Almost October

Fall has arrived in Antwerp and it is wonderful. We are still able to enjoy an afternoon coffee outside on the square, wearing scarves while soaking up this year’s final rays of sunshine. I see that in Austin it is still in the 90s. I don’t miss it. I haven’t missed it yet.

I have finished both my summer tutoring and my latest teaching course. During the summer I met twice a week with the sons of one of my previous English students. They were 14 and 17 and very driven to learn English better. I got to know and love them, and I learned so much about Korea (sauna-culture and PC rooms and all!) that I want to go visit now. My friendship with their mother will continue during the remainder of their time in Belgium here (another year and a half).

I was happy to be done with the intensive academic course as this was a rather difficult one to keep together. But I said goodbye to my “students” with genuine regret and thanks. They all worked hard and assured me they learned a lot of English from me, but I am not sure if I am not the one who has learned the most. I must honestly admit that not a single seminar in graduate school has caused me to think as much as spending each morning of the week with these people. (And yes, I have had some challenging seminars…)

Here I was every day of the week teaching advanced English to people from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Cameroon, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Italy (not in the picture). Several of them had never before left their country. They are all here to begin a Master program at the University’s Institute of Development Management, to learn advanced skills that they then can either take back to their home country or apply in international policy making. They are all educated people.
The worlds from whence we come could not have been more different.

We discussed (while focusing on the nuances of the English language) democracy, freedom, politics, corruption, globalization, humanitarianism, government, the US elections, sex-tourism in South-Asia (from a male point of view...) and many other issues. I thought I knew what democracy meant, what freedom meant… I know now that I did not, simply because I live with both. You don’t think about you have. Freedom and Democracy mean something very different to those who live without it. We spoke about more trivial subjects as well, like marriage, food, Bill Gates, and Starbucks coffee. Yet with them, no topic was trivial. My ignorance about their world caused me to never feel prepared for the discussions (the grammar and tenses yes, but never on what to expect of the topics…). What seems like a rather trivial question (How did you celebrate your wedding day?) evolved into a discussion of bridal gifts consisting of barrels of crude oil and goats (the DRC) and raised the question whether a bride was then “bought” and therefore became a property (affirmative, according to the woman from Mozambique, providing me with a female point of view on some African customs …). Food? Horsemeat in Belgium, dogmeat in Vietnam, and forest rats in Congo. We found a common ground in Belgium’s sweet pastries that I offered them in the final class.

I brought my cup of “take-away” coffee each morning (finally that trend has made it to Belgium!). With the Italian (she was the odd one out of the group, a white girl from Tirol with experience in policy making at the Austrian parliament) I walked to the coffee bar nearby (where they actually have good coffee) and we discussed the varieties of coffee cultures in Italy, Belgium, and the US. “They make the cappuccino too hot here,” she said, “this way you have to wait too long to drink it and by then the froth has gone to the bottom. In Italy they have that detail down and you can drink it right away.” Ah yes, now that she mentioned it… That did seem indeed trivial in the midst of everything else, but nonetheless interesting to the two of us. She even admitted to me that she briefly halted her personal anti-globalization policy after months of being in Sri Lanka checking on the tsunami-aid organizations, and ate at McDonalds. I never eat at the big MD, I have said before to make a point, but who am I to talk? Starbucks? Only two (incl. the Italian of course) of my students had ever heard of it. Seattle has made it to Indonesia! How then to tackle a reading in the “course-book” on the success of the company and its image in the US? We quickly moved to issues of globalization since the actual existence of a coffee-culture, let alone why SB is so popular in the US, escaped most of them. How can there be time for sipping $4 cups of coffee with fancy names in a country where civil war reigns, where (democratic) dictators change the (democratic) constitutions and try their hardest at preventing the people from getting an education lest they would actually voice their opinions? “I tried coffee,” my student from Cameroon said, “to see what the hype is all about, but I don’t get it.” There were several things about "my" culture they didn't get. Of course not.

They spoke about their countries, the poverty they have lived and seen, and the ways in which their governments deal with issues as well as (in many cases) cause the issues. Yet while we practiced the conditionals and I asked them “What would you do if you won the lottery?” not one of them said to want to leave his or her country. All of them said they would set up local charities and aid-projects. Maybe most of us would mention giving money away in our answer to that hypothetical question (after thinking of the new house, the new car, the new I don’t know what…) but somehow I actually believed all of THEM when they said it.

I too, spoke about my country (actually both of them, but they were barely interested in the United States with the exception of the after effects of the Vietman war in Vietman of course). To them, Belgium was already a place too cold to live in with a weird language and introverted people. Yet they also described it as a country with amazing buildings and too many riches. I tried to teach them about a little something about Belgium and gave them parts to read from “Culture Shock! Belgium” which they appreciated. I told them about the Vlaams Belang, because I thought they had to know. I am not proud of the fact that Antwerp is the country’s most racist city and that the right-wing separatist-racist party has its home here, but I was not going to keep that from them. They wondered how it is possible that Belgium can have such political problems about two languages while in the DRC there are over 400. Apparently they laugh at us over there. (Well yes, but the DRC’s problems are quite a bit larger too.)

For the first time in my life talking about Belgium included addressing colonization, talking about its history with Africa, and the remnants of that most horrid episode of Belgium’s history in Congo. I have been answering foreigners’ questions about “my country” since I first left it in 1987 as an AFS exchange student to Pennsylvania, USA, then later when I lived in Texas, and afterwards in Italy. Never has the conversation been quite like this. Here at the table with me were people who had all their lives heard about the Belgians, followed Belgian politics (Flemish independence is feared in Congo I learned), lived with both the burden as well as opportunities that are the result of dependence upon a western nation. For the first time chocolate and waffles and lace were not part of the conversation.

I learned a lot from these teaching experiences. I of course learned basic facts about all the countries they represented. I also learned that I don’t really like teaching English even though I can (or better, am able to). But mainly I learned how terribly ignorant about the world I am, and about how small mine has been. Most importantly, I learned that it is easy, no matter how different the cultures, to sit at a table together and to talk, to be amazed and to be baffled, to agree and to disagree, to get to know each other and to learn from each other, and to laugh.

At the end of the course my students gave me a beautiful necklace and bracelet handmade in Mozambique. The Koreans wrote me sweet thank you letters when the tutoring was done, treated me to a wonderful meal and gave me gifts from Korea. I will cherish these gifts and these people forever. They taught me more than they realize. Maybe the English they learned from me will open their worlds, they have certainly opened mine.