During my first week in Athens volunteering with Kitab World
Education I had very few students. (Kitab is pronounced Kit-aab with the
emphasis on the aab) Last term, when I
wasn’t here, Kitab offered regular daily
English and Greek lessons but they became too popular and attracted so many and
such a wide diversity of students that the neighbors complained. Our class size
has now been limited to five. We don’t want to be evicted from this building
where we rent both a classroom and a volunteer apartment, so we’re toeing the
line.
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Kitab classroom - quite nice,
especially now that we have electricity! |
Yes, diversity was apparently part of the problem: I’m told
that many Athenians, because of historic connections, have some sympathy with
Syrians, but they’re less welcoming of people from Afghanistan and of black Africans.
We still bring in students of all
ethnicities, but in small numbers.
Also, volunteers are becoming harder to find and we’re now
short of teachers. I’m essentially the only one, and I’m not a qualified
teacher, more of a seat-of-the-pants sort of person. It certainly pays to be
flexible round here.
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| View from classroom window |
Yesterday, for instance. I had scheduled a 9:30 English
session with staff at the Hope Café. The café’s a meeting place for refugees
that offers a free lunch, coffee and by-appointment clothing distribution. The
staff are mainly Syrian teenage boys who volunteer their time to make and serve
coffee, clean tables, and do other café jobs. They, like most of the refugees
here, want to learn English because the language is seen as - probably is - the
door to a new life in a European country. They begin work at 11am, so I’m
offering 9:30 lessons several days a week.
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| Volunteers at Hope Café |
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| Art at Hope Cafe |
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| Five kilos of lentils cleaned by Julia at Hope café |
The first day, eight people attended, not all of them staff,
but who cares? Adnan, my advanced student, joined us, despite having said he
wouldn’t. None of the others was a complete beginner but the range was
huge! We had fun. The second day there
were three and the third day, one.
The third day was yesterday, which is the day I’m trying to describe.
So I have this one guy from the staff, Radi, for an English
lesson and we talk about the parts of the body.
Perhaps the main achievement is getting him to understand the difference
between “write” and “draw”. He wanders off after a while. All this time the early morning business of
the café – cleaning, organizing, food prep – is going on around us and at another
table my colleague Mary Ellen is conducting a lesson with half a dozen Kurdish
people. What are they doing in the café
before opening time? Well, Mary Ellen met them here a few days ago and arranged
these lessons. She’s focusing on the vocabulary of cooking, because they’re
right beside the kitchen, which is open to the café.
Radi’s disappeared but some new people have appeared at my
table: the café’s not really open but Sam is letting people in and I’ve been
joined by a Syrian woman in hijab and long gown, and her three young
children. The mother doesn’t reply to my
greeting, just smiles; then the oldest child turns to her and signs rapidly.
“Oh” I say, and touch my hands to my ears questioningly. “Yes” says the little
girl – we’ll call her Amanda – “she doesn’t hear or speak.”
Amanda, at 9 years old, has an excellent command of English.
I predict for her a job as a translator. But today she’s interested in coloring:
I have coloring pages of Dora the Explorer and Ben Ten, both of whom Amanda
knows from pre-war Syria. This reminds me of my motivation to come and
volunteer: I realized that these people had lives just like ours until one day the bombs came.
It could happen anywhere.
Back from the café, at 12 noon I have a session in the Kitab
classroom with Karwan, an Iraqi Kurd of about 26 years old who’s here in Athens
with his wife and three children. This is his third lesson. He speaks little
English but today he asks for something specific. He gives me to understand
that he knows how to write the capital letters of the English alphabet, and he
demonstrates this for me, but he’s unsure of writing the small letters. So
that’s what we do, or rather, he does and I encourage, for an hour and a half,
writing whole lines of each letter very carefully. He’s really dedicated. We
get to Q before time is up and he takes the rest home to do before his next
lesson. I admire his persistence, it’s
a good way to learn!
I think that’s the day’s last lesson but I’m wrong. Just
after three the doorbell goes. “That’ll be your pizza” I say to colleague
Deena who’s cleaning the kitchen. “I’ll run down and get it.” No pizza. Instead, there’s a young man and woman
with a baby in a pram (baby carriage).
“English lesson,” she says “I’m here for English lesson, 3 o’clock.” I’m mystified. “Kitab?” I ask “Aida?
Barbara?” naming the organizers.
The young woman smiles and walks in. Hmm, I wonder what’s going on here. I take them into the classroom, leave them
there and run upstairs (in the elevator/lift) to ask in the volunteer
apartment “Anyone expecting students for
a lesson?” No one is. We decide that
they were probably coming at this time last term and were expecting the
schedule to be the same, which it isn’t, as there is no schedule (or timetable
if you’re British). Never mind, I can, so I do: I go back to the classroom and
start a lesson.
As with all first sessions, I try to figure out where they
are with English. The woman, Mary, is Afghan and she’s at an advanced level;
the baby, Leo, is four months old and speaks only the universal language of the
very young; the man, Zoran, is Iranian and speaks barely a word of English but
is very loud and wants to dominate the proceedings. We talk about family: simple
sentences about mother, father, brother, sister and so on. I invite them to
come back at 3pm the next day. Teaching two such different levels in one lesson
will be a challenge but since they’re a couple it should work, with her helping
him.
Now I really have finished work for the day. My Greek
volunteer friend Vera calls round at 5. We drink tea on the balcony, then go out to eat. I unload some of my multifaceted day on her
and she listens patiently. The food is mediocre, but the wine and the company are
good.
And that’s a Kitab day!
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Hi-tech: Mary Ellen has her grandchildren in Minnesota
talk with the refugee children here in Athens. |
