Teaching the Refugees

An excerpt from "Teaching the Refugees" - They were educated and possessed unrivaled work ethics. Every convenience store on Gessner was clerked by a South Vietnamese doctor, lawyer, or professor now working for minimum wage. Everyone in the family worked. Within a few years they bought the businesses. Many in the community hated them because of the war or their success or just because. 

I was given refugee children without a hint of support from the district. Our two languages may as well have been Martian and Venusian. Their names were short with few letters but still I could not sound them out properly. Many of them were Roman Catholic so I looked for Biblical names that we could both pronounce. On their first day, I pointed at the student and slowly tried simple names with a “what do you think?” expression after each. The first name they repeated with a smile became their new unofficial moniker. I passed these on to their other teachers which made it easier to discuss their progress. They never spoke a word, raised a hand, caused a problem, or asked for help. The only thing they did was make perfect 100% grades on everything! They carried small paperback Vietnamese-English dictionaries and furiously turned the pages as I spoke or wrote on the board. Most of the class paid little attention to the situation but I had one student who was the poster child for all the ignorance and prejudice toward the refugees. He made comments using a vernacular that could only have come from his parents at the dinner table. He never worked at learning so on test days his regret turned to resentment and anger. During the silence of one exam, he pointed at “Ruth” and bellowed, “Why do they get to look up words during a test? That’s not fair.” I walked over to his desk with heavy copies of a dictionary and science textbook, dropped them onto his table with a thump and said, “Knock yourself out. Nothing would thrill me more than to see you look up an answer.”

I doubt we taught them as much as they taught us. I learned that as happy as they were to be alive and have this opportunity, this was not what they dreamed of. They had been violently displaced and silently mourned the life and loved ones they had lost.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen. - Albert Einstein