An interesting lesson

I came across this email the other day. I wrote it to my family last year while I was living in Australia.  

Hey Guys,

I just had a very surreal experience and thought I would share.

I am currently volunteering as a teacher and mentor for refugees living in Australia. The kids are great, and to be honest, they are nothing like you would expect—they act like normal kids. They are acclimating to western life at a blistering pace and are becoming fascinated by the likes of Lady Gaga and other random celebrity heartthrobs. Because of this, I often forget their families were forced to flee from their mother country in fear of persecution or worse. Then there are times, like last week, where the kids whip off their masks of normalcy and give a view into the world that they came.

I was helping Fatimata, a spirited 12-year-old girl from Turkey, with some of her homework. She had received a vocabulary list from her teacher and it was her job to write a sentence for every word. We were trucking along until we came to the word ‘frighten.’ She was not sure what the word meant so I modeled a sentence for her so she could understand the meaning. “Spiders really frighten me,” I said and waited for her response. She looked at me for a few seconds as the wheels in her head went to work and then suddenly the light bulb went off.  “I was really frightened when the soldier came to my house and took my grandmother,” she said with a look of satisfaction. I sat there and looked at her with the most forced smile I’ve ever given. “I bet you were really frightened,” is all I could think to say. Considering she used the word correctly, I decided not to press the issue and told her to use my sentence instead as it was easier to write. The next word we came across was ‘quarrel’, which I again modeled in a sentence to help her understand. “I sometimes quarrel with my friend when he makes me angry, but we are still friends,” I said. She looked at me with a big smile that seemed, in retrospect, to have been designed for the sole purpose of disarming me. “My brother quarreled with a soldier once. The soldier took out a metal stick (a knife) and put it inside his body (stabbed him),” she said with a calm, effortless voice. After explaining that that was more than just a quarrel, I decided that we had worked hard enough for this class and we played a game until time was up.

Living overseas for the past few years has taught me a lot of things about other cultures and values that I am forever grateful for. But this particular lesson reminded me of how lucky and thankful I am to be an American