Old kids

My kids here are old. It is mandatory to attend middle school here and at around fourteen, the choice is theirs whether or not to continue. Or the choice is made for them. Students have to pay to attend school. From what I can gather, it costs around $200 a semester to attend the public high school where I work. Most of the kids are on scholarships. I was surprised that a lot of my students don't look like kids, they look like men. Many of them stated their age as "twenty". One "kid" tails me around school, he is not in my classes and his attempts to practice English with me verge on sexual harassment. He looks about twenty-five. While riding to school in the car of a fellow teacher, we saw this "kid" in the street. "He's one of my first year students" the teacher told me. First year? How old would he be when he finishes, thirty? "A lot of them take breaks after secundaria" he explained "and end up working a few years and then returning to school".

I had some secret, old kids in my U.S. school too. I remember the day my beloved Keen told me that her "American age" was seventeen, but that she was secretly twenty-one. "But Mawoo, your brother, is the same age?!" I asked, bewildered. "I'm confusing you" she said with a smile. "My father had many wives in Sudan, when one would get pregnant, the rest would try to get pregnant too. We were born six months apart". She went on to tell me about her trip from Sudan to Egypt to await visas to enter the U.S. "I thought that Mawoo's mom invited me to come because she wanted to help me. Turns out it's easier for girls to find work in Egypt than men. I was thirteen. Men chased me down the street, calling me 'chocolate', ya feel me?" September 11th happened while they waited for their visas, leaving them trapped in Egypt for years. Keen entered the American system without having ever entered a classroom or knowing a word of English, she didn't even know the Roman alphabet. She and Mawoo were handed an English competency test on arrival, they took it, sat with it for about fifteen minutes, then turned it back in, blank. Keen and I spent weeks running from the school the minute after the school buses left to hunt for a free place for her to live after she refused to marry the man her family had sold her to. They were angry and had taken to locking her out of the house.

There was also the lovely Tab. She used a Farsi word for "smile" instead of her real name, because when pronounced, it sounded like "fuck" and all the kids would laugh at her. They tried to put her out of school when they discovered that she was twenty-two, mere months before her high school graduation. She fled Afghanistan with her mother and brothers after her father was killed by the Taliban and spent the next few years as a child laborer in Pakistan. She also entered the American system with one year of "formal" education and was facing removal because of her age. They didn't want to remove the violent students, the chronically absent students, the do-nothing students, but my principal, who stated that his favorite book was "The Kite Runner", wanted to remove her. To his credit, the action was avoided and Tab and I managed to win her a place in a nice, private, liberal arts college.

Sometimes I think the only good I did in three years of public education was work with those two girls. I had a fantasy about starting a charter school for non-traditional students; refugees whose education had been interrupted, a state and federally funded institution that would have higher age limits and a powerhouse ESOL program. I remember the Nepalese girl from Bhutan that I knew. "I went to those classes in the refugee camp. I thought it would help me, I thought it would mean something. Here I have nothing". She was too old (twenty) to enter a public high school in the U.S., but couldn't go anywhere without a high school diploma. The last time we spoke, she was supporting a family of six working as a maid in a hotel chain.

It felt a little cool a few days ago and I finally decided to take a jog. I have been told that wearing shorts can attract unwanted attention here, so I instead donned the skin tight exercise pants that I bought at Wal Mart. It was a little awkward running around the small dirt track while people ate tacos at the stands that line the park, watching the crazy American woman who thinks physical labor is recreation. After a few laps, a dog lunged at me, barking with teeth barred. It was kind of embarrassing to scream out loud like that and I quickly ran out of the park and back to my house.

The temperature abruptly dropped in the middle of the day at school and it rained, for five minutes. "Aren't you cold, profe?" the students asked me, mysteriously clad in jackets, not just jackets, winter coats with fur collars. They don't even have lockers, where did these coats come from? As Roberto and I rode out of school, a couple of students on the street corner started calling "Hey profe! Hey profe!" grinning and waiving at Roberto. "Gaaay!" called Roberto from his window, leaving the boys to shriek and slap each other in the twilight.