[Photo Credit: https://unsplash.com/photos/rC1gxLEtxHc]
A colleague forwarded an update yesterday from Janne Ritskis, founder of Tabitha Cambodia. Reading through it and hearing Janne’s honest voice in the writing made me recall a story in which I am, unfortunately, the central character.
I do not emerge well from the telling!
Back in 2001, I joined the school as a Grade 2 teacher and, one day within the first month, it was explained to me that Janne Ritskis from Tabitha would speak to the Grade 2s that afternoon. Wanting to ensure I made a good impression in my new school, I sat my class down and led a discussion that had as its central theme “People Less Fortunate than Ourselves”. I really went to town on it - questions, examples, little stories. Happy that I had prepared them well for whatever this lady might say, we took our seats after lunch. Within minutes of beginning her talk, however, Janne utterly destroyed my street cred! And gave me a condign lesson in the process about the kind of school I had joined. I never forgot it.
“Children”, Janne said to them earnestly, “I need your help.” She went on, to my growing alarm, to describe a phenomenon in which people, (nearly always grown-ups she explained), insist on using the phrase “people less fortunate than ourselves”. She wanted to know if any of them had ever heard adults use this phrase because she needed their help in getting them to stop it. I could feel furtive glances in my direction but I had taken a keen interest in my shoes at this point.
“Have you?” she asked, “… have you ever heard an adult use this phrase?” I could now sense my students were weighing things up in their heads, torn between handing me over to this lady or helping me instead to make a run for the Causeway. The tension was too much for them finally and the dam burst:
“There!” a child finally gave me up. “There’s one of them right there! He’s been saying it all morning!”
Poor Janne - she wasn’t expecting to expose a teacher in the room as one of her intended culprits, particularly one who looked so helpless and condemned. She tried politely to change tack but really it was too late.
When people use this phrase, Janne explained, they usually mean that these "fortunates" have lots of things, stuff, money. To counteract this for them, she described a daily event, completely familiar to all of the children in the room but which had one major difference. She knew this boy she told us, who got to go to school every day. And every day, at about 4.00 pm, he returned. And his Mum and his Dad are there waiting for him. Every single day. When they see him enter the village in the distance, they jump up and down and wave and shout and laugh. He reaches them and they smother him with kisses and with love and then he teaches them everything he can remember that he learnt at school that day, while they listen intently and don’t interrupt.
“Now hands up”, Janne said “put your hands up if you would like that to happen to you every day when you get home?” Of course every hand shot up - and not just because it was expected - every earnest hand.
“And keep your hands up if you won’t see one of your parents, probably your Dad, at all today or maybe for the rest of the week?’ A depleted forest of raised arms - but still a forest for sure.
“So ... who's less fortunate NOW?” Janne smiled kindly at them all, “who’s less fortunate now?”
What a lady! And what a school. I had never encountered anything quite like it honestly. Seven-year-olds being exposed to this kind of thinking, made so accessible to them. Their hapless teacher learning the greatest lesson of all.
That particular cohort all graduated last year; the stool pigeon is heading for a law degree I am told.
Have a restful weekend,
Brian
Comments
Post a Comment