Teaching English

“I want to learn English,” he said to me. “Can you help me?” This was during a rare moment of peace at the Recycling School for Boys in the heart of Manshiyet Nasr. I could feel intimidation and panic creeping up behind my eyes as I contemplated this task that felt herculean in scope. 

“Umm, sure... I’ll try,” I replied. 

I wasn’t even sure where to start. How do you teach someone an entire language, especially when they aren’t the incommunicative toddler walking around that shares your DNA? Yet I knew I really wanted to help him, this teenage boy who would never get the chance to go to government school and may never have another chance to choose a future besides his family’s recycling business. If he could learn to speak English on a conversational level, it could open doors that would otherwise remain locked and unexplored. But where to begin? 

I know my language well. I’m a writer and an editor, and I understand my native tongue and its idiosyncrasies better than most. I picked up German after 8 months of self study and another 8 months in country; I began teaching myself Egyptian Arabic this summer after feeling compelled to return. Yet throughout all of this, I had never considered teaching until the day I realized that I could use some of this innate ability to help improve someone’s circumstances. I’ve never cared much about advancing a career per se or climbing a corporate ladder or rising through the ranks of government service. I just wanted to find something that made my heart sing and do that. The search has proved long and my goal elusive until I showed up at a dusty school in the middle of a garbage collectors’ community, and after a few impromptu English lessons, watched with pride as my student successfully navigated his first real world English conversation. Every time comprehension dawned in subsequent lessons, I knew that not only had I found a previously unexplored gift within myself, but I had also managed to make someone else’s small, littered world a little bigger. 

For some of us, the world and all its possibilities lay wide open. For others, it is dull and exhausting, and dreams of better things are squelched by the realities of circumstance. But I’ve seen the lights in their eyes when they begin to realize that this might be possible, that they may learn how to communicate and understand a world outside their country’s borders. And then I, too, begin to understand just a little bit more...