Good teachers can teach their subject with competence and enthusiasm. They know the ins and outs of their material and they display a genuine passion for the topic at hand. Great teachers, however, take it a step further. While covering a specific academic subject, great teachers also manage to give lessons in the most important subject of all: life. They themselves can see the big picture, and they bring out their students’ abilities to do the same. I have had a handful of great teachers in my life, and I am happy to say that, after only two weeks of being here, I have one more to add to the list.
I have to admit, before sitting down for my first one-on-one Spanish class, I had absolutely no idea what to expect. Our classroom at El Nahual is a large room on the second floor with only a thin layer of aluminum (I think. I don’t know my metals) panels separating our heads from the elements. There are eight tables scattered throughout the room with two cheap plastic chairs on each side, one for the teacher and one for the student. Several wooden Mayan masks watch us as they hang on the wall alongside a few naturey paintings – sunsets and forests and the like.
I arrived a half hour early on my first day with Andy and Beth. At eight o’clock, a short, slightly gordita Guatemalan woman wearing a zip-up hooded sweatshirt, blue jeans, and white basketball sneakers sat down across from me. She looked slightly out of breath and she was perspiring under bangs, but her movements were all controlled and confident. “Hola. Buenas Dias, Tom. Me llamo Francis…” and that’s how it began.
Nothing too spectacular happened on the first day of class. I cracked a couple jokes and she laughed. She played along and poked fun at me and my fake-egotism. That would change.
Before I knew it, we were still making jokes and telling funny stories, but our conversations got much heavier. By day two, she told me about the problems plaguing Guatemala – the corrupt and misleading government, the severe distrust lingering between towns and neighbors after the civil war, the inequality in education (a decent school costs about 1300Q a month and most parents make about 1400Q a month), the endless oppression of the Mayans, the lack of education in the countryside and the consequent over-reproduction of the family, machismo and how it holds women back, foreign domination in the past (by Spain) and today (US companies), and the list could go on. She only alluded to how she was connected to all of these problems; her weary eyes, however, told me that she carried their weight on a daily basis. Listening to her tell me about these issues in Spanish was difficult enough; trying to put myself in her shoes was impossible.
As time went on, sure, we covered the present, past, and imperfect tenses, prepositions, and a long list of idiomatic expressions, but we also covered so much more. I would tell Francis about my family, friends, and Julie, and she would remind me how important it is to keep in touch with the people closest to me in my life. I asked her about migration to the
It wasn’t until our last two days together that Francis told me her story, and it was then that I realized how much she embodies her slogan for the Guatemalan people. Throughout our nine days of class together, she always seemed to be walking that fine line between appreciating whatever life has offered to the fullest and breaking down from carrying all that life has piled on her shoulders. When she was sixteen she faced the death of her mother and the subsequent abandonment of her father. She got back up. She worked all day to take night classes where she was ridiculed for being a woman. She kept moving forward. She asked me not to share the details of her marriage, so suffice it to say that she now lives alone with her three daughters – aged 13, 10, and 6. She gets up every morning with a will to live.
What impressed me most is that, despite these setbacks, she can still laugh at my stupid stories about Gina and her boyfriend and me being pulled over by the cops for “taking pictures of kids.” In one of our conversations, she told me that we all have problems in life, but we have to remember the problem is never bigger than us. Never. Even if all the doors around us appear closed, “siempre hay una ventana por donde entra la luz.” There is always a window for the light to enter.
Francis, if I ever feel overwhelmed by the problems that life will throw at me, may the memory of you always be my window.
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