s a gale blows outside and fifteen-foot swells buck Makulu II through the pitch-black night in the southern Caribbean, a frantic voice crackles over the ship's radio, rousing the crew from its slumber. A nearby ship is having trouble steering, and the captain needs assistance.

Ashley Wells '96 and the rest of the Makulu crew battle the squall as they try to motor toward the ailing vessel. But the sea is too choppy and the ship too far away. When word comes that the other ship has lost its rudder, Makulu gives up the chase. As they resume their westward course, crew members count their blessings that the storm didn't do them in, as well. A tugboat sent by Colombian authorities rescues the crew of the drifting ship, which is abandoned after efforts to tow it to port fail.

"We made it through okay, but we were lucky," Wells says with a nervous laugh, recalling the January 2002 incident.

Wells knew she had signed on for adventure when she enlisted for the crew of Makulu two years ago, and flirting with disaster in stormy waters off Aruba was just the beginning. During the first two years of the sailboat's planned three-year circumnavigation of the globe, she has had to elude pirates in the Red Sea, confront the aftermath of a terrorist bombing in Bali, face Islamic restrictions on women in Oman, and visited dozens of spots most people couldn't find on a map--all so inner-city students could expand their horizons.

Makulu II's voyage is sponsored by Reach the World, a nonprofit organization in New York City that helps teachers make better use of technology in the classroom, while introducing students to different cultures. The organization provides technology and curriculum consulting for twenty-five classrooms in grades three through seven, most of them in impoverished New York neighborhoods. Through Reach the World's website, students and teachers are able to follow the travels and travails of Makulu II, a forty-three-foot Nautor's Swan sailboat, and its crew. In the various ports of call, Wells and her fellow crew members use satellite e-mail and digital and video cameras to document their experiences, serving as the "eyes and ears" for those back home. Photographs are posted on the site; the ship's log, which crew members take turns contributing to, is updated every Friday; and there is a "track Makulu" option, where students can click on world maps to chart the boat's course.

"A main issue that I faced in motivating my students was a problem I dubbed the 'fifteen-block radius,'" says Wells, who taught language arts and social studies to seventh-graders in the Bronx for two years after graduating from Duke. "Most of my students operated within the confines of a fifteen-block radius that encompassed their apartments, their school, and the stores where they shopped. Seldom did they travel beyond this radius, so they did not see the relevance of learning skills and information that were not directly applicable to their lives."

That's the wall Reach the World hopes to break down. The six-year-old organization receives financial and technical support from dozens of corporations and foundations and has an advisory board that includes the likes of newsman Walter Cronkite and underwater explorer Robert Ballard. It also joins with Columbia University's Teachers College to provide graduate students direct experience with educational technology.

"We're trying to open disadvantaged students' minds to possibilities and, at the same time, close the digital divide by having them and their teachers work more with computers and the Internet," says Reach the World's founder, Heather Halstead, who skippered Makulu around the world from 1997 to 1999.

Wells never felt constrained by a "fifteen-block radius." When she was in the seventh grade, her parents took her and her two brothers from their home in San Anselmo, California, on a yearlong sojourn, spending six months sailing up the East Coast and another six touring Europe in a Volkswagen van. The trip instilled in her a wanderlust, and she studied in Germany for a semester while at Duke, where she majored in English and German. She later taught in Germany for a year through a Fulbright Program teaching assistantship. Her experiences abroad deepened her belief that travel enhances education; as she puts it, they taught her the virtue of "extending learning beyond the four walls of the classroom."