Celebrations & Self Sacrifice

Twice a week I teach an English class in the same Muslim community where I teach at the pre-school. There are 9 women who come, including the teacher of the pre-school, and we have the both classes in the main room of her house. We sit round the small

plastic pre-school tables on the little pre-school plastic chairs. Most sessions I take along some snacks, usually some buns or bread from the small bake shop at the entrance of the community, it costs about 30p to buy some for all of us. All of the women have young children and I know that they always let the children eat before they do so I like to make sure that they get a chance to eat too, and everyone knows you can’t really concentrate on an empty stomach!

I really enjoy the English class, the women all have a fair grasp of basic English so it means we can communicate pretty well, they’re also a funny bunch and we laugh a lot.

Last week I found out it was the teacher’s birthday (I’ll call her Ka Sarah, Ka is a term of respect in the Muslim communities) on Tuesday so I bought snacks and chocolate milk for the children in the class, bought a gift and a cake and took along lots of balloons. When I gave out the snacks to the children I asked Ka Sarah to explain that we were celebrating her birthday, she looked at me totally surprised and then told me that she’d forgotten it was her birthday! The children all sang Happy Birthday and we blew up balloons and played colour games with them. They don’t really celebrate birthdays much and they don’t have the same significance that we place on them, I guess if you can’t really afford to eat then buying birthday presents isn’t really high on the priority list. In the English class that followed we ate the cake and talked about birthdays, Ka Sarah is now 46, has a degree in commerce and lives in a slum, with an immediate family of 6, on a government hand out of 1000 pesos a month, around £10.50. Her husband is a fisherman but 4 months ago his boat was confiscated and kept by the Mayor of the neighbouring island as they said he was fishing illegally. I’m not sure of the ins and outs of what happened but he can’t get the boat back so now the family has no way of bringing in any income. The fish he caught was dried in the sun and then sold at market on the weekends. Sometimes now he is able to do some odd jobs around the community to earn a few pesos but his livelihood and ability to provide for his family have been stripped away.

The communities are largely related and Ka Sarah and her husband used to support her sisters and their families, they are now no longer in a position to do that and, as a result, two of the women in the English class will be leaving for Saudi Arabia in December to work as domestic helpers. Both have young children under three and both will leave their husbands and families in order to work abroad to send money home, just so that they can eat.

I have a great time here, it’s easy to get carried away and treat this like a working holiday and sometimes it’s easy to become immune to the poverty but at times like this it really hits home. How priviliged I am, how I’ve never really wanted for anything, a proper home, an education, a job, food when I’m hungry. I know things are so different back home, here and there are worlds apart but I could have been born into poverty and my life could have been so very different. I’m so glad I have this opportunity to help, even though sometimes I feel like I’m not really doing anything. I can’t do anything to stop the ladies from having to go overseas but what I can do is help equip them with language, their confidence in speaking English and mostly, show them that I care. Surely, that’s the most important thing of all.