Open your eyes

Denissa and I spent the morning in a lovely little cafe in town, eating French croissants, sipping heavenly cafe-au-lait, and planning our lessons for the next few days (there are some good parts about being in a French dominion).
At 4:00 I went to my longest-running children's class, where the kids are starting to understand the concept of "no hitting". There were only 6 kids when I arrived there but I started anyway because I have discovered that the longer you wait for people, the longer it takes for them to come, but if you just start, they magically appear. And sure enough, the kids slowly started filtering in as the singing started. By the time I got to story time, I started to realize that there were more children than usual and the noise was steadily increasing, so when we got into a circle to play the game, I made a quick count...I was surrounded by 23 little children, not including the 5 babies who came with their older sisters. To say it was chaotic would be an understatement, and I am proud to report I am going hoarse! But there is no way to turn the children away...life here happens outside and events are for everyone...not only do we not want to turn children away, it would be impossible; they would only stand on the sidelines and sing along.
After the children's class we wait for an hour to have our junior youth class. It is never a lonely wait. One thing that holds true for children everywhere is that they all need physical affection; they all want to be held, hugged, patted, squeezed, any kind of touch. In some cultures however, like this one, it is not commonly done, and now that the children have figured out that we want to be close to them, they won't let us go. We never have a hand free, and there is usually one of two children on our backs. It never gets annoying either.
It was the first night for my first junior youth group. I was very excited and it turned out to be a wonderful evening. There are eight junior youth, all incredibly bright, fun, and enthusiastic. When we began reading from the book we'll be using, one of the boys very adamantly stated he did not want to read. I agreed but when it came time to pair up for group reading I took the boy aside and asked him to read, which he did! The only problem was that he was not confident in his reading and so it was slow and he occasionally stumbled over some words. He tried to guess the words instead of making a mistake reading the syllables. I silently cursed an outdated education system, offered him some encouragement and he continued. By the end of the class he was asking if he could be next to read.
The smile that appears on a face, be it adult, youth or child, when they realize they can do something, is a reward worth more than all the money and jewels on the planet.
At one point during the class, one of the boys sitting next to me said something funny, so I reached over to pat him on the head, and he automatically pulled away and closed his eyes. I almost died! It was at that moment I realized what all these kids go through at home. I apologized profusely, stopped the class, and re-explained that I would never hit them and why I didn't want them to hit each other. It was a real eye-opener.
At 9:00, when I got up to leave, they all started asking "Can we have this tomorrow?" "Can we keep our books?" "What's our homework?" "Why can't we go to 10 o'clock?" I am very excited to see what will come from this group.


Lesson Learned:
Sometimes people want advice, and sometimes they just want to be listened to. It's hard to know the difference. It is even harder to be a good listener. But the hardest of all is trying not to indulge pointless complaining and backbiting, since that only causes disunity and discontent.