Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [50]
The class actually had twenty-five kids, too many for one teacher. Grace was an excellent teacher, but there wasn't enough of her to go around. Many kids who were eager to work couldn't get the help they needed. For this story I chose to describe only ten of the kids. I picked both kids whose parents were doing a good job making choices in America and kids whose parents were choosing all the wrong things. And I picked kids who varied in resilience and overall adjustment to America.
SYCAMORE SCHOOL
The number one thing is to care for children.
CLASS ROSTER:
Abdul Ignazio Ly Trinh Deena
Pavel Khoa Mai Walat Fatima
September 6, 1999
Sycamore Elementary School is a three-story redbrick building just off a busy street that is lined with a McDonald's, Arab and Mexican markets, liquor stores, pawnshops, and a Vietnamese karaoke bar. The houses around the school are small, close together, and dilapidated. Police cars cruise the area. Unemployed men stand on the corners and in the alleys. The school was built for the children of Czechs and Germans, but it now welcomes students of all colors and ethnic groups.
Walking in the first day, I admired a sycamore tree with its sheltering white branches and big greeny gold leaves. There is something about the shape of a sycamore that reminds me of embracing arms. On the playground, a Latino boy scored in a vigorous soccer game and his team shouted and high-fived each other. Soccer is the universal solvent in Lincoln—Vietnamese, Mexican, Haitian, Romanian, and Serbian kids all like soccer.
Inside the school, a boy who looked like a biker's kid, wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt, watched a girl with dreadlocks twirl in circles, singing to herself. A teacher listened to an Arabic-speaking mother in a hijab. The mother was surrounded by her four wide-eyed kids, the youngest of whom clung to her skirt. The teacher imitated talking on a phone, then she wrote down a phone number and handed it to the mother.
I walked past a sign that said YOU HAVE ONLY ONE CHANCE TO HAVE A CHILDHOOD. I examined pictures of houses from all over the world—a Thai houseboat, Panamanian hutches, a Somali camp—and a display of macaroni-and-cereal necklaces, some of which had been nibbled on.
I signed in at the front office and a third grader named Judy Running Wolf escorted me to a portable classroom, a trailer outside the main building beside the clothing and food distribution center. My new class was a ragtag group, dressed in Salvation Army clothes, with an amazing array of bad haircuts. Most of them looked between eight and eleven, although some might have been small twelve-year-olds.
They were holding Village Inn menus and practicing how to order. The kids giggled and pointed at the glossy pictures of cheeseburgers and blueberry pie. In a dozen languages they discussed the pictures as if they were rare objets d'art. These kids came from many religious traditions and had food taboos and preferences. Some kids don't eat lettuce. Others didn't like milk. But today several ordered pretend hamburgers and boasted they had eaten before at McDonald's. Others ordered the most expensive dishes on the menu and bragged about how much it cost.
Their teacher watched them converse. Grace was a pretty woman in her late thirties. She didn't miss much and nothing rattled her. She spoke softly, laughed easily, and kept the room reasonably calm without making threats. As the kids ordered pretend meals, she told me a little about each of them.
Grace's biggest worry was Abdul, a beautiful kid with nut-colored skin and deep dimples. He was an Iraqi boy who had watched his younger brother freeze to death in the snow when his family walked barefoot across mountains into Turkey. Possibly he was brain damaged from gas attacks during the Gulf War. Abdul rarely did his work and he didn't seem to connect with anyone. Other teachers thought he should be in special education classes, but Grace wanted to give him a chance to adjust. She said many of the ELL kids look like special education kids at first, but then