is changing education in Pakistan. At ABL, Mohsin was introduced to progressive education philosophy, teacher research, and the notion that the best way to make teachers better writing teachers is to make teachers better writers. Mohsin was so charged up from his experience at ABL that he enrolled in its partner institution, the Bread Loaf School of English, and has now spent several summers there pursuing a Masters Degree.

The classrooms at the school were large and arranged traditionally, in rows, the English school model. The rooms were dark and shadowy, not blindingly bright the way American classrooms typically are. The only light was natural and soft, the windows shaded, a good thing since there was no air conditioning, just fans that circled slowly overhead. (It was nine in the morning and already my shirt stuck to my back.)

Class size averaged 40 students and all the kids wore uniforms. The male teachers wore Western ties and button down shirts, but the female teachers wore traditional (and beautiful) Pakistani shalwars which were bright and colorful, and matching diaphanous scarves were draped around their shoulders, elegant as flowers. (I saw some women in Karachi in the burqa, the costume that covers all of a woman’s body, leaving only her eyes peaking out, but most women in that more progressive city wear the shalwar.)

The girl students were in school for four hours each morning; the boys for four hours each afternoon. All of them studied English and their native Urdu; in religion classes they studied the Koran, but that they learned in Arabic, a language that they didn’t speak and in any other context couldn’t read.

The school was K-10, grade ten being the final grade in Pakistani secondary schools. Student writing and projects were on display in the corridors, and inspirational sayings on the walls seemed emblematic:

God will not look for your medals, degrees or diplomas, but for scars.

The greater the obstacles, the more glory in overcoming it.

The school didn’t have a lot of books, even in the library. Privileged as these private Aga Khan schools are, they’re not as well-equipped as many of our public schools, but I was happy to see they had recess, something the school I taught in back in Queens had done away with years ago.

Education isn’t compulsory in Pakistan, and although there are public schools, Pakistan’s illiteracy rate, at 70%, is one of the worst in the world. Most Aga Khan students come from middle and lower middle income families (tuition is about $14 a month), but 25 percent are on full scholarship. Obviously, there are a lot more applicants to Aga Khan schools than there are seats. The drop-out rate is zero. A majority of male graduates go on to get higher degrees; a majority of the females don’t.

There are no discipline problems in Aga Khan schools, none. The students were quiet, orderly, and well-behaved, and they giggled when I smiled at them and were thrilled if I took their picture.

Late in the afternoon we went back to the hotel to shower away the day’s heat and change for the conference’s opening ceremonies. Hazel was giving the keynote address, and she was understandably nervous, uncertain that her speech would work. "I don’t know these people!" she told me. "I don’t know what they’re up against as teachers! Who am I to tell them anything?"

Hazel has been teaching on the front lines, in urban public schools, for more than thirty years. She’s won a lot of awards, and has a reputation as a classroom dynamo. Although she hadn’t traveled much, there she was in Pakistan, gamely trying the food she found too spicy, eager to ride in one of the tiny three-wheeler motorized rickshaws which seemed more toy than taxi, and kept her wary, interested eyes open to this different culture.

Like me, Hazel is a private person and takes her time opening up. She hated the way people in Karachi looked at her, a black woman in Western dress. "Everyone’s always staring at me!" she said more than once.

"You’re exotic," I told her.

"I am exotic!" she agreed, laughing. "They look at me and they’re thinking, What’s that all about?"

Hazel had a great laugh, so infectious that when we were tired, her laugh made me laugh, which made her laugh more, till both of us were laughing so hard we cried. Laughing together, like crying together, is an intimate experience and I was glad for the way Hazel’s laugh welcomed me in.

In her Keynote Address, Hazel said our ultimate goal was to transform schools and ourselves as teachers and thinkers. This wouldn’t happen overnight, but the conference was a beginning. She told the story of her own transformation as a writing teacher. After years of successfully teacher grammar to her students, she came to the painful conclusion that she wasn’t teaching them what they needed to know most: to communicate. Students, she told us, don’t need to be able to identify gerunds. What they need is a compelling reason to write; once they have something they want to say, they’ll learn the grammar that they need so they can say it.

That lesson hadn’t come easily to Hazel; transformation is hard. She warned us, "This conference isn’t about a bag of tricks." What it was about was learning strategies that would help us begin the process of looking honestly at our teaching and asking, "Is this working?" Inevitably, transformation is a private journey but it need not be taken alone, especially today, thanks to the Internet and its ability to connect teachers and classrooms around the world. Listserves and email communication can do a lot for teachers who feel isolated in their schools, but they are more successful when teachers know each other and feel part of the same community. That’s why an essential goal of the Karachi conference was to build a sense of community.

The following morning, that work began.

The Institute for Education Development (IED), where the conference was held, was founded in 1993. IED is part of the Aga Khan University and is a brand new facility on a pleasant landscaped campus. IED’s mission is daunting: to improve and reform education in the developing world, where untold millions of children never even go to school. (Some of those children, seeking an education, come to the United States, and many of them wind up in Queens, where every day I’d see a line of new admits outside the school office and pray they weren’t headed for my already crowded classroom.)

IED’s classrooms were air conditioned, and the teachers, my students, sat around tables. They were mostly female and mostly young, although a fair proportion had been teaching for years. I told them, "In the next few days, we’re going to write poems that we’ll publish in a book, a book that will be made on the Internet. The book will have a poem written by each one of you, accompanied by your photograph, and you’ll each get a copy of this conference anthology."

My Karachi students were excited (as students of all ages everywhere always are) at the thought that they’d be published in a book. Publishing is an important way to motivate students to write and I’ve done it all my teaching life, but now technology makes it possible and inexpensive (at $5-7 dollars a book) to publish student writing in real books, not stapled photocopied pages. (I would upload the poems and photos to Chapbooks.com where the layout, design, printing and binding would be done automatically.) The books are printed in less than a week and are impressively professional, just as real as books can be.

"But I’ve never written a poem!" one of my students said. Others worried that although they taught English as a foreign language, they didn’t have a strong enough command of English to write poems.

"Not to worry!" I told them. "You can do this. Every one can do this. Poetry is easy!"

That statement might get me into trouble, but it’s true: Poetry is easy, as easy as singing, and it’s a shame so many teachers are intimidated by the form because so many students love it. In poetry, the rules of grammar are relaxed, no sentences required, and even those uncomfortable with English can have success with just a simple thought or deeply felt emotion. Often, much more often than you’d think, the poems students write are even good or anyway may have one striking image or a phrase that makes you catch your breath. And even if the poems aren’t all that good, they are important. I hear it in the classroom all the time: I didn’t know that I could write a poem!

We only wrote the simplest sorts of poems: list poems, poems with a single word per line, poems in which each line begins with the same words, and haiku. When I taught the lesson on haiku, I asked for three short lines and told them not to bother counting syllables, no full sentences allowed, only brush strokes needed, a phrase that paints a fleeting image of a thing that they could see or taste or feel or hear or touch. I added it would make me really happy if they tossed in something unexpected at the end.

"Is this clear?" I said.

Mamoona, in her sixties, gentle face and lovely smile, tilted her head and shrugged as if to say, "Not really, no, I’m sorry." So I explained haiku a second time, but once more Mamoona tilted her head and shrugged, so once more I began again until Rozina, young and sassy, stopped me, crying, "No! We understand!" and I discovered that the head tilt with the shrug meant "Yes" in Pakistani body language, and everybody laughed at my confusion and their laughing made me glad because I know when students laugh at me it makes them feel more comfortable and so they write much better poems.

I told them, "Okay, now let’s write haiku, but remember as a poet you are free to break any rules I give, and if you have another kind of poem burning to get out, write that instead."

The women readjusted their colorful scarves, picked up their pens, willing writers all. I walked among them, helping when asked, happy to be in a room with people writing poems.

The breeze
Like a whisper
Speaks to the blossoms.

-- Shameem Noorani

The second day of the conference was given over to an all-day field trip. No school! We boarded buses and were taken to various Karachi sites, an interesting experience in itself, of course, but the day would also help us forge the friendships necessary if we were to communicate and collaborate online after the conference was over.

I sat beside Ayesha, an elegant young woman with perfect posture and aristocratic mien. She spoke English in a clipped British accent mixed with musical Urdu, and with only minor and charming grammatical errors. I remembered Ayesha from the day before when I was taking teachers’ photos for our chapbook. As I looked through the lens at each teacher, I’d say, "Gorgeous!" and that made both men and women smile, but matter-of-fact Ayesha had replied, "Of course it’s gorgeous. I am very photogenic."

Following the custom of formal address in Pakistan, Ayesha called me Mr. Sam until I told her just plain Sam would do. When I asked her what she taught, she smiled and said, "Fourth grade, girls," explaining she preferred to teach young girls because they’re easier to control and also are a lot of fun. I said that I agreed completely, yes, the younger ones are best, and then she smiled at me, surprised but pleased.

The bus driver cranked up the radio full blast, entertaining us with popular Pakistani songs. Teachers sang along and clapped their hands, making so much noise Ayesha and I had to shout at one another to be heard.

Ayesha told me she lived with her parents and her brother and would do so until she got married. She said her father didn’t have a "very smart pension" but her brother had a good job that paid the rent. Ayesha contributed "a bit, not very much" of her $50/​month salary to the household, spending the rest on herself: "I am very fond of clothes, perfumes, and movies, not violent American ones, but Indian movies, romance type movies." This confession made her laugh at herself.

I asked Ayesha if she’d ever thought of living on her own. She looked at me as if she’d never heard of anything so strange. Then she said, "Our society is not like that. A woman who lives on her own has not security, not respect."

When questioned about the recent military coup, Ayesha told me she was glad because General Musharraf had imposed much needed discipline, the streets were safer, and the rich were being made to pay their taxes. Although the General was not universally admired, most teachers I talked to agreed that the democratic political system in Pakistan was hopelessly corrupt and made life miserable.

She told me primary schoolteachers earn less than secondary schoolteachers do because the latter must prepare the students for the make-or-break national exams that determine if and where you go to college. She also told me that teachers in the Aga Khan schools make less than those in other private schools, but the smaller paycheck was made up for by the opportunities for professional development provided by the Aga Khan schools. I asked Ayesha if she’d considered applying for a scholarship to ABL. She shook her head — it’s much too far, I’m scared of planes — but I could sense that she was interested and throughout the day I worked on her and told her she must try.

The bus stopped in the dusty, barren outskirts of Karachi at an historic site, a tribal cemetery several hundred years old. A hot wind blew and the sun was so bright you had to squint. The tombs were quite elaborately carved and there were lots of them, interspersed with piles of rock where servants had been buried. Tamarah didn’t enter the graveyard. Navajos never enter other people’s graveyards, she said, but she did open a little sack filled with corn dust from back home and sprinkled some at the entrance, a kind of offering.

Back on the bus, a song every Pakistani knew came on the radio. Ayesha’s colleagues shouted out her name. She glanced at them, amused, then told me they were teasing her because, "I sit with you. The lyric of the song says, "I found someone.’"

This worried me a little. I didn’t get the sense she had a crush on me, though everybody teased her as if she did and Hazel told me she was sure of it. I was just trying to be friendly, but in this unknown culture I was at a loss, illiterate to signals sent between the sexes. (When Mohsin introduced me to his wife, I stuck out a friendly hand which made her flinch; she was more conservative than women at the conference and could not shake hands with a man.)

Karachi is more liberal than other parts of Pakistan, but not too far away the women aren’t allowed to work or even leave the home and pregnancy outside of marriage is punishable with jail, and even in Karachi, a mullah (like a priest) had followed a teacher not completely covered through the market, screaming, "She’s a she-devil! She-devil!"

There are job opportunities for Pakistani women, particularly in the cities, but they’re limited and of course women are never paid as much as men. Yet on the whole Ayesha said that she was satisfied: "Women can help to run, organize, but some jobs we must to leave for men. Business, for example, because in business it is necessary to lie and women are not so good liars as the men." She said teaching was convenient for a woman because the school day was only four hours long, leaving them time to manage the household and take care of their children.

Our last stop was Karachi’s beach. It was misty out, the waves were big, the sand ran deep and broad and soft. There weren’t many people, and what few there were were male, but none of them were swimming and all of them were clothed. No one sun-bathed. A street ran parallel the beach, its ocean view apartments in rundown, weather-beaten two-story concrete buildings, many of them vacant. It was difficult, though not impossible, to feel the romance of this ancient sea. It helped there were no shops with postcards or seashell ashtrays, no ice cream cones or deep-fried clams.

Rich, the high school teacher from Massachusetts, wished he had his swim suit on and ran to put his feet in the Arabian Sea. Meanwhile, hopeful entrepreneurs had spotted us and headed our way, men carrying blue plastic bags with papadum (a kind of bread), and others with trays of food atop their heads. An ancient, wrinkled man with a camel gave us rides along the beach, and there were other animals, as well — a dancing bear, some ponies, and a mongoose whose owner also had a cobra in a vase; for a fee, he’d let us watch them fight.

Tamarah offered rupees to a boy who had a scrawny monkey on a leash. "Monkey dance!" he said. But his monkey wasn’t in the mood, so the boy yanked the monkey to his feet and made it scoot around a bit. It wasn’t much of a dance, and I felt sorry for the monkey. But Tamarah disagreed, saying, "What I see here is a pet who’s helping his owner make a living."

After each busy day, the Americans collapsed around a table in the Sheraton lobby and unwound, something I was grateful for. One evening Hazel was feeling down, upset by news that a few Karachi teachers had said they wished we’d given them more hand-outs and exercises, things that they could use immediately in their classrooms.

"But I warned them that this conference is not about a bag of tricks," said Hazel, looking at us for confirmation. "Didn’t I warn them?"

"Yes, you did," I said. "But I can understand those teachers. I know I for one love bags of tricks. There have been times when I was drowning and was desperate for any trick that I could find." But of course I was just proving Hazel’s point, that what a drowning teacher really needs to learn is how to build a boat. But that’s not something quickly taught.

One afternoon, Mohsin took us shopping in the Karachi market. We were all eager to shop. Based on the cost of dinner at the town’s most expensive restaurant ($6), we knew things would be inexpensive, but none of us were prepared for how incredibly cheap the prices were, and that was before the haggling started. It was an amazing experience to be able to buy whatever you wanted: the teacher as millionaire.

Often in the market, beggars would appear, never hoards of them but always one or two, usually a boy or girl or else a mother with an infant, always dressed in rags. Sometimes they sold flowers, but mostly they just gestured to their mouths to show that they were hungry. One beggar looked so look like a student I had had in Queens, I gave him several rupees, at which a teacher cried, "Oh, no, Mr. Sam! Now all will come and want the same!"

"What could I do?" I said. "He’s a child."

"You give a beggar money and he stays a beggar," she replied, but seeing my distress, she softened, saying, "Mr. Sam, I am afraid you do not have so many rupees you can give to all the beggars in the world."

And so I didn’t give another rupee out, none of us did, and when we paused amid our shopping to chat about the things we’d bought, we ignored the gentle tugging on our trousers, the children pointing at their mouths.

One night Mohsin took us home to dinner. He lived at the top of a five-story walk-up in three small apartments shared by 21 family members from four generations — an amazing sight, one rarely seen in the United States but common here in Pakistan. Like many Americans, I love my relatives but couldn’t imagine living with them, yet watching Mohsin with his family made me think that was a loss.

We left our shoes at the door. There were no decorations on the walls and hardly any furniture, so we sat on a sheet that covered the floor. Their home was clean and simple and honest. Mohsin’s family had prepared a feast of breads and curried meats and vegetarian stews. They didn’t eat with us but stood apart, solicitous and welcoming. I played with Mohsin’s youngest, a boy of three, and though we couldn’t speak each other’s language, we made each other laugh.

On the conference’s last day, everyone gathered for a public reading of the work written in the conference workshops. Some pieces were funny, some were sad, some personal, and several were political. It was quite moving, as such readings always are. Rich, who’d served as midwife to a number of pieces, was practically in tears. There’s nothing like a public reading to help to build community.

At our farewell banquet, held outside, the campus was magical, striped tents, candles, white lights strung from tree to tree. A group of musicians sat cross-legged on a stage, citars and drums.

Once the plates were cleared away, the music changed. It was time to dance. First out of their seats were the young women, but their joy was infectious and, like a scene from an uplifting movie, more and more of us got up and joined the line, all dancing like a happy snake. We’re one.

And then, like Cinderella’s midnight, it was over. The bus was waiting, good-byes happened very fast. In a rush, Ayesha gave both Rich and I a wallet as a gift and I gave her a copy of one of my children’s books. It made me happy when she told me she had changed her mind, that she’d decided, yes, she would apply for ABL next summer.

As always with teaching, it’s hard to know just how much good you’ve done, but spirits were high, friendships had begun and several teachers had decided to conduct online exchanges, bringing together classrooms in India and Pakistan, Pakistan and Tanzania, the Navajo Nation and Karachi, and Kenya and Massachusetts.

As happens so often when I have a great teaching experience, I think I’m the one who got the best end of the deal. I’ve been to lots of conferences in my life, but those had all been "bag of tricks" conferences where I’d learned some useful things to bring back to my classroom. What happened in Karachi is less easy to quantify, and more profound. I’ve been thrown off balance, the world I knew had changed. The trip had changed me in ways I don’t yet understand, but I do know I now see my immigrant students with a different eye, and understand in ways I never could before that they have come from someplace real, a place where people live and shop and pray and ride amazing buses.

I didn’t want to leave, but it was time. When I returned to the airport, the stern-faced guards no longer looked threatening. I’d learned in the course of my week that Pakistani men are eager to return a smile, so I smiled at the man scanning my luggage. When he smiled back at me I said, "You have a wonderful city."

He looked surprised. "Really?" he said. "You like Karachi?"

"Yes," I said. "I love Karachi."

"Then I love you!" he said, smiling, beaming, proud.