So, as I wrote in my previous post, I did some traveling
this summer. I ended up spending three weeks in India, about a month in Nepal,
and then topped it off with a week at the beach in southern Thailand. I had a
terrible, horrible, no good, very bad time.
Just kidding. It was absolutely amazing. I cannot relay all
of my experiences in a single post, but I’ll try to give some anecdotes over
time that sum up the experiences I had.
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| Montfort School in Jongla, Meghalaya |
I’ll begin at the beginning—India. My friend and coworker
Emma and I taught at a school in a very small village in the northeast part of India. I originally thought I’d be teaching there for
about three weeks, but due to timing and holidays, I unfortunately only got to
teach for a week and a half. Nonetheless, I was totally blown away by the
experience.
I ended up teaching quite a smattering of classes—English,
health education, general knowledge, and chemistry. In English I played some
fun,
never-before-seen games both inside and outside of the classroom,
including one in which, to the students’ great amusement, the short, stout
school director stood in front of the classroom and tried to mime being a
giraffe. In health education, I got to shock the 9th-graders a bit
by giving an impromptu lesson on safe sex (while I was really supposed to be
teaching a bit of a rigid curriculum about “body changes” during puberty). It
was good fun to see eyes popping out of the 14-year-olds’ skulls, but I have to
say my favorite class was chemistry. And I was lucky to be teaching the same topic
as I had taught during my student teaching days—chemical reactions. I was
reinvigorated by teaching something I know so well and love so much
Although I only taught for a week and a half, I became
comfortable with the students quickly and developed quite a fondness towards
them. What wonderful kids. Wonderful. It occupied a lot of cognitive space
during my stay there, knowing how different these kids’ lives were from the
life I led growing up. Shoddy electricity, little money, very basic amenities,
virtually no motorized road transportation, no travel... Yet, here they were
everyday, filling their brains with some hopefully useful information, skills
and habits. For this, I had a tremendous amount of respect for them.
To say the least, I loved working with the kids at the
school, and it became clear that they loved me too when they offered me
something so precious as a goodbye present.
It was my last day at the school. I was sitting in the
teachers’ office, showing some of the teachers how to cut out paper snowflakes
(they had never seen this before were completely enthralled with it), when the
9th-grade homeroom teacher called Emma and me into her classroom.
We stood at the front of the room, facing the students who
were all standing as well. They had written a personalized goodbye song for us,
and they sang it beautifully with the accompaniment of an old, beat-up guitar.
I was touched. I teared up. Some of the girls in the back were crying as well.
It was one of the best presents I have every received. It has become a memory
that will always stick with me, and will constantly serve as a reminder for me
of a very important lesson—that what I do, what we all do, makes a difference.
Big or small, we affect the world and the people around us.
Sometimes we think we’re just having a good time, moving through life without
much aim or intention. We pass by people in our lives and don’t think anything
of it. But we make a difference. In the people we interact with, teach, learn
from, lead, follow...we make a difference. It’s truly in the little things that
differences occur: a short interaction; an act of kindness; a show of
generosity or understanding; the giving of time. We are the sum of the people
we have met, and you better believe that you are included in the sums of many
people’s lives that you’ve met.
“Act as if what
you do makes a difference. It does.” –William James
