Foreigners
The English students took turns introducing themselves. By the third class, they had enough rudimentary knowledge to state their name and where they came from. “My name is Boris and I am from the Soviet Union,” said Boris who was from Russia. “My name is Maria and I am from Mexico,” she said, dressed in her brown corduroy jacket and big poofy hair. The class of ‘92 was a diverse array of foreigners, ages ranging from late teens to early sixties, with most squarely in the middle bracket. As Jonas the instructor called up on one student at a time, he was greeted with one name and one foreign country after another. It did not escape him that most of them had come from countries torn up by war, conflict, and poverty. It did not escape Jonas that these people had been uprooted from their homes. Now, here he was, tasked with helping them get acclimated to their new home in the U.S.. Each night, when he’d come in to greet his class, he would always be surprised by the presence of those who arrived early to sit in their desks, even before he had shown up. There was Elena, the pregnant one from El Salvador. Always ready to learn with her neatly filled out workbook at hand. Elena was by her own admission, months down the line when she had learned more english, a slow learner herself. At least linguistically. But she was determined to get those words down. The genderless verbs. The silent k’s and g’s. The nonsensical similarity of words like colonel and kernel, in spite of their spelling disparities. As the weeks went on, Jonas recognized her as a most dedicated student, always willing to help and inform those other hispanics around her who had trouble grasping the week’s task. One day after class had concluded, Elena approached Jonas and asked him a question in her still unsophisticated level of English.
“Mr. Jonas, thank you very much for teach us English.”
“Your welcome, Elena,” he replied.
“My family would like to invite you to our house for dinner.”
Jonas accepted the invitation and went downtown to a shoddy apartment building, where Elena was living with her husband, their two-year old daughter, and her husband’s aunt. Four souls, and soon to be five, were living in a tight situation with barely any breathing room. It was just so cramped. Elena made some money on the side cleaning houses, while her young husband looked for work trimming trees from time to time. Jonas was charmed by the experience of the visit, and appreciated gaining insight into what his students’ lives were like. He hopes that maybe if he could improve his teaching abilities, he might help them find better opportunities to thrive.