The Presentation of the English Club

Besides my responsibilities as a teacher at the University, I am to head up an English Club.

And in order to introduce such a club, it was necessary (as I was informed) to have students do all sorts of presentations. To read poetry and other aspects of culture. This turned into a big deal when all I wanted to do was just tell studetns when and where to show up. Geesh.

This thing got scheduled and rescheduled almost entirely based on the fact that the Director wasn't around or that I didn't find students to read poems in both Russian and English (had I been told...).

Anyway, this thing finally got doen and it went fine as far as I could tell, but it solidified something that I had been beginning to feel for some time... I love the students, and I dare say they are my favorite thing about being here.

It has been impossible for me not to compare this experience to that of my time as a VISTA. Recently I talked to another PCV my age about her prior experience as a VISTA and it wasn't long before her eyes welled up with tears, evidence of how moving it was for her. Here we feel our value comes from being foreign. As VISTAs our value was in being ourselves.

I did not think that here I would ever be anything beyond a "Peace Corps Volunteer," but I have to say that I was wrong. And this presentation only emphasized that.

Students were slated to read something about food from three different countries: Great Britain, America, and Ukraine. (I only asked for volunteers to read, as I do not like the common practice of commanding students to do something). Reading these texts out loud, I quickly found a strong cultural bias about the habits of Americans.

"Americans eat a lot," reads the very first sentence. "They eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner," it continued. I stopped, lookeda t my class and said, "and you don't eat three meals a day? What they are trying to say is that Ameircans are fat." Of course at that, my students started laughing. They laughed nearly every time we practiced the reading out loud for the presentation. But it really agitated me. British cuisine is good and American food is only noted in terms of how much we consume? What kind of BS is that?

On the day of the presentation, the student reading this text stood up in front of the large room and began, "Americans eat like everybody else..." and I caught her sidewise glance at me.

It is a moment like that (and again, the tact that all my students volunteered) that lets me know that things like student empowerment and critical thinking can and do exist here. That I might be me first, volunteer second.