cover image Back to Pakistan: A Fifty-Year Journey

Back to Pakistan: A Fifty-Year Journey

Leslie Noyes Mass. Rowman & Littlefield, $32.95 (224p) ISBN 978-1-4422-1319-7

A lifelong educator, Mass began her teaching career in a small village in Pakistan as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1962. Nearly 50 years later, she revisits the country as a 68-year-old volunteer for the Citizens Foundation, a nongovernmental organization that builds schools in the country’s poorest areas. Skillfully interweaving letters and memories with her observations of present-day Pakistan, her engrossing memoir gives readers a well-rendered portrait of both eras. Returning to a more modernized Pakistan, with cars, trucks, and buses largely replacing the rickshaws and tongas of the 1960s, she’s struck by the “omnipresence of Islamic law,” where there are now prayer rooms in the airports, and liquor and beer no longer flow freely in city restaurants. Focusing on the accomplishments of the Citizens Foundation, which has set up hundreds of schools since 1996, and where girls now make up 50% of their enrollment, a “staggering achievement in Pakistan,” she interviews the organization’s CEOs, administrators, teachers, students, family members, and ayahs, finding people from all educational levels and social classes trying to solve the country’s education problems. A descriptive, often vivid writer, Mass evokes the cities, villages, schools, mountain retreats, and people of Pakistan, putting a human face on a paradoxical country that she acknowledges still faces immense problems. (Oct.)