A Much-Needed Update

I must sincerely apologize to you, my dear reader. I realize that my extended absence may present itself as some sort of apathy on my part in keeping you updated on not only my doings but also my wellbeing. Rest assure that I am alive and well, and that the cause of such an extended hiatus was not intentional on my part. Normally I would have given you an update about Christmas, New Years, and whatever else happened in December. Nonetheless, I lost internet connection in my apartment for 3 weeks. After 5 visits from the provider and many days of frustration, I finally went out and bought my own temporary solution, just to come home to find that the provider had fixed the problem while I was gone. Sometimes the Good Lord must teach us humility when He had intended to teach us patience.

Anyways, 3 weeks without internet normally wouldn’t have bothered me. I have plenty of things that can entertain me. However, when I’m not teaching, I work from home, which requires internet. So you can imagine that most of January has been a game of catch-up on all my missed tasks which, as of today, is now finally completed. Moreover, I lose communication with all of you when I have no internet. Needless to say, my mid-December to early January was quite the frustrating period of time for me. So let me catch you up on a few things.

I am still in Madagascar. I haven’t left or gone anywhere else. I did attend Christmas morning mass at my local church and even helped set up the lawn chairs for the outdoor mass (pictures included). Christmas day was relatively quiet, but I did manage to meet up with some staff from the US Embassy who had a small Christmas brunch, and I had some other Americans join me for supper. As far as New Years, well I don’t really celebrate it. I was in bed by my normal 9:30 and up at 4:30 on January 1st to get to mass. For my college friends, my grandpa sleeping habits are even worse now. I even joined a running club of US Embassy staff.

The beginning of January was nothing too special. Most of my time was spent preparing for the semester and attending a few clubs or English classes outside my assigned placements. But as of January 9th, I am full-time teaching. On Mondays and Tuesdays, I teach at the same school as I did last year, (LJJR). And on Thursdays and Fridays I am at a new school located significantly closer to my apartment called Lycée Moderne Ampefiloha or LMA for the layman.

As was the case last year, I have a variety of classes ranging from 10th to 12th grade, and I typically have the same lesson for each class and each grade, adjusting the difficulty to match the level of my near 1,000 students. Classes this year are much larger, ranging from 45 at the lowest to 65 at the maximum. Unlike last year, when I was much less wise and experienced as I appear now, I decided to focus my lessons on relevant contexts. That is, I wanted to provide my students with English tools they would need if they were ever to encounter an English-speaker or befriend one. That includes talking about food, shopping, and giving directions or explaining physical locations.

Unlike many of the other programs I assist, such as English Access, LIME, and a few others, my regular student doesn’t really have a dream of going to America, graduating with an American university degree, or living abroad. For the most part, my students are typical high schoolers. They laugh, they joke, they don’t always (usually) take their studies seriously, and they certainly don’t expect – like many of our American students learning a required foreign language – to use English in their daily lives in Madagascar. Needless to say, my goal for teaching these students as opposed to those in the English Access Program or LIME is more so a matter of cultural encounter and, what they refer to in the education world as, teacher rapport, the positive relationship between students and teacher. Whereas my goal is to teach my students English, specifically focusing on speaking and listening, my personal and, if I am honest, primary objective is to expose my students to a foreigner who, for lack of better terminology, gives a sh*t about them.

The truth of the matter is that Madagascar as a culture and a nation is utterly isolated from the world. In truth, life in Madagascar is horribly isolated from itself. That is, most people have no idea what is going on beyond their village or, if they live in the city, their neighborhood. As such, the average Malagasy high schooler doesn’t know much about the world outside their little maze of bricks and cobblestone that they call Tana and home. We could say the same about a lot of places in the United States. To be isolated is not necessarily an entirely bad thing. Nonetheless, there is an extreme on either end of the measure. To be isolated to the point of blatant ignorance of the world and its happenings limits our horizons and shelters us from horrible things that may be going on. Still, it can also leave us lacking in solidarity, understanding, and deeper knowledge of creation and, to a certain degree, ourselves. On the other extreme is an overbearing belief that everywhere in the world is completely connected and that, even though we have never been there, speak their language, understand their culture, or know the complex and unique dynamics of their society, that every freaking problem in the world is practically our own and that we need to do something to fix it. Ironically, that train of thought, which is nothing more than pride with a façade of solidarity, is interestingly grounded in the 19th century idea of “The White Man’s Burden” which was a philosophical argument meant to justify colonialism under the guise that it was the dominant Anglo-Saxon race’s divine burden to lift the lesser races from the cesspool of their ignorance. I don’t find that idea very far apart from many Western powers who like to thrust their ideas and political systems on African nations using aid funds as their crux and crowbar.

Thus, as is with virtually 99% of all my positions and opinions, there is a balance and mean between the two extremes of isolation and, let us call it, global self-righteousness. Ergo, my personal goal is to demonstrate to my students that someone in this big, cruel, unforgiving world does, in fact, give a sh*t about them, and that, for whatever reason, they are better off caring about what happens in the outside their world whether they think they will ever see the rest of the world or not. In short, my goal is to be a model of how a teacher can be and what a world with better understanding can be. My goal is to be patient, gentle, compassionate, and personable. I want to be genuine, fun, challenging, and reasonable. I have expectations for them, and those expectations are clear. But overall, I want them to see that it is possible to be joyful and to flourish in a world that seems very much the opposite.

Anyways, there have been some interesting events that have taken place over the last month. So I promise you that I will start uploading more and letting you know all about it. In the meantime, however, know that you are in my prayers each morning. All I ask is that you do the same for me.

May God be praised.