Week #1 - (continued)

So, Thursday.

I took the quite-crowded bus across the river (which is always itself full of interesting stores...there are quirky people on our buses) and arrived at their apartment. The whole family was there this time, so I was able to meet the parents and the oldest son, and to re-meet the three younger boys. I'm having a lot of trouble with their names, which makes me feel bad. Karen names have a general pattern of two syllables (e.g. ThuWah or KweeLah), and I keep mixing up the sounds among all their names. Of course, I was trying to learn the six family members' names simultaneously, along with three or four names of the Karen neighbors who kept popping in and out. But I'll get them. Or at least some sadly-anglicized approximation of them.

Anyway, I went in and tried to remember whom I had already met and whom I hadn't, and shook hands with everyone, and the second-oldest son--we'll call him ThuWah--indicated I should sit on the couch. They then proceeded to sit on the floor and various chairs around the room and look expectantly at me. All six of them. I tried small-talk: "How're you doing?" Smiles and shy mumbling. "How was school?" Same. Finally, there was a pause... ThuWah looked at me. "You teach...now?" Teach? Like, a classroom lesson to the family? Um... "Yes, I can teach now. Do you have schoolwork, homework, I can help with?" (This is what I was told I'd be doing.) The three school-aged boys conversed rapidly in Karen for a moment and ThuWah disappeared down the hall.

Five faces looked at me. I smiled. They smiled. We sat.

Finally, ThuWah came back with his grammar workbook from his ESL class at school. We sat down on the floor and began going through what he's learning (simple present and "wh"-interrogatives). And everyone else in the family--plus the neighbor kids who had shown up--continued to sit and watch. I wasn't sure what to do. Were they hoping to listen in and learn as he did his homework? Were they expecting that I would be teaching all of them out of his book? About half an hour into it, ThuWah disappeared again for a minute. I decided to pull out the picture dictionaries I had grabbed at the library before I left.

Good move. They pounced on them, and began looking at all the pictures and sounding out the words and talking with each other. Yay for pictures dictionaries. From that point on, it was much more relaxed (at least for me), because they could all be looking through the books while I helped ThuWah with his homework. He seemed much more willing to try talking to me in English when his whole family wasn't watching him, and I could stop occasionally while he worked and interact with the other family members, pronouncing words for them, having the neighbor kid (who's been here almost a year) interpret some of their questions.

By the time I left, we were all just hanging out, talking as much as we could, laughing, ironing out the pronunciation-differences between "violet" and "violin." It was good.

I must say, though, I'm struggling with the tension (faced by everyone who works with adult beginners in ESL, I think) between speaking simply and being patronizing. These are smart, smart kids. ThuWah almost finished highschool in his camp in Thailand--a rare feat--and the younger boys were on track to do the same. And--for the kids and the parents--I can't imagine how frustrating it would be to come into a new place, having been well-respected and educated in your home country, only to be completely at sea in the new language and customs and weirdness of it all here.

In short, they seem brilliant and funny and kind and eager to learn. I'm excited to get to know them better, and to learn from them as I teach them, and to let God do in all of us whatever He's planning to do through this time together.

This afternoon, though, I think I'm going off to buy a better picture dictionary than those at the library. (And maybe one that has "strollers" and "eggplants" instead of "prams" and "aubergines"...)