my future déjà vu
When I walked through the door of the apartment and saw the activity around me, I honestly had a moment of realization – a déjà vu of the future, that this would be my life if I made it into the Peace Corps. There was a tinge of inspiration in that realization, but that tinge was far overshadowed by the emotion that I now recognize as an integral part of any very-first-time-teaching experience: Abject Fear.
Rewind: Three years ago, I got in contact with the Reclamation Project (‘TRP’) in Fort Wayne. I wanted something to fill up my last few weeks in the States until I would be flying across the world to start a job in Seoul. Each Tuesday and Thursday, I’d meet a handful of ladies and join them in a free-fall into my first attempts at lesson-planning. When I got back to Fort Wayne in August 2010, I emailed Angie (with TRP) about volunteering again. We’d start classes right after the New Year. Emails were sent back and forth to determine a location and time, and after some kinks were straightened out, I found myself driving to Fort Wayne’s southeast side on a Tuesday afternoon in January.
The first thing I saw when I got to the apartment was how many pairs of shoes there were by the door. I looked up from the shoes to the faces in the living room; twelve ladies sat on the floor in a semi-circle. But that makes it sound quiet, and it definitely wasn’t. I also quickly saw the flurry of young children. It’s an exaggeration, but it seemed like there was an average of five children under the age of three for each woman. Truthfully, there might have only been twelve or thirteen kids total, but it looked like there were about sixty children weaving in and out of their mothers. There were also countless babies in the room: some strapped to or lying in front of their mothers, and maybe three or four sleeping inconspicuously among piles of coats on the floor. I almost stepped on a few of them, honest to goodness.
And that was the moment of fear. I’d felt that fear before, on my first day with my second kindergarten class in Seoul, the ones that started with almost no working English. I felt dwarfed by how much there was for them to learn. The first time I met the students would be noisy and unfocused. We were meeting in a middle place between that world and this one, with all of the clamor you would expect from a clashing of cultures. So many women looked at me with round faces and dark eyes, waiting for this next step in their journey toward freedom to begin.
I told them through my interpreter, Myo Myint, that I was happy and excited to be their teacher, and a little nervous too. I told them about my job in South Korea, and that we’d begin with a language assessment. A false start; I had wanted them to have something to do while I found out who knew what. I had imagined that I’d be in a room with a table for this class, but had known we probably wouldn’t be. I stopped the assessments and showed them how to make table tents for their names, an idea I’d had to help me get to know them. I opened my pencil box full of craft supplies, and every kid in the room was on it like ducks on water. When the language assessments were done and half of the table tents had been crumpled by a wandering foot or a grasping, meandering baby hand, I began.
“Who can read this?” I asked, showing a card that read ‘What is your name?’
Kap Cing, at whose apartment we were meeting, leaned forward and squinted. “‘What is your name?’” she said.
I made sure that everyone understood, and then I moved onto the next card: ‘My name is.’
She squinted and read again, “‘my name is.’”
I went around the circle again, giving each woman a chance to read. Some read confidently, and some repeated with nervousness, embarrassment, and laughter. I held up the first card again, and they all read out loud, and then I held up the ‘My name is’ card and my own table tent, saying, “My name is Joel.”
I had them do a chain drill, all asking what each other’s names were. When that was established, I moved onto the second part of my lesson. “What day is today?” I asked, holding up a large calendar.
One woman leaned forward on her knees and pointed to today’s date, and the group murmured variations of, “Tuesday… January…” I held up cards to build the sentence: ‘Today is Tuesday, January 18.” I couldn’t find the card that said ‘2011’; that got lost when the kids stampeded over to see what was in the pencil box, so I kept the sentence at ‘Today is Tuesday, January 18.” We worked on days of the week, and when I was satisfied that they knew them, we also worked on the months. We even managed to do some work with seasons, and then we had a discussion of ‘What do you like?’, ‘I like,’ and ‘I don’t like.’ I finished class by having them break off into pairs and talk about the days and seasons they liked and didn’t like.
Eight months later, classes with the Chin students are my favorite parts of my week. A few hours with them can turn a bad day around. I’ve been treated to spicy, delicious Burmese and Malaysian meals after class, and snacks of corn on the cob and fried banana bread. I was even invited to a family wedding, my friend and I the only white faces in a sea of Zo. I marvel at their carefree laughter when I’ve made a joke they’ve understood and how we get to know each other over our language and culture barriers. I started volunteering because I wanted to help, but as with any similar experience, each person brings me something I didn’t have before.
Teaching refugee adults throws in a wild card that teaching wealthy, privileged children never did. Though I don’t know each individual story, everything I know about where they came from sings strength in the face of chaos. I still wonder how I can take everything I know about the way I talk every day and boil it down to the relevant parts, or the “survival English.” What right do I even have to assume the title of Teacher to these women who know so much more about life than I do? That first day was filled with fear and breath and quickly glancing to make sure I’d brought everything I needed. That was my Peace Corps moment, my future déjà vu: seeing their shoes and their faces and their children and their eyes and knowing that this was what I meant when I’d told myself years ago that I wanted to be part of reconciliation, putting the world back together, brick by brick.
By Joel Miller, TRP volunteer
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