If you saw the show, you learned that we recently transitioned from Forman to Baylor University in Texas and this has opened a way to tell many about our adventures and experiences in Pakistan. I taught Religion and Peace Studies, Brooke home-schooled our children and participated in the life of the college through many student activities, and our children delighted in the grounds, park, and swimming – taking turns serving as the “mayor” of faculty housing. These are remembered as fabulous years for our family. As we reminisce about what made this time so valuable, what inevitably comes to mind are the many relationships we developed with coworkers, but particularly with students.
I think of Waqas Mirza, for example, a young man from Southern Punjab which is an area of poverty that has also become a hotbed of militancy. Waqas started a pre-med program in Karachi, but after a few months he correctly discerned that his heart was in the Social Sciences. He was in my World Religions class and became fascinated with the Sufi poetry indigenous to his region. This gave him language to process many of the ideas he learned from a liberal arts education and he was able to share them with his family. Waqas is now finishing his MA in London, writing a thesis that explores and translates one of the most important poets from his region. His dream is to complete a doctorate and teach somewhere like FCC, perhaps even closer to home.