Blog
11 …
Actions we take in life consist of misses
and hits, rough and smooth roads, adventures small and big. At whatever point we encounter the good or
bad, the real milestone is found in our resilience to stand up when so doing
challenges us greatly to just give up.
Sorting through pictures that document lives
of students I have worked with in school rooms or met along the hallways of the
academia and its grounds, I think back to the many instances of their initial,
yet profound silence, sadness or limitation brought into the center of English
language learning and development. I am
reminded of Huon, a Vietnamese-Montagnard refugee in one of my first formal
ESOL classes, who struggled to understand concepts of color and shapes; I
wondered about experiences that got her many times largely confused about them,
and her inability to make connections with past and present worlds. I also recall Luka, Jasmin, Rada, and
Brankica … Bosnian and Croatian refugees, who kept themselves muted in 7th
and 8th grade classes for a long time, and only attempted to utter
strange, foreign words soon after they were convinced that it was safe to do so
in our circle. I could picture young
Indian immigrant Sonal and her struggle in forming printed words. I remember the look on her face. It suggested writhing coordination felt by
her brain, and its messages to her hand as she reconciled Sanskrit writing and Roman script.
I recall Igor, an anxious boy of 12, and his fears of not catching up
with English sounds because his Ukrainian knowledge of sound production interfered. Hundreds of south of the border undocumented
students, who went through English language development classrooms, writhed in
psychological pain as their American counterparts touted them for taking over
their “pristine world”. They were bereft
with identity woes. While they rebeled
toward discrimination that almost kept them away from returning to classes day
after day, many of them swallowed the misery in which they found themselves. Congolese, Rwandan, Liberian, and various
young nationals from African countries engaged in political and economic conflicts
at the time, were neither spared. They suffered
enormous challenges too, both in learning the English language of their asylum
country, and adapting to their new personal and wider worlds.
The anguish brought upon by survival
immigration is undefinable for my many fragile students and their families. There’s no telling of the extensive, damaging
wounds and scars left in their psyches.
Harmful life experiences could wear anyone of them down, but for those
who bravely toil, who focus on a mission to succeed, and who determinedly rise
above odds, bright futures await them. They
are the embodiment of the power and the drive of the human spirit completing
its wheel of falling and rising!
