The Shadow Proves the Sunshine

Yesterday I found myself rediscovering Switchfoot's Nothing is Sound album.

This morning I woke up early due to digestive needs and found myself facing the most beautiful sunrise I have experienced here thus far (and I have experienced many, many sunrises here). Directly horizontal and above me the sky danced in shades of pink and orange, and below me, I looked over the ocean of clouds, dimly reflecting these beautiful colors. Every tree and object sticking up cast long, eerie shadows over the ground, simultaneously creating striking silhouettes against the sky. Yet nowhere could the sun be seen. I realized another mountain peak blocked this orange ball of fire from my sight. I looked around at the shadowy state of my home, where I yet required a flashlight to see around, and smiled. The shadows proved the sunshine.The day was breaking, and shadows were cast everywhere.

 Relying on an old-fashioned piece of technology called the radio, we are hearing rumors that Aung San Suu Kyi has been entering into some potentially meaningful peace talks with the ruling regime of Burma. Right now, everything seems hopeless when I think about the things the SPDC does to the minority groups here. The other day I heard a story about the SPDC, who occupied a town in the Shan State, one day randomly kidnapping a little six year old girl, raping her, and then sealing her in the town's pagoda alive, for no other reason than that they could. This little child died a slow death of starvation in the pitch black, nobody hearing her cries, nobody coming to her rescue. Her mother went a little crazy afterward, never quite recovering.

It's hard to imagine that those who do this to such pictures of innocence might really every making peace with those they've been attacking and torturing for decades. Yet it's possible a little hint of pink dances on the horizon, as we look around the shadowy, gloomy landscape of this earth. With that in mind, I leave you the words of Switchfoot's "The Shadow Proves the Sunshine."

 Switchfoot - “The Shadow Proves the Sunshine”

 Sunshine, won't you be my mother?
Sunshine, come and help me sing.
My heart is darker than these oceans.
My heart is frozen underneath.

 We are crooked souls trying to stay up straight.
Dry eyes in the pouring rain.
Well, the shadow proves the sunshine.
The shadow proves the sunshine.
Too scared it'll run away.
Hold fast to the break of daylight.
The shadow proves the sunshine.

 Oh, Lord why did you forsake me?
Oh, Lord, don't be far away.
Storm clouds gathering beside me.
Please Lord don't look the other way.

Crooked souls trying to stay up straight.
Dry eyes in the pouring rain.
The shadow proves the sunshine.
The shadow proves the sunshine.
Too scared it'll run away.
Hold fast to the break of daylight.
The shadow proves the sunshine.
The shadow proves the sunshine.

Living with receiving

Witten by Kara about 1 week ago, but delayed by her technologically challenged Dad! --------------

 Two days ago I received an extraordinarily humbling lesson in foot washing. I have always found the story of Jesus washing his disciples' feet to both deeply moving and quite imperative. However, I realized how deep my own pride went when this week it was not I that was asked to wash the feet of another, but rather it was my own feet that were washed.      

My two closest girlfriends, sisters named L. P. and P. H., came by my room after dinner on Wednesday, and I was quite happy to sit with them on the floor of my room for a bit. The older one, P. H., all of a sudden stood up, smiled, and said, “I'm going to wash your shoes.” I followed her gaze to my shoes sitting just outside my room. My really, really dirty shoes. My chacos. My four year old chacos. My chacos that still carried the dust of Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Germany, the Netherlands, and Thailand on them. My chacos that have forged rivers and sunken deep in the stickiest mud with only ever the slightest rinsing afterward. Because, after all, they are chacos, and we all know chacos are meant for the dirt. And my rubber Beans. The ones I only use when I fear getting stuck in the mud in my chacos.      

I blushed and immediately told her not to. No worries, I would wash them myself. But now L. P. was standing, and the two of them were calling to the Shan couple that also lives in my house. Now they were all telling me that P. H.  and L. P. were going to wash my shoes. B., the husband who speaks very good English, motioned to my dusty chacos (really, they weren't even that bad, just dusty, because there hadn't been much mud for a while) and said, “Shan women will look at those and think you are lazy.”      

I tried to tell them then I would just have to start washing my shoes, but I didn't need someone else to do it for me. I was so embarrassed at the thought of someone else washing my shoes, the very thing I wear on the lowest part of my body, in a culture where feet are considered worse than merely dirty. However, P.K., the wife, handed P. H. and L. P. the detergent and the scrub brush, and the two of them took me to the shower and taught me to wash my shoes. Really they did all the work and only let me watch, as I stood their barefoot on the muddy cement. They scrubbed and scrubbed years of dirt off those shoes. I had forgotten what a vibrant purple and green my chacos once were.      

 I had also forgotten what it meant to let someone give a gift that required immense humility and self-sacrifice on their part. I felt utterly awkward to be served so. Humility is contagious, and their humility humbled me deeply. If only I could explain how low feet are considered here, how careful one must be to never point your feet at people or places of respect, and how very dirty the dirt roads make feet/shoes here. If only I could explain this, my deep mortification would make sense. For just a moment, P. H. am and L. P. acted as Christ to me, and I, like Peter, did all I could to prevent their act of service. I really have so much to learn about receiving generosity. These two girls, who have certainly never heard the story of Christ's foot washing, may never know how they stretched me and grew me in this one act of service, but I will never forget it.

Lessons Learned

Blog entry written October 4, 2011:

Lessons Learned

Right now in the intermediate English class of community health worker
and medic students, we are going through Jack Johnson's Curious George
album. The last song we did was “We're Going to Be Friends,” and now
we're working through “My Two Hands.” This class has been very
interesting to me, because they're all right on the verge of
conversational English, light years ahead of their beginning
classmates, but they have not yet grasped the rhythm of English. We
use music a lot to learn how we put together phrases. Lyrics often do
not even use complete sentences, but it's okay, because they
communicate concepts we understand in shorter phrases. I believe
students must first feel the rhythm of the shorter phrases, before
they move into full-length structured sentences. It appears this gut
instinct is right, because I am watching both their vocabulary expand
rapidly, as well as their general ability to put words into meaningful
phrases with an understandable word order. This excites me
exceedingly, because I can see that these students will truly advance
to meaningful conversations very quickly.

However, to the students, they feel what they do not know. Every song
there are so many new words, which overwhelms them. I am amazed by how
quickly they learn and grasp new words, but they are discouraged that
they do not already know them. They long to make longer utterances
comparable to their conversations in Shan, and yet they are confined
to shorter child-like phrases. These are the students who have often
been at the top of every class they've ever been in, and they likely
excelled in their English classes in school. The shock of real
language is hitting them hard. Real language is not grammar. Real
language is not even about the size of one's vocabulary. Real language
is about communication, and when we start learning a new language, we
all become like children again. We must accept what we do not know and
begin the process of decoding this other strange system set before us.
We simply do not begin by excelling; we begin by the humbling process
of pointing to something and saying “I want.”

Yet every evening the tables turn, and I become the student. Now it is
I who must discipline myself to not speak English, even if I know they
know the word in English, and do my best to use every Shan word
possible to try to communicate a concept until I am given the correct
Shan word. I use motions. I use sound effects. I become the child, and
my students of the intermediate class becoming my greatest
cheerleaders. They do not forget their own frustrations when
attempting the same thing in English. They know my challenge, and they
patiently say phrases again and again in context until suddenly I get
it and know myself how to create novel phrases of the same structure.
In this strange switch of roles, my students are slowly realizing that
what I am doing in their intermediate class is not meant to be cruel
or overwhelming. I am giving them the same opportunity that they give
me each evening, no matter how difficult or painful. I am giving them
the chance to speak English. Every student that lives at the clinic
and interacts with me in the evening feels this, knows this, and even
expresses enjoyment in the English class. I watch their excitement
when suddenly the light bulb goes off and I can tell they've just
mastered a new concept.

Sadly yesterday I received a letter from one of the students who does
not live at the clinic. He has been missing a lot of class, and I had
wondered why. He wrote in his letter of how difficult he found the
class to be and how he really wanted to learn grammar. What struck me
was how different his approach to the language is from those who have
been assisting me in my daily struggle to learn Shan. They intuit what
I am doing for them, but this poor student is still stuck on what he
has been told he should be learning in class. He is actually one of my
top students, and I know his difficulty to hear spoken English cannot
be any more acute than his classmates. What's different is his
understanding of why the struggle is worthwhile. I do teach very short
grammar lessons in context, but I am more concerned about
communication right now than grammar. This student would rather know
rules than be able to communicate. While his classmates are moving
forward quickly in their ability to strings words and phrases together
into meaningful conversation, he remains focused on what he is yet
unable to do.

Reading this poor student's words has caused me to reflect on where I
am doing the same. Linguistically I accept my limited abilities for
now and am moving forward quickly to decode this system of
communication. Yet I have found myself deeply frustrated by all the
cultural rules I do not understand. I have allowed myself to become
deeply discouraged by the cultural mistakes I have made and the people
I've accidentally offended. As hard as it is, I have to see that in
the mistakes I've made, I've learned one more cultural norm. I cannot
start off knowing the rules, just as this student cannot start off
understanding 100% of spoken English. We must take bits and pieces,
combined with our mistakes, to create a new system of understanding.
For those of us that pride ourselves on learning other things fast, it
is time to learn humility fast.

Meanwhile, I am so very proud of my students, who read through “My Two
Hands” yesterday and demonstrated, in collaboration and through
carefully asking for help in English, complete understanding of the
song and all its vocabulary. I watched their own feelings of pride
when they realized they understood the song. Even a week ago, this
song would not have worked for them. Yet yesterday they were smiling,
laughing, and expressing themselves in English. I have to face that I
too am able to do things now, not just linguistically but culturally
as well, that a week ago would have ended in frustration and breaking
cultural taboos. I smile in the midst of humiliation at this thought.

Placed for Kara due to poor connectivity...

Per email:

So apparently my internet is too slow to use the blogger.com website, which means I cannot post onto my blog. Here's the entry I would have posted there for any who are interested.

 

Written Sept 24:

 

The weather is changing, and I can feel the mood turning lighter, as the sun burns away the morning clouds everyday. No longer does it stay gray and dreary 24 hours a day, and no longer can you count on a daily downpour. The sun comes out, and the air warms our skin again.

            My interactions with the community are also slowly changing. All over the school, even to those I do not teach, I have become very well known, as well as my unusual teaching style. This has been my first week going to each of my assigned classes (I have seven classes at the school, each with around 30 students, and will start two classes at the clinic soon, each with 10-15 students). It's been amusing, because when I walk into a classroom for the first time, students clap and giggle, and I hear them whispering to each other in Shan, “The foreign teacher!” It's kind of exciting to be so happily anticipated,

            In fact, my students' interactions with me have truly tickled me pink. Everywhere I go, students respectfully wai me (fold their hands and give a slight bow with their head), as they do every teacher in the school. Before each class, they stand together and welcome me, and after each class they stand together and thank me for teaching. We laugh and joke together in class, but there's an extraordinarily high value of teachers, giving me a place of honor in the eyes of the students. I shudder to imagine what these children (or their teachers) would think of their American peers.

            While my ego does not require this constant petting, I am realizing what a gift this value is to the students. Since they are not constantly battling their teachers, they are able to laugh with and enjoy their teachers. Since they generally trust their teachers to be trying to do the right thing for them, they follow instructions and are able to be trusted with greater responsibility. Since these students honor and respect their teachers, they want to learn what their teachers know and so receive a better education.

            For now, I am enjoying this strange new feeling of utter delight every time I get to see my students. I realize people can rightly label this the honeymoon phase and that, of course, teaching will remain a lot of work, but, right now, when I see my students, I can't help but smile. And when one shouts out at the end of the class, “Teacher, where are you from?” or whatever small little phrase from the past that they want me to know they've learned (regardless of whether or not they understand the answer), I laugh with enjoyment and answer their question with gusto. It's a good feeling.