Facing the Storm

I'm here in Belize as a student, to learn and be humbled.  Instead, I am reminded, slapped in the face by the reason I went to college: poverty and summer.

I never went to summer camp as a child.  The closest I had was four days of Bible school, and that depended upon summer crops.

My summer camps were tobacco fields and chopping weeds.  We didn't have migrant workers.  We had two teenage cousins, my parents, myself, and other local farmers.  Farmers are one of the most communal social groups.  The first time I worked through the heat in the field I was 8.  I would follow the tractor and pick up stray tobacco leaves to be tied, cured and sold.

On the dusty roads to the local schools, I am reminded how I would ride my bike down the mile long driveway to escape my life as a farm child; but I couldn't escape not matter how far I pedaled.  I wanted a small glimpse of civilization.  Of new cars and getting the mail.  These roads in Belize are actually in better shape than my rural driveway.  I wonder if they drag their dirt roads with a tractor as my stepdad did, when he got home from his day job to work the farm. It's something his entire family had done.

I became a teacher because I had worked every summer of my life.  When I was looking for a profession, I wanted a profession that would pay a decent salary, always be available, and would not require me to work during the summer.  Teaching it was, and I was a natural at it.  My mom, who volunteered at my school during the winter when farm work was slow, would bring home old textbooks.  I would then teach my sisters cursive; one of the first lessons I taught was about caterpillars.  As John Dewey and Maria Montessori emphasized experiential learning and literacy, I was already understanding the need to experience.  I would take my sisters in the woods and we would look for caterpillars, capturing them in old canning jars that we used to scoop jam out of with our fingers.  This time, we weren't scooping jam, but shaking a potential butterfly off our tiny digits.

I didn't intend to be a science teacher; I loved reading and writing.  But, I also loved people, and so becoming a special education teacher after learning my grandfather was illiterate, and trying to cope with my young, deaf cousin's death, would mean I teach everything.

Perhaps there is something I can offer these students and teachers.  I can offer them not help, but hope.  I've faced the storm that is poverty.  Through my own will, I fought up and out of that storm.  Of the storm of stress when the crops didn't make, of the storm when the government shut down our tobacco crops.

Our students will make it through this storm in a day.  However, the storm brewing in them will require more time.