Teaching ESL is a wonderful job to have at this time of life, because it invariably keeps my focus on what I have, rather than what I don't have. If I were to give THE major difference between my pre- and post-fifty-year-old selves, this would be it. In younger days, I truly believed that if only I had this or that one more thing, I'd be happy. Now I know better, and try to keep my attention on what I do have, in the present. And my ESL students help me do this. They always send me home newly grateful for the peace and freedom here in the U.S. that let us pursue happiness. Their intimate knowledge of war, conflict, and political repression, things they don't talk about but that shape the way they think and learn, constantly show me the privileges of the present: a peaceful classroom, the freedom to go where I please - in my own car, a safe road home without fear of bombs or snipers, and the rule of law which lets me assume that I'll find my town, house, and family as I left them.
It was freedom from fear that I appreciated most when I drove home the other day from my session with A., the Afghani refugee I tutor for Literacy Volunteers. We worked on filling out his application for step 1 of the USMLE, the first of three or four eight-hour tests he'll have to take on the seven-year path to become licensed as a physician in the U.S. A. was a Family Practice doctor in the Ukraine, where he went to medical school; he eventually returned to Afghanistan to set up a practice. But the Taliban had taken over his homeland, and A. had to flee for his life. Now, he works on the night-shift as a phlebotomist at a local hospital while learning English by studying for the USMLE.
A. and I worked our way through the application, each writing to-do lists of the extensive accompanying documentation we'd have to gather and xerox over the next week. We came to the question: What ethnicity are you? I waited for him to choose one of the eight or nine possible answers you could check off. But he just sat there, staring at the form. I said, "Hmmm, this is the one question that's voluntary; they just want it for research purposes." He shook his head, saying that he wouldn't answer it then. "It separate people," he said. He told me about Afghani president Hamid Karzai's reaction to that question in a recent newscast. Despite being a member of the most prominent of his country's several tribes, Karzai answered reporters: "I am Afghani. We are all one people." The reporters then tried from another angle, asking, "What's your mother-tongue?" Karzai, again, wouldn't tell, saying that the 32 Afghan languages and dialects should be seen as his people's talents, not marks of their ethnicity or identity.
A. leaned forward in his chair as he said this, his eyes shining. "Karzai speaks Dari, Pashto, English. He patted his chest: "I speak Dari, Pashto, and now English." Then he did something he's never done before: opened up about his past. He told me about having to leave Afghanistan when he was only twenty. It was 1989, and A. was a first-year medical student at Kaboul University. Soviet troops had just withdrawn from Afghanistan, but civil war continued between the communist government and Muslim political parties (mujahideen). Cruise missles went off every night, and the city wasn't safe. A. was offered a chance to transfer to a medical school in the Ukraine, and although it would cost him an extra year for learning Russian, he jumped at the chance to go to what he thought would be a peaceful country.
But his first bus-ride when he arrived in the Ukraine showed him otherwise. Passengers were packed tightly in the swaying bus, and A. said it was almost impossible to avoid jostling one's neighbor. All of a sudden, a Ukrainian yelled at a Moroccan man, pushed him violently away, and the passengers the man fell against turned on him and started pummeling him. The bus-driver stopped the bus, opened the doors, and a group of passengers pushed the foreigner off the bus into the winter slush, jumped on him, and stomped his face into the ice as the bus waited, its doors ajar, the other passengers watching calmly. The man died from his injuries. Another time A. saw a fellow medical student, an Egyptian man, beaten in a cafeteria for putting his tray down at a table of Ukrainians. The Egyptian was permanently blinded by shards from his broken glasses, and had to drop out of school, go back home.
A. learned quickly to keep his head down and mind his own business. He knew he was too scared to fight, so he taught himself to run. Every day he ran around the perimeter of the medical school's gym fifty or sixty times till the sweat poured off him. Every day, the spector of being attacked by street gangs, made him run faster. Even so, a kind teacher who had spent some years in Afghanistan warned A. that it was unsafe for him and the other foreign students to go out on the streets after 8pm, no matter how fast he was, and A. obeyed.
And now, sixteen years later, A. has finally worked his way to a country that will let him study and learn in peace. But it's cost him his profession; he's studying his medical school material all over again, this time in English.
He never complains though, and this is another mark of my ESL students, along with not talking (usually) about their pasts. When I think of how much we Americans complain, in comparison, it strikes me that it must take years of true security, an ingrained freedom from fear, to carp and criticize. I'm just realizing as I write this that my ESL students don't even complain about gas prices!
And now that I think of it, A. doesn't seem to feel as bereft as I do about losing his profession. That may be because despite losing the right to practice, he hasn't lost the way medicine's taught him to look at the world. When I asked him if I could write about him on this blog, telling him what I wanted to write about, he said, "My profession to see people as HUMAN, not by their color, ethnicity, language, age, gender, and religion."
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