Perhaps the greatest reward for participating in the World Wise Schools program is a renewed glimpse of a child's curiosity. The most recent opportunity came in a burst of letters from an Indianapolis area fourth grade class, which I found in my PO Box about a month back. Above is a small snippet from MacKenna.
On final tally, the most-often asked question had nothing to do with volunteering. Let's skip the mundane and figure out what it's like sleeping under a mosquito net? Do you like it? I think it'd be fun because it'd be like sleeping under a tent. No matter what the question, an outsider's curiosity is by far the quickest way to remind me that I've quickly gotten accustomed to living in my new, slightly tanner, cultural skin. This is especially true with children. While an adult might be busy stepping back to take in something altogether too big to fit into a paragraph, the kids are up close peeling at the flecks of paint to see what's underneath.
Are there movie theaters in Costa Rica? Sure there are movie theaters. Well, I guess not everywhere. Romp around in the capital long enough and with confidence you'll come across a multiplex that rivals anything in a U.S. city. During training I took my siblings to see Alice y el pais de maravillas, and we dumped our 3-D glasses at the door on our way out. Puerto Limon is a city of over 100,000. There's a rickety wooden building by the stoplight that supposedly shows films, but I've never seen the doors open. The posters change. Someone told me once that you just knock on the door with a DVD in hand. The guy will wave you through and throw it on the projector. I want to try it.
I'm slowly working my way through the questions from the fourth graders and am posting them piecewise on my WWS correspondence blog.
My buddy Adam from Guinea is currently teaching in a South Bronx neighborhood while working toward his Masters in Education from Columbia Teacher's College. As a former Costa Rica volunteer, Adam was able to prep his middle schoolers for a pen pal exchange by presenting them a PowerPoint slideshow on tico geography and culture. Just like with the mosquito net, the kids tended to hone in on very specific cultural details, yielding wonderfully entertaining results:
- I want to know about your country why do you eat so much for breakfast?
- Do you eat rice and beans all the time?
- Do you really eat rice and beans mostly every day? ...and later in the same letter: Do you really want to eat rice and beans every day? I wouldn't really like to eat rice and beans every day.
The dynamic with Adam's students is quite beautiful. Mott Haven is one of the more socio-economically challenged neighborhoods in the country; and in the letters the kids here read that the life of grandeur and prosperity about which they often dream is not always so accurate. That reality is often manifested in the students' descriptions of themselves, as well as in their questions. "How is life there? Here it's hard. I like my school and Mr. Johnson but I want to move." "Is it dangerous there?" "Can you bring two toy car for my family?"
Mott Haven is also replete with immigrants. A good third of the letters didn't even require translation. One interesting trend was the kids' identification with their heritage. "I was born in Puerto Rico and moved here when I was six." "My mom's dominican and my dad's black." One student only knew how to write in French. Another, only Arabic. Especially among the Latin community, kids seemed to embrace their roots in their writing, whereas in Costa Rica a conscious effort is often made to slough off any peculiarities associated with another country. That's obviously an overstatement, but it's an exceptionally exaggerated fact when it comes to Nicaraguans. And I can't really blame them. Profiling of Nicaraguans is rampant.
I've had the pleasure of visiting two classes while on short stints in the States. My last opportunity was particularly special, as I was able to visit my cousin Joanna's class at a Chicago turnaround school. The greatest reward from the experience by far was witnessing Joanna--whom my history goes back to playing Clue on the cabin floor and splashing in Lake Michigan at family retreats--flourishing in her work. The kids drew energy and love from her, and they reciprocated.
And again, I was rewarded merely by finding myself in the midst of innocent curiosity. They looked on with smiling eyes as the images of exotic landscape and dress passed, but when we started talking about the Guinea evacuation, they really started digging. "Wait, how is it that their own president doesn't want what's best for them?" "An army can shoot at their own people?" "Why don't they just do something about it? Why don't they kick the president out?"
May those voices forever retain their candor. You can view the Prezi I created for the presentation below. It's best viewed on the website, but you can get the idea by cycling through the steps below. Just click on the play button, then use your left and right arrow buttons to follow the storyline.
¡Pura Vida! on Prezi
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