Joy Will
Southwestern College Class of 1969
International School of Islamabad

from the 2009 edition of Faces of Southwestern-Homecoming 2009

Joy Will has a rule for her students at the International School of Islamabad that is unnecessary in most kindergartens of the world. When the school day ends, these young pupils must carry their own book bags to the car.

“They’re not allowed to throw the bag at the feet of the nanny and say, ‘Here, carry this,’” she says.

These youngsters stem from a privileged group. Their parents form the social classes that can afford $17,000 per year tuition – diplomats, top executives, walthy business owners. An these heirs to privilege are accustomed to the nannies, cooks, drives, and other helpers that make up their retinues from early childhood.

They’re from many nations (Sweden, Germany, Kenya, Malaysia, United States, and Pakistan were represented in last year’s 18-member kindergarten class) but they share advantaged circumstances.

Joy believes it is part of her responsibility to help these cosseted kids become global citizens who can practice compassionate leadership.

“It’s a matter of helping them look outside their own lives, to say to themselves ‘How does what I just said affect someone else:’” she says.

It’s not a life she had imagined for herself when Will graduated from Southwestern 40 years ago. She had taught in small towns in Kansas and Oklahoma, in inner city Kansas City, and 12 years at Wichita Collegiate, and then spent a decade at home rearing her own children. When she divorced in 1996, though, she was ready for a complete change of perspective.

She found this new perspective as a teacher in international schools, a move that perfectly combines her love of adventure with her professional qualifications (she has  master’s degree in school administration).

Each summer she is able to be home and visit her parents (Lyman and Mary Weigle) in Winfield, check on the house she still owns in Andover, catch up with her two grown children. Then as the summer winds down, she’s back on a plane and welcoming another class to the first day of school.

It has given her a heaping helping of world without boundaries. She spent two years in Kuwait, the world’s fourth- richest nation per capita but one she nonetheless describes as a second world nation because of its treatment of the country’s Bedouins. This was followed by four years in the Sudan, the third most politically unstable country in the world, Finally she arrived in Pakistan, a country with a standard of living that most would characterize as Third World but that has the military prowress to develop a nuclear bomb.

Now, as she prepares to start her fifth year in Islamabad, will has learned to fit in as well as a light-skinned Midwesterner can fit into the Islamic culture where women’s clothing exposes only their hands and faces. She shops early on Saturday mornings, and wears long sleeves and sunglasses to stay modestly covered.

She has experienced Pakistan’s natural disasters, watching the undulations of the earth that marked the deadly 2005 earthquake that killed more than 75,000 people. And she has seen humanity’s own destructiveness, most recently when a terrorist bomb exploded only a block from her house.

Her school is scrupulously safeguarded, with eight-foot fences, and armed guards at every corner. When necessary, classes can be conducted virtually, as they were two weeks last year. In spite of these precautions, about a fourth of the school’s enrollment has disappeared as diplomatic families decide to send their children home and out of harm’s way. Joy seldom worries about her personal safety.

“I feel very well cared for,” she says. “If there’s a problem, the school calls to make sure I’m safe and secure and accounted for.”

With this reassurance, she’s ready to get back to her classes. She’s formed relationships with these children that are unaffected by nationality. People all over the world, she says, really are the same.

“I had one little boy tell me that he had heard someone call someone else the ‘st’ word,” she recalls, grinning. “I didn’t know what that was, so I asked him to whisper it in my ear. What was it? ‘Stupid!’” She laughs out loud, then turns serious. “Children all over the world want to live, love, laugh, and learn, and if we can provide them the ways to do that, they will become lifelong learners and global citizens.”