Visual Aid

A few new pictures to give you an idea of my surroundings … unfortunately I haven’t taken any of the villages yet, so keep in mind the town’s much more European compared to anything else.

Teacher only looks at the bright side!

“Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom.” – Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u'llah (1976 U.S. Edition), CXXIII, p. 260.

“Whensoever a mother seeth that her child hath done well, let her praise and applaud him and cheer his heart; and if the slightest undesirable trait should manifest itself, let her counsel the child and punish him, and use means based on reason, even a slight verbal chastisement should this be necessary. It is not, however, permissible to strike a child, or to vilify him, for the child’s character will be totally perverted if he be subjected to blows or verbal abuse.” – Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Baha (1978 Baha’i World Center Edition), no. 115, p.139. [the bold lettering is an addition by me]

The top excerpt from Baha’u'llah’s Writings has been on my mind for sometime. Education systems these days often regard children as empty buckets to be filled up. But that is not the case: any teacher can attest that after the first few classes they can point out a child’s main character traits. If one looks closely enough, the child’s talents, may they be academic, artistic, or social, start showing up too. That’s the idea of the “mine rich in gems”. And that is a technique strongly advised for the children’s classes teacher. Let me use my personal experiences of the past few weeks to show the difference.

Week 1:

Teacher (me) enters the porch where kids sort of settle. Teacher proceeds with introductions. Children hit each other a bit. Teacher is a little shocked and reacts to the hitting. Teacher keeps trying to go on through the lesson, but children keep hitting each other for multiple reasons, and Teacher reacts every time. By the end, Teacher is flustered. Teacher comes back home and dreads the next class with those children.

Meanwhile … Teacher talks about it to friends and family and consults the Baha’i Writings about the subject. Teacher decides to take another approach.

Week 2:

Teacher enters the porch, where children slowly trickle in. Teacher does the roll call. Later, child hits other child. Teacher gently but firmly takes the hitting had away and reminds children that in this class, there will be no hitting, and ties in the comment with the lesson (“In the garden of thy heart, plant naught but the rose of love …”). Later on, teacher stuffs her fingers in her ears and sings loudly when a child starts backbiting (saying anything negative about another child)*. Children laugh, but most importantly, they start getting the point (and if not, they see I won’t listen anyway).

Because of the now more peaceful attitude in the class, Teacher starts recognizing “gems” in every child. Teacher is mostly happy to find the gem of super-fast-and-precise-at-learning-melodies-and-rhythm in the child that seemed to be hitting the most. By focusing on the child’s positive attributes, the child slowly stopped hitting others and trying to get attention through his talents (as he was obviously getting more from me by singing well).

The difference: Teacher didn’t let the hitting affect her emotions, and showed the children she really WAS interested in them, what they can do, who they are, and that she’s not just a rule monger.

Yep.

If some of you were trying to figure out what in the world I was doing with children’s classes.

*In the Baha’i laws, backbiting is up there with murder and stealing.

Snow?

Well, after having many comments of the frequent snow storms back at home, I started to feel left out of the fun …

I collected the ice/slush/snow from the fridge I had to defrost today, and tried to make a few snowballs …

…sigh …

It’s just not the same.

But hey! how many people made snowballs in the Caribbean?

Other Happy Moments

Got a hello from home in my inbox …

Philip and I are being spoiled. Mmmm, Dutch chocolate.

The perfect children’s class – smart, interactive, and nice Amerindian kids – cute, too!

… I finally cleaned and organized my room to my liking! (it’s the designated “resource room”, so it’s bursting to the seams with books and markers and computers and other such materials – that I successfully stuffed out of view)

… and I’m having fun learning to drive a stick-shift car. This is the little Twingo I’ll be driving (still being fixed, so no hurry there)

Side-story …

So, at PK-10, I had the honour of sleeping in a lady’s bed, while she easily slipped into a hammock (apparently, without much practice, I would have ended up being squished like a banana in the morning – they pitied my inexperience and gave me the bed instead). Over the bed was a mosquito net, and over the hammock itself was a sheet hung over a string. This meant I didn’t see who was in the hammock, though I knew it was a lady.

At 6:30 am, there came a knock at the door, and the hostess got up fairly quickly to answer. I noticed a few seconds later that the hammock still moved on its own. Then came a child’s voice. A slightly confused child’s voice. Then the sheet over the hammock flung onto the ground and a little one year old craweld out looking for his mother.

I assumed the child usually slept in the bed with his mother, and I was right: the moment he saw my curled-up shape in the bed, he smiled and proceeded to lift up the mosquito net to crawl up (it was dark – he sure hadn’t seen my face from the floor). I knew where this was going. I really, REALLY tried not to be scary, but you can guess what happened next.

What would YOU do if you were one year old and suddenly found a stranger instead of your mother in your bed?

Run away screaming, of course.

A night in PK-10

So much for writing every two to three days.

I’d like to believe that I haven’t been writing because I’m just too busy, but actually, sometimes it’s just hard to find the right words to explain some things.

Besides fighting a particularly violent wave of homesickness, I’ve been somewhat busy planning the few classes I’ve already established. The most exciting of these happened on the weekend, and I have high hopes for these kids and adults.

The weekend is usually reserved for a trip to a not-so-remote village, in which we give the whole lessons kit, and more. The idea is that we stay overnight to get to know them better, and consequently, we have more time to do even more projects with them. While Philip goes to Wagi-Pasi, I’m staying at a little place nicknamed “PK-10″, literally meaning, “point kilométrique 10″ (10 KM from downtown).

To avoid rambling on and on, I’m presenting the general overview in point form.

Children’s classes:

• When kids run up to your car, jump around, then all run under a thatched roof to sit on long benches in a somewhat orderly fashion, it means they’re excited to have a class.
• Lesson learned: keep baby siblings OUT of the class. Still don’t know how to yet.
• Kids walking bare-bottomed in their own village is like walking around in your own backyard: it’s ok.
• I shall undoubtedly loose my voice early on.
• Playing games in the hot afternoon sun isn’t the best idea.
• Teachers double-up as climbing posts and givers of super-spinning piggy-back rides.
• Colouring brings on silence. Really.

Youth Group

• Thank God for smart, bright, funny, energetic youth.
• Thank God for strong-willed girls: they’re the ones who’ll change the women’s condition in the end.
• Spending an extra hour with a girl to teach her to read, in this case, IS my idea of fun.
• Said girl then proceeded to braid my hair in the evening:

• The seven youth want a comic-drawing class. A COMICS CLASS!! Do you know how much FUN that’s going to be???

French Classes

• Treat the ladies with respect: a lot of them feel ashamed they can’t read or write, even though it’s not their fault they were denied education.
• They like having fun too!
• A cursive “g” is really complicated to draw in one stroke. Really.
• … I need to learn to write left-handed so as to accommodate the left-handed ladies.

Other Fun Facts:

• Washing up in the creek is nice.
• Playing with over 20 children and youth in the small dusty field until the stars come out is quite something.
• Jogging with the youth to accompany someone to another village after that can cause muscle spasms the next day.
• It took me 23 years and had to be out of my country to finally try a dish that, in the end, is traditional to my native culture (Acadian): crab. Mom would be proud of me.

First Week

And so, having reached Sunday, I find it appropriate that I now start giving you all a few details of where I am, and how I am going to spend my next nine months.

According to Phillip (the other Youth Year of Service who is also presently living at the Walker’s), newbies are given a whole week to acclimatize. For some unknown reason, I was thrown into the heat of the action the morning following my arrival – so I feel that, though it’s only been five days, I’ve seen two weeks’ worth!

Though I’ll have access to a little car, I still need to learn to drive stick-shift, and the car needs fixing, so I’ve been either getting rides with the Walkers when they felt it necessary to bring me somewhere, or I’ve been biking around. It’s not much hotter than a hot Canadian summer day, but the humidity itself makes it hard to breathe sometimes (this mostly when biking …). The sun is also very intense, since we’re so close to the equator. So, from day 1: hat, lots of water, sunscreen.

Many of the classes I’ll be conducting for now (French classes for ladies, and children’s classes, both young and older) are either in a lady’s home in a neighborhood of the city, or in a village 10 kilometers out East (the village is actually called PK 10: Point Kilométrique 10). I met with the small village – may I say these are really incredibly warm people? They are. This should be fun.

Today was the celebration of the Birthday of Baha’u'llah (usually on the 12th, but people are off on Sunday, so …). LOTS OF CHILDREN!! I was boggled! The plan, for my part, was to say two stories concerning Baha’u'llah’s life, and fiddle a bit. I never did much storytelling with kids before, so while talking, the little hamster in my head was running on its wheel at a frantic speed!! How do you a), hold 50 kids’ attention, b), make sure the language (which is mostly their third language) is comprehensible, and c), make sure they like it at least a bit? The first story worked – the second, not so much.

At least the fiddling was a fun novelty: I got them to clap along with my stomping, and voilà! They followed the beat better than lot of the tourists I see on my little historical steam train … I think they liked it enough to hear some more another day …

A fun fact: the Walkers have a piece of land, and on that piece of land are banana trees.

This results in the abundance of bananas:

And what do you do when you have around 40 bananas about to ripen simultaneously? Banana bread!

Paramaribo

So, hello, finally, to all who read this.

Some may have the idea that, by “stranded for six days,” I meant stuck, lost, alone, with no help. That, thankfully, was not the case.

The plan was to land in Paramaribo, Suriname, at midnight, take a bus to a guest house to sleep a little, and the owner would then help me get onto another bus to the border town Albina, cross the river in a small boat, and arrive safely in St-Laurent, French Guyana. Sounds a little complicated, no? Well, believe it or not, all of that was the easiest part: retrieving my strayed luggage was what kept me in Paramaribo for six days.

After arriving at the guest house at 2:30am, I was warmly greeted by Mr. Ramlall, the Hindustani (Suriname-born Hindu) owner: elderly, long white beard, and always ready to help. He offered me tea (remember, 2:30am – he was waiting for me to arrive), and fed me every mealtime (yay, room AND board!). When he heard my luggage had not yet come, he devised a plan of nagging every possible person working at the airline company to retrieve the luggage. On his very limited free time.

Long story short, I made a few long useless trips to the airport, each time expecting the bags to arrive on the next flight (as the airline company kept saying that, oh, yes, they’re on the next flight), and meanwhile washing my only set of clothing in the sink every night. Below is that said set of clothing:

Now, everything has a bright side. During those six days, I was able to type up my project for my application to U of Montréal (meaning I wouldn’t have it hanging over my head once I was down here). I also learned the virtues of detachment and patience to a new degree … and it gave me the time to acclimatize myself to the culture (though downtown Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname, is quite different from rural St-Laurent).

And I got to meet the Baha’is of Paramaribo, who, after receiving an email from Jackie (the lady with whom I’m staying) explaining my situation, kept coming over and either taking me out or driving me to various banks and airports when I needed it. Funny thing is, I never needed to call them – they would just come randomly at the right time (especially the last day, when a retired gentleman drove by just to pick up a phone number from Mr. Ramlall’s guest house – he had no idea I was still in town, and he ended up driving me all over the place for the day). Call it coincidence or the Will of God, but it was perfect timing.

So, in all, those six first days were definitely not lost to me. Definitely not.

Oh, and the boats which cross the border river are absolutely cute (long and thin, like a long canoe, but with a motor).

I need to get me a picture one of these days.

EDIT: Oh yes, and the viola was allowed as a carry-on in the end, but seeing I already had another carry-on bag for my computer, I couldn’t bring on a third carry-on, which explains why the small luggage which was supposed to be my carry-on with extra clothing “just in case” got also thrown into the cargo (and consequently lost, too). D’oh! But the viola was safe with me the whole time. Sweet.

Short Update

For all of you who are diligent to follow this, I’ll make this quick (as it’s past midnight here and I’m exhausted): stranded in Suriname for six days without luggage, just got in French Guyana this afternoon, just got Internet half an hour ago, going to bed and will write details tomorrow.