Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Hey, what's up? My name is Phillip Chan. I'm a Peace Corps Volunteer currently working in an Amerindian village in the rainforests of Guyana. Though I am a health volunteer, recently I began assisting at the local school, taking on teaching duties in Math and English. Guyana is a former British colony so English is the native language. The Amerindians used to speak in their native tongues, but in many communities (such as my own), influences have caused these old languages to largely die out.

I was working with a small class of about 8 or 9 kids the other day, conducting English lessons. The topic was adjectives, and we were having fun--I was picking out students and having the class toss out adjectives to describe them. "Cream-colored shirt," "tan shorts," "black belt," and so on. I even poked a few good-natured jibes at some of the boys--"short," "sweaty," "stinky--jokingly of course. Having demonstrated for them the use of adjectives, and having highlighted them in example sentences on the board, I then asked the students to turn to a page in their grammar books and work some similar exercises--copying sentences down and circling the adjectives and their objects. I went around to help them out individually, and found many students just staring at the sentences after copying them down. When I sat down and tried to go over them word for word, they could not follow along. They could not read. These are twelve and thirteen year old kids.

The weird thing was, I wasn't surprised, frustrated, or even sad. Their illiteracy came as no huge shock to me--it wasn't the first time I had worked with these schoolchildren, so I had an idea of how limited their academic abilities were. No, the weird thing was, I suddenly found myself angry. Just this pent up, bubbling anger that beat on my chest and pounded in my ears. I didn't want to freak out and lose it in the middle of the class, so I took some deep breaths and continued trying to work patiently with the kids. After all, I certainly wasn't mad at them. Yet, as I backpedaled my lesson all the way back to the alphabet and "sounding out words," I still couldn�t shake this weird pissed off feeling in my head. Yeah, it did create some difficulty--try sounding out the soft letter "a" with a clenched jaw!

I dunno, maybe it was because it was the afternoon and I was getting tired after a full day of teaching classes. Or maybe it was just the sudden, unexpected shift from high to low that I felt. After all, one moment I was having fun, truly enjoying myself as I joked around with the kids, and getting that nice warm and fuzzy feeling you have when you feel like you are actually "making a difference." Then, boom! all of a sudden you are reminded just how far behind you really are, and you come crashing down. It's like that Simpsons episode when Homer climbs Mt. Springfield, and crests a peak, exhausted but finally believing he has reached the summit and can plant the PowerSauce flag. Then, the mists lift and he sees he's still got a whole 'nother steep chunk of mountain left to climb. D'oh!

I think some of the anger came from not only realizing how much of a mountain these kids had before them, but also how unsurprising and almost acceptable this fact was. I knew none of the people around me, the teachers, the villagers, even the students themselves, would be surprised at the illiteracy I was encountering. Of course there were students who couldn't read. What do you expect in a community with no high school, where most kids stop going to school after age 11 or 12, where there aren't even enough rulers or textbooks to go around, and where most of the kids don't even wear shoes to school? As for the parents, they're probably too busy worrying about how to get by on less than $3 a day, which is all that the big foreign lumber corporation upriver is willing to pay its workers (a corporation which the villagers didn't even want to come into the community, but which pressured and manipulated them into signing a contract).

Nope, no one around me would really be all that shocked that the twelve-year-olds in my class couldn't read--one reason I was determined to keep a straight face and look calm. Inside, however, part of me wanted to shout and throw things, to grab someone by the shoulders and shake them, hard, screaming "Can you believe it?!! These kids can�t read!" and have them be as shocked and upset as I was.

It was kind of like seeing a terrible crime go unpunished, or discovering a grave injustice but not having anyone to blame or bring before the courts. There are no superheros to swoop in and save the day. The bat signal is broken out here. And really, who the fuck was I to play the self-righteous whistleblower. The only reason it was so shocking to me was because I came from a home and culture where it was expected, no, demanded that every child learn to read when he was just a few years old. Hell, reading had been part of my life for so long, and seemed such a natural, ordinary, and expected thing to me, that at first I found myself at a loss as to how to even begin teaching it to my students. If one of them had asked me "Sir Phillip [as teachers are addressed here], how do I learn to read?" at that moment I would've replied "Read?? Jesus, I dunno, you just do it?" To me, it was almost like asking how to breathe.
But that's just me. I'm a privileged-ass American, with upper middle class parents, who was sent, nay forced to go to the library every week as a kid, who was educated at great public and private schools, who graduated from college with 16 years of formal education under his belt (and with Asian parents, that should really count for at least double, plus the violin and/or piano lessons). And I use to whine and cry and get all depressed about this as a kid, like when my parents made me stay home and study instead of going to the movies with my friends.
But hey, that's where I'm from. I come from a country where half the population is overweight or obese to the point of being a public health emergency, while the other half is busy starving themselves or sticking their fingers down their throats and throwing up perfectly good food just to look like the skinny-ass chicks in Cosmo or on Entertainment Tonight! I come from a country where, even when gas was above $3 a gallon, people were still lining up to buy huge SUVs and cars that are actually modeled after military vehicles, yes, MILITARY VEHICLES. Meanwhile, out here the cost of gas hurts so much that a mother has to fucking think twice about going six miles to the nearest health center when her son is fucking lying goddamn unconscious in her arms!!! (see post below from Thanksgiving) Excuse me just a second, but WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THE WORLD?!!! Jesus H. Christ man, are you kidding me??
But I should calm down and get the hell off my self-righteous soap box. Because, yeah, I come from America. And who the hell am I kidding? When I'm all the way out here in the rainforest, do I get homesick? You're damn right I do. And where do I get homesick for? The good ol' U.S. of A. America. Fuck yeah. When my two years as a Volunteer are up, I'm going home, just like nearly everyone else. And I wouldn't trade that return ticket for the world. To paraphrase Chris Rock when he was talking about white people, "I could be a one-legged busboy, and I still wouldn't trade places. Naw man, I wanna ride out this American thing. See where it takes me." The children in my class, however, will be staying right here. This is their home.