It’s strange how pliant and attentive they are. I don’t mean to knock the students I worked with back home, but when I was an intern doing pretty much the same thing, it was like pulling teeth. I had to hear lectures from twelve-year-olds about why the book was dumb, I was dumb, school was dumb, and the world was dumb.
It’s probably been the same through the ages, but something about them bothered me. I used to think that kids were growing up too fast, too interested in taking on the trappings of adulthood. Twelve-year-olds got into these fights over boys and dated and they all had smart phones that they’d constantly be checking in class, in flagrant violation of the school rules.
Sitting here with these kids, I realize what growing up too fast really means. I don’t have to hear the stories, and they don’t like to tell them. You can read it in their eyes. When you’re ten and you see your sister step on a land mine, or soldiers drag your mother away, it leaves a mark on your soul.
Young teachers, or interns as I was, I guess, are used to a strange tug-of-war with their students. They want to pull you into their childish world and they want to use you to pull themselves into adulthood. They want you to be a peer and are confused when you’re not. They don’t see where the line is. I was an aide, so I was in a subservient position to the teacher. That really confuses them.
It’s not like that, here. When one of the boys summons his full command of the English language to tell me I look like an angel, he’s not complimenting my looks. To him, I came from heaven.
For my first few months here I felt fat compared to the kids. I started to lean out on the MREs. They’re not bad, if you get the right ones. The vegetarian bean burrito is great. The other stuff, not so much. The chicken stew, my God. Sometimes a bunch of the volunteers get together and dump the nastiest, gloppiest varieties into one big pot, pour in a bottle of hot sauce, and make a disgusting but somewhat more palatable stew.
I really don’t care. There’s nothing for me back where I came from, and these kids need someone like me.
Class drags on until five in the afternoon. Tomorrow I don’t have to get up—local teachers provide some of their education in their native dialect for three hours in the morning. Melissa likes to get up, unfortunately. She’s read Charlotte’s Web about five times and has these stacks of lesson plans she’s never going to use. It’ll be a victory if we can get them to grasp the basics of the story.
They’re all smart as hell, they take to the computers and tablets we provided like fish to water, they just don’t have the tools to understand. I’m amazed that kids who have been through so much can even bring themselves to care about the hackneyed wisdom of a talking spider.
I mean, to me, Charlotte’s Web is just a cartoon. I didn’t even read the book until I came here.
Exhausting as it is, I still feel good about myself at the end of the day. Older boys and girls, kids really, have come back from the fields and construction projects to walk their siblings and cousins home. Some of these kids are the heads of their households, and take care of their younger family and their grandparents at the same time.
I get a lot of attention from the boys but quietly and graciously ignore it, doing my best to greet them and wish them well in broken Solkovian. I speak the language at about a fourth-grade level now, pretty good for six months in. Melissa is a better speaker. She’s been here for a year.
I’m not really afraid anything will happen to me, but we have a buddy system. The two of us walk back to the volunteer camp together. Along the way, Brad shows up.
He tests Melissa’s vows of chastity. It’s funny to me how blatantly and obviously she gets horny just at the sight of him. I can practically hear her getting wet. She turns beet red, stares at his package and coughs, then keeps looking at him as he draws near.
The man has a similar effect on me. He’s been with the org for two years now, and however he looked when he left, it’s given him a great body and a rich, dark tan that contrasts with his sandy hair in a strangely macho way, like some fifties bodybuilder from Muscle Beach. He’s covered in dust and soot and it only makes the effect more intense, like a sexy construction worker from a calendar. Short shorts show off long, carven legs without an ounce of fat, bulging muscles, and an ass that could crack bricks between his cheeks. The tank top he wears shows off his massive shoulders and pulls tight around his thick, broad chest.
I’m sure if Melissa could, she’d run over and lick his stomach. She’d be pushing me out of the way. Conceptually, anyway. I’m not really that interested in him. He’d be good for a lay, but he’s too…cheery. One day he and Melissa are destined to settle down, have passionate missionary sex, and breed a new generation of missionaries.
Heh, missionary.