I have to kick students out of class…..not because they are disruptive or disrespectful but because too many of them show up! The young men and women are so eager to learn English they try to sneak in class and crowd me after class to ask for more. Their interest is touching, all levels are in one class and somehow it works, the more advanced students helping the weaker ones, involvement is general. No electricity means no technology, the books I brought are inadequate so I make up my own texts and they really like the personalization and pertinence to their lives. There is a lot of laughter and I leave the class charged.
My other delight is my afternoon group of young women novices who take advanced French with me. Today we worked on a book in French for children entitled: “ Small hurts, big disasters” , it deals with issues children have with the psychological trauma incurred after natural disasters. Only one of the novices was raised by her own parents, the others were all placed in other families, sometimes a relative sometimes not. It seems everyone has a story to share of a lost one. We talked about how one could help a child deal with those issues. It strikes me that adults can be helped in very much the same way. Finding the strength inside, how what they have already done to get to this point is because of that inner strength.
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