 by Nina Scott |
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Andover math teachers Bill Scott and Kathryn Green stumbled into the lobby of the Serena Lodge, overlooking the ancient city of Gilgit, on the famed Silk Road in the remote Northern Areas of Pakistan. Weary and disheveled, they had just finished a day's work teaching at the International Academic Partnership's Andover Institute of Mathematics workshop. They had been chauffeured to the hotel by a Pakistani who had driven wildly through crowded streets, scattering flocks of pedestrians and missing oncoming trucks by a hairsbreadth. But it was not the ride that left Scott and Green breathless. They had been in Gilgit several days now; they knew how people drove. Nor were they overwhelmed by the landscape—the snow-laden Rakaposhi towering over the Gilgit valley—or by the town's poverty. They had noted these things, but were not in the frame of mind to marvel at their surroundings. They were too busy working. They were exhausted from doing what they love—teaching. In their math workshop were 21 Pakistani secondary school teachers. Eight came from Gilgit itself, the rest from schools in even more remote villages in Pakistan's Northern Areas, where the world's four greatest mountain ranges meet in a dizzying explosion of peaks. |
Copyright, Phillips Academy, 2000
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