It takes a village

When I create lessons for Tabesha, specifically when I bring objects and photos for us to discuss and write about, I very intentionally avoid an ethoncentric bias. Meaning, for example, I don't assume we have the same context for even simple words like "store." She's been in the states for eight years now, so we don't loose too much in translation, but I still avoid assumptions.

We had an interesting discussion during our last lesson, a discussion that knocked my mind around a bit and kept my context in check. I brought in a series of pages ripped from magazines. She sifted through them to find a photo she liked and then we were going to write a story about that photo. She picked a spread from Town & Country: a wealthy white woman was walking out the front door of her massive brick-and-shutter house toward the mailbox. We've had writing exercises about homes before and I knew she would have a strong vocabulary base to write a new story about this photo.

I began asking her questions about the photo and writing vocabulary words on our little white board. She reached a point where she stopped and seemed to be thinking about something. I gave her a moment and then asked what she was thinking. She said slowly, "In Africa, we can make any house we want for free. I bet this house is a lot of money." I immediately felt like a jackass for even considering a Town & Country photo (the magazine was inexplicably found in the lobby of my office) and quickly encouraged her to tell me more about her house in Africa.

She said her family built the house they lived in. I asked if she helped build it, if her brothers helped, and she said: "Everyone." I proded, "Everyone in your family? Everyone helped?" "No," she said quickly, shaking her head and audibly chuckling at my ignorance. "Everyone in the village. Everyone in Ndulu. Everyone builds houses for the village. My village built my house and I built their house."

I think that's beautiful.

Tabehsa teaches me a lesson

I'm such a jerk. I don't entirely regret the comments I made in this post because in large part I still feel everything expressed there. However, The Universe does have a consistent, particularly annoying way of teaching me, shutting me up, and putting life back into perspective. Sometimes these lessons are waiting for me years down the road, in some cases I'm forced to recalibrate immediately. In the case of my cold feet about tutoring Tabesha, The Universe smacked me around the very next day.

I parked my car and walked around the corner toward her house. Before I even saw her daughters playing in the front yard, I heard: "TEACHER! TEACHER IS HERE! MOOOOOMMMMMM! TEACHER!" When I was close enough to the house to see them, I spotted her three-year-old running around in crazy circles, her arms flailing above her head, "TEACHER!" Her other daughter had already run inside to fetch her "MOOOOOOMMM!" Once I was inside I saw that Musa, her husband, was still at the table eating dinner. Tabesha was busy in the kitchen, but poked her head out and told me to sit, sit, sit down at the table.

I struggle to know if it's worse to eat their food and take that much needed resource away from her large family, or if it's worse to insult her by refusing hospitality. Ultimately, knowing what I do of her family and her culture, I opted to respect her hospitality. As I sat down at the table my eye caught Musa tearing mystery meat from the bone with his hands and sopping up the dripping sauce with a huge dinner roll. I don't eat red meat (or shellfish, pork, dark meat of any kind, the list goes on) and my first thought was, "It's only been ten years or so...I'm sure your body will figure out how to digest this mystery animal. You can do this..."

I sat down and was immediately presented with two huge dinner rolls, a large bowl full of cucumber/tomato/olive oil/spices salad, three large pieces of said mystery meat, and, thankfully, utensils. It smelled fantastically spicy and I told myself to "...dig in. Eat it with lots of bread. Enjoy the salad. Don't think about it. Don't be rude." Knowing how expensive this meal was for her family, now was not exactly the time to have a lesson on the quite-privileged-if-you-think-about-it word "vegetarian."

Musa was in a reflective mood and talked a lot about Africa as I gingerly attempted to cut my meat from the bone with an old butter knife. His kids running in the front yard on a busy street caused him to comment: "In Africa, if our neighbors saw danger, they would protect our kids. We all raise kids. Children belong to everyone in the village. Here, in America, my daughter could run into the street and no one would protect her." With my mouth full of red meat and cold dinner roll, I watched his face as he said this and my heart broke.

Fast forward to my salad being gone, one dinner roll and two out of the three pieces of meat consumed, and I thanked them as I got up from the table. Musa pointed to the third piece of meat and said, "Sit, sit, sit. Eat, eat, eat." "Oh, I'm very full," I said as I held my stomach and smiled. "Thank you for sharing. Tabesha is a good cook. That was good. Thank you." I headed to the living room for our lesson. Musa called after me, "If you are ever in our home and you are hungry, you say so. If you are in our home, you are our family. You are our teacher and you live here to. This is your home, teacher, and your food." Tabesha smiled and nodded along to his words. Again, my heart broke.

So I have a busy job. So I have a lot of commitments and events and stuff going on after work. So it takes me a fair amount of time to prepare each lesson for her, twice each week. So what?

To drive this lesson home, The Universe watched us and smiled knowingly as Tabesha and I sat on the couch for 40 minutes after the lesson was over...talking and laughing and teasing each other, having a great time.

Note to Self: Get over yourself.

Tabesha...two months in

It's been seven, nearly eight, weeks since I first met Tabesha. I can't believe how fast the time has flown, and at the same time I feel like I've been at this whole tutoring thing for years. I enjoy it and Tabesha and I have become friends outside our lessons; however, I don't think I fully realized how difficult it would be. I had some vague notion in the back of my mind about the time commitment becoming an issue...as summer wound down and my calendar pages filled like a flash flood rushing toward June 2009 with the rising waters leaving me roughly sixteen days of free time.

Beyond the dramatic absence of negotiable time, I was incredibly naive in my initial thoughts about ESL tutoring. I tutored a woman named Lidya for two years, but the situation was very different from my commitment with Tabesha. In the case of this new volunteer gig, I think I somehow pictured pre-fab lesson books lining shelf after shelf at the public library. While I have checked out no less than 59 resources from said library, I realized about week two of this adventure that none are going to give me pre-fab lessons perfectly applicable to Tabesha. Working in instructional design means that I'm more than capable of creating lessons from scratch, but again, ibid on the dramatic absence of free time.

I know, I know. You have every right to offer me a sharply aged cheese to go with this awful whine, but I did create this posting space for me to work through both the joys and the challenges that I knew would come. I'm at the point now where I look ahead to the end of my six-month mandatory commitment and think, "Should I take it as far as I've promised to and then move on? No shame in that." Then I wonder if I'll hit my stride, my runner's high, so to speak. If I bail after only six months, will I regret it? The other piece of this equation is that I care a lot about Tabesha, have come to love her family, her children, the time we spend together.

Together we wrote a story about her favorite photo, a beautiful action shot of her daughter's first steps. When I see that ridiculously yummy face and remember the pride Tabesha felt when she wrote a seven-sentence story about it in perfect English...I think...how can you not stick with this?

Common Ground

As Tabesha invited me into her home for the first time, she showed me the many photos hanging on her living room wall: her sons, her daughters, Barack Obama, her mother hanging in a place of honor with floral arrangements on either side of the large frame, a map of Utah, Jesus preaching, class photos of her high school aged children.

I teased her that it looks like she's adopted Barack. I joked that his photo is four times the size of a group shot of her own children. She laughed and laughed and laughed and brushed it off by saying it was a silly thing to have hanging there. I told her it's not silly at all. She responded in all seriousness, "He's a good man. Good ideas."

I can't imagine how empowering and exciting it is for a family of African refugees to be thisclose to an African-American president. I love that a 16x20 poster of his Rolling Stone cover hangs proudly on the wall beside her front door. Framed, no less.

My New Adventure

It's been about 18 months since I stopped volunteering with the Utah AIDS Foundation. Every other week for nearly three years I delivered hot meals to home-bound end-stage HIV patients. It was an incredible experience. Incredibly difficult and incredibly meaningful. When I stopped volunteering for UAF life quickly filled in the gaps, I let myself be consumed by work and other concerns, and before I knew it, even my other regular volunteer commitment (selling hand-made artisan crafts at Ten Thousand Villages), became less and less frequent. I was still very active in the community and involved in all sorts of volunteer and committee work...but nothing as concentrated as my time delivering meals.

Recognizing my desire to engage once again in that concentrated way, I began exploring my options. I've always wanted to work with the refugee community. I have scouted out countless opportunities over the years, made a handful of phone calls, and kept in touch with various friends in the field, but nothing ever seemed to fit. It knew it was something I wanted to do, but it wasn't quite right. Yet.

Late one night a few months back I saw a PSA on PBS featuring Catherine Barnhart, Executive Director of the English Skills Learning Center. The ESLC provides 16 hours of training, manuals and resources for me to keep, one-on-one personalized matching services, and ongoing in-service workshops. That's it. That was the opportunity I'd been waiting for.

How, do you ask, do I plan to fit two 90-minute tutoring sessions into each week, find time to create custom lesson plans for my student, and do it all in and around my demanding work and travel schedule? I honestly can't tell you. I feel as though this entire experience, up until this very moment, has been operating on complete auto-pilot. I saw the PSA, the next day I made the call, their quarterly training was the very next week...and I was off. I completed the 16-hour training, received my certification, and have been successfully matched with my student.

Auto-pilot or not, it's all finally hitting me. I met my student last week (on International Refugee Day, of all appropriate days) and it became very real very quickly. No more abstract talk about TPR and TOEFL techniques for survival skills. My auto-pilot came to a grinding halt and my uber-organizer kicked into high gear. The uber-organizer in me loves her time in the spotlight, but I still don't know quite what this will look like yet. What I can tell you is that life has taught me that when I put my energy into positive actions, toward the greater good, whatever you want to call it, a way is made for me. We each make our path by walking, right?

Tabesha is a refugee from Sudan. She has been in Salt Lake with her husband for eight years now, has five children, and English will be her fourth language behind Nuba and Arabic, in both of which she is fluent, and braille, which she is currently learning. Our second introductory meeting is tomorrow and then the real tutoring begins.

I will respect Tabesha's privacy and that of her family, but I also know that I'll need a space to process my own thoughts. With that in mind, I've created a new label for the posts about this experience, "Adventures with Tabesha." Here goes nothing...