Turn, turn, turn

The last hour of Susan's Monday/Wednesday class is kind of chaotic now. Mark and I each form a small group where we can give several students more focused attention on writing or pronunciation. And when I say 'writing,' I mean writing the letters of the alphabet. And when I say 'pronunciation,' I mean correcting to include in Akron, or on April 12^th, or to the United States. Meanwhile, Susan continues with the remaining students.

So we have three groups of people conversing in Nepali while we try to teach them fine points of speaking English. Inevitably, someone gets a little lost.

This week, in my group, it was Jordan, one of our oldest students, probably in his seventies. Jordan invariably dresses in traditional Nepali tunics and loose pants, a combo called Daura-Suruwal, with a dark suit coat overtop and a topi on his shaved head. I saw a photo of him without his Nepali hat once, on his state ID card. He looked small and old and scared, almost childlike. I learned over the course of the fifteen months I've worked with this group that Jordan and Tal Maya are married, that Bibek is their son and Sabithra their daughter-in-law, and that Ashtavakra and his brother, the non-verbal Yadu, are their grandchildren. It was quite a puzzle to put together because the Nepali do not show a lot of public affection with each other.

I had six people at my table, as did Mark at his. We started off writing the basic sentences we had been working on in class before the break: Where are you from? Where do you live now? Are you married? Some in the group did really well and wrote the words with few errors rather quickly. Others had a lot of difficulty, leaving out letters or entire words, becoming confused by the string of sentences on my tablet and conflating two or more of them. I back-pedaled and spent the final half hour writing the letters of the alphabet. Everyone responded well to this, eager to practice something they knew a little, calling out the answers to what letter was next.

Jay faded after writing only a sentence or two. He was on the other side of Asara from me, so I had to lean over her to get to his paper. Our table was shoved up against the file cabinets, and I had no way to exit, surrounded as I was by students. I had tried to correct his writing early on by erasing a jumbled combination of letters that didn't make a word, then writing the correct word on the line below and indicating that he should copy it into the erased spot. He didn't, though; he just began another word right up against the previous word and continued a long line of letters with no breaks. I've looked through most of his notebook; he does this a lot. It looks as though he's trying to conserve space by writing everything as close together as possible. The times I've tried to indicate that there should be space between words, he takes it as a cue to make slanted lines between the words.

Because I couldn't get to Jay easily, I couldn't give him a lot of attention. Saradha was directly across from me; she always demands a great deal of attention, calling out Teetser! after every effort at a word and shoving her notebook under my nose, regardless of whatever else I may be doing. She writes very poorly, but tries hard and teaches me a lot of Nepali words for things (though Mahananda, another teacher who is bilingual, told me she is wrong about most of them, substituting a pidgin-like slang for most words).

The upshot of this whole small group situation is that I am increasingly frustrated with this class. I no longer look forward to going there, and I only go on Wednesdays instead of both days. I still enjoy interacting with the Bhutanese in between lessons, when we are just being people and trying to get our meaning across however we can. But the actual teaching portion of the class only frustrates me. I feel I am not doing any of them much good.

And that's probably a good thing because I finally got a job. For actual money, not volunteering. I'll be a part-time faculty tutor at the writing lab at the University of Akron beginning this fall semester. My primary work days are Monday and Wednesday, with a third that I can choose. So I'll no longer be available to volunteer with this class. I'll keep running the evening conversation class I began two weeks ago, for more advanced speakers, on Thursday evenings, but my mornings will no longer be open.

I have really mixed feelings about this development. I knew I would get a job eventually, but I suppose I thought there would be some kind of finality to the arc of my experience with this class. I've been working them very steadily for fifteen months now; I know their names and many of their relationships with each other, a few words in their native tongue, a little bit about their culture and group dynamic. I've seen Deepta's glasses change a few times, Chandra's hair get shaved off and grow long, heard about Drolma's first grandchild being born, and noticed Sabithra get a full set of clean, white teeth.

I think I understand how they’ve touched and moved me over these months: I have a much deeper appreciation for the plight of refugees in general, and some insight into the loss and grief these particular people have suffered. I have a bit of an understanding of the difficult complexity of institutions that depend on public funding to try and meet the needs of a population that needs absolutely everything, from clothes and education to food and healthcare.

But these are all rather abstract, cerebral effects, aren't they? I don’t think I'll understand fully how deeply they’ve affected me until I'm away from them for a while. I missed them during the winter break last year, but then I didn’t miss them so much in the spring when I was so overwhelmed with graduation

Let's see how much I miss the scent of curry and body odor, the shy, gleaming smiles, the choruses of good morning teetser, and the heartfelt namastes after a semester of tutoring young, entitled students at the university.