The young and the old (2)

It's easier to write about them than to prepare lessons for them. I am talking about the 17 kids whom I am teaching Maths, Music, Arts and Sport, for a total of two months. All afternoon I tried to figure out how to make them understand the formula for calculation of area; in between I tried to fish some fancy games out of the www for the sport lesson tomorrow. Three hours of thinking and fishing have last but not least generated a half way decent plan for tomorrows' maths and sports lesson. While preparing the lessons, thoughts of who and how these kids are crossed my mind, too.

Over the past years, children didn't play a role at all in my life. My cousins turned into young adults few years ago, at university I was surrounded by a bunch of agemates and slightly older professors, and the social environment in Somaliland and Afghanistan was characterized people from 25 years of age upwards, uniformily behaving like unmarried bachelors. Some of them might have had and have children at home, but as soon as one sets foot onto Afghan, or Somalian soil, those kids tend to evaporate like the rest of those things that remind us of a life elsewhere.

And all of a sudden, I am surrounded by kids a few hours a day. There are moments when I look at them and wonder "who are these little aliens"? There are also moments when I look at them and memories of my own childhood come up again (after all, I learned how to read and write and few other things in the same school about twenty years ago). But more so there are moments when I just smirk over the thousands of questions which they ask every day. Over all these years I have forgotten how much children can ask. Every second sentence which comes out of their mouth tends to start with "teacher, can I ask you something?". If they are polite, they add a quick "Johanna" after "teacher". But usually it's just "teacher". Some questions are easy to answer; others require some thinking; but there are also questions which put me into a moral dilemma. Like recently, when a girl asked me "Teacher, which part of the cigarette is the one that has to be light up; the yellow or the white?" I mean, I don't want them to burn their lips, at the same time I can't really answer the questions as this would probably bring them one step closer to smoking. In this particular case I tried to answer with a "you know, you shouldn't even think about these things.... bad cigarettes!". Another time I was asked by one boy from India about my husband (he knows that I am pregnant). Should I tell him that I am actually not even together with the father of my soon to be child? And yet another time, I was asked whether I had been drunk already in my life. Lying or telling the truth?

Sometimes there are also moments when I am just desperately longing for my previous job, where I could chose to interact only with my computer if I felt moody. And if on moody days, the computer behaved moody as well, I could simply press five seconds on the start buttom, and shut it down. You can't quite do that with kids. They don't seem to have these magic five second buttoms to make them shut up. Instead, the louder I talk, the louder they talk. They don't even have mercy when my voice is already raspy.

But what's the most amazing thing about being surrounded by kids, is that I all of a sudden feel adult. Over all these years, I felt young, and often was younger then the people around me. Being and feeling young was also something like a protection; if something went wrong, I could plead with my age; telling myself I was still in a learning process. Now I am standing in front of children, daily, and they don't see me as somebody young; for them, I am an adult as their parents are, somebody who has to answer their million questions, somebody they can test for how strict she is; somebody whom they can show and explain their Ipods (that's where they go wrong: Ipods aren't just for kids!). But truly, for the first time since many years, I feel that I am not young anymore, but rather somebody who is about to have her own family and be an adult like all the other adults I see around here.