Another Place to Belong

If there is one place I can say that has become more familiar than our apartment and its surroundings, it would have to be Hay el Ashr- which is the St Andrews site where Zuri, Ruba, Max and I work at. For one, I realized that we had a class where students showed up consistently and I knew all their names and this was a great moment- especially given the challenges we had initially faced in trying to find students to attend classes. I thought back to the days where we had only 2 students one time, or another day when we had started teaching a group of school-going children who came to learn at our site because their parents were watching a world cup game and needed their children to be pre-occupied for that duration. I also felt that the past week had been one of the best teaching experiences for me personally- finally understanding how to teach a group that was largely illiterate in English, some of whom had never heard the language before, and overcoming the idea of 'What is the point of teaching them if they can't read or write and therefore effectively retain the information?' Max and I tried our best with repeating words and phrases constantly for this week's topic- body parts and sickness- trying to come up with activities that would both engage the students and help them learn. At the end of each day, it was unbelievably satisfying when each one left with having learnt maybe two or three words after every class but what was most surprising was when half left with having learnt almost all the phrases relating to the body by the end of Wednesday's class. This was something that I would never have imagined and it has forced me to think about expectations of service projects. Even before my application for this program was accepted, I thought I was being incredibly mature by taking the perspective that two months of a service project in a foreign country could not yield great results and therefore I should be realistic, which for me translated to having almost no expectations of what my service project could achieve. This past week at Hay el Ashr has changed this mindset completely. There are many people who are enthusiastic about trying to bring change and that is an extreme, but I realized that the way I was thinking was not the right way to look at this issue either. Sure, being realistic may evade the frustration and anguish that comes along with disappointment, but at the same time the joy that accompanies small successes such as this week, are multiplied when you have believed and had faith that your efforts will yield fruit and I hope to keep this in mind for the last three weeks here.