This week has been all about learning humility. I don't think that I'm a particularly proud person, in the sense of being stubborn or always having to be right. But I do think that lines are easily blurred between blind optimism, ownership in one's work, and a certain kind of pride. I'm plagued by the general feeling of, “Geeze, this is really exciting...I've worked really hard on this, so it's going to be REALLY GOOD!”
It's an easy trap to fall into, and one that sets you up for failure when things don't go the way you've imagined. I don't know why I continue to do this to myself...after all, people in development work say that if you're not yet to Plan G by noon, you're having a productive day. But I'm addicted a youthful idealism that causes me to lay awake at night, dreaming up lesson plans that I deem so brilliant, the world may never be the same again...
So it was with my lesson plan on The Blues. Sadly, one of our young men in the prison group attempted to take his own life about a week and a half ago, while his buddies looked on. I found out about the incident a few days before our meeting, and so I poured all my energies into developing some kind of creative outlet that would give them the opportunity to voice their pain, and hopefully find some communal catharsis after such an intense episode. I spent DAYS on the phone with therapist friends back in the US, scouring the Internet for suicide prevention/understanding resources, and developing a lesson plan based on the Blues.
The idea was that the Blues allow a person to share their emotional burden with the group...it isn't a solitary experience, music making...using the call and response of the old 12-bar Blues format. The leader sings one phrase, and then everyone repeats it back to him on the second chord progression, and then the leader comes to a conclusion at the end. Generally, the Blues tells us that it's okay to be hurting sometimes, especially if we share that pain. As a professor wrote to me, the Blues doesn't say that life isn't painful, but instead helps us feel okay about our pain. I was hoping to give the guys some background on the style of music, and then teach the pattern on the guitar and let the guys have a little jam session.
I downloaded over $30 worth of old Blues classics to play as examples...Nina Simon, John Lee Hooker, Billie Holiday, and many more. I spent about 10 hours translating lyrics into Spanish, and printing them out side by side. I stayed after work for a few hours every day, trying to master the style on my guitar—an instrument I'm only just learning.
And so, yes, I was PROUD of the work I had done on this lesson plan, when we showed up at the prison a week ago, Tuesday. But because of the suicide attempt from a few days before, our session was being observed by new faces—a sociologist, an extra psychologist, and a few others that I didn't even recognize. And as I drew in my breath to begin the lesson I had planned, one of the new faces in the room started in on a looooong tirade about suicide being a sin, that only God can take and give life away, and that in moments of crisis, we need only turn to God and God will take away our pain.
Two hours later, the group was finished, and not one note of the Blues had been played.
I was mad. I admit, it was as much about my own pride as it was about the audacity of what those teenagers were forced to listen to. I'm not arguing with the fact that turning to one's source of faith helps in times of crisis. But that needs to be translated into a tangible way of working through our pain. God doesn't wave a magic wand and take away our pain, but instead works through tangible means—friends, books, exercise, MUSIC—to help us get by.
'What CRAP!,' I thought. 'The lesson plan I prepared was so much more worthwhile than that sermon that incapable woman gave! Who lets these people work with these kids? Don't they know what they're missing out on, having me here and not letting me do my own thing?'
It's easy for thoughts like that to spin out of control. Before long, you're in pretty condescending, arrogant territory. And I must admit that I fumed about it for the rest of the evening. Before leaving the prison, I insisted that the psychologist let me come back the next day for a make up class. You should have seen the angry emails and phone calls I made to my parents and other confidantes back home. “Can you believe how foolish that woman was?,” I said. Boy, did it feel good to know that I was a better teacher than her, by far! And I'm only just getting started!
Self-righteous anger can feel so good, can't it?
The next day, I practiced my Blues guitar until my fingers nearly bled. I was gonna show THEM what a good lesson was. I showed up to the prison ten minutes early. I walked down the dark staircase to the passage with peeling paint and a drippy ceiling, that ends in the solid steel door leading to the prison yard. I knocked confidently on the metal, and the small rectangle at eye level flaps open. He didn't know where the psychologist was. He'd get back to me.
The hallway was getting crowded. Young wives/girlfriends were there, waiting on their conjugal visits, wearing tight clothes and lots of perfume. A little girl clutched her grandmother's hand, waiting to go visit her dad. A guard wearing a very thin Kevlar vest tapped the butt of his assault rifle against the wet floor.
I waited there, guitar, laptop, and translated lyrics in hand, for 55 minutes before I saw the psychologist's face. She was so sorry not to have called, but there was an all-day staff meeting and so there would be no one to supervise our group. I'd have to come back Friday.
At some point in those 55 minutes, my righteous anger from the day before melted into disappointment. It was at that point that I began to see the condescension in my attitude, and realized that I really just wanted to be there with the teens in their time of need. I was truly disappointed that I couldn't offer them what I had prepared.
I went back to the office, tail between my legs, and focused my energies on Thursday's theatre group. We had had a pretty sensational first meeting on Monday, so I thought I could up the ante a little bit on Thursday, and throw out some slightly more challenging exercises. Well, I'm still surfing the teaching learning curve, and Thursday's class was a total bomb. From the outset, the kids froze under the new activities, and gave me deer-in-the-headlights stares for the rest of the class. It wasn't a happy day for me.
Friday came around, and I braced myself for another disappointment. Surely it was better to assume that my extra make up class with the teens wouldn't ever happen, and just be excited if it did. But I became cautiously optimistic, as I packed up my guitar and started out of the office door at 1:55pm for our 2pm class. But then the phone rang. And it was the psychologist. And class was canceled.
This time, I had to laugh. Our class was canceled because the police had detained a Columbian boat in the harbor that was carrying over 2000 kilograms of cocaine. They needed the room I hold my classes in to unload the cargo and sort through the evidence. What can you do?
Saturday's theatre class went better...I try to learn from my mistakes...and I took the day off on Sunday. Monday came around, and you all know how THAT theatre class ended in disaster (see yesterday's blog post). Yesterday, I got to face all THAT music, which was certainly a blow to the pride of a guy who's been lauding himself as “fluent” in Spanish recently. But I thought I'd have the chance for redemption when the regularly scheduled prison session came around yesterday afternoon. I would finally get the chance to present my lesson on the Blues.
The session got off to a good start. We had decided to celebrate the birthdays of all six teens, since it's been a while since they've had a birthday celebration. We had cake, and balloons, and even got a few of them to get up and dance to the rather festive Spanish version of “Happy Birthday.” All good.
Then it was my turn. I told them all about the Blues, and why they make us feel better. I told them how some of the musical roots of the Blues come from Africa—which as African descendants themselves, they appreciated. I then asked for a volunteer to read my translation of an old tune sung by Nina Simone, “Trouble in Mind.” Serendipitously, the young man who tried to take his own life volunteered. He read (in Spanish):
Trouble in mind, I'm blue
But I won't be blue always,
'Cause the sun's gonna shine
In my back door some day.
I'm all alone at midnight
And my lamp is burnin' low
Ain't never had so much
Trouble in my life before.
Trouble in mind, that's true
I have almost lost my mind,
Life ain't worth livin,
Sometimes I feel like dyin'.
Goin' down to the river
Gonna take my ol' rockin' chair
And if the blues don't leave me
I'll rock away from there.
You been a hard-hearted mama
Great God! You been unkind
Gonna be a cold, cold papa
Cause you to lose your mind.
I'm gonna lay my head down
On some lonesome railroad line
And let the two nineteen train
Ease my mind.
Well it's trouble, oh trouble
Trouble on my worried mind,
When you see me laughin'
I'm laughin' just to keep from cryin'.
By the time he finished reading, I'm pretty sure there were tears gathering in the corners of his eyes. We talked for a few minutes about how deep our feelings of pain can be, but that sometimes just by saying them out loud, they don't feel so lonely any more.
“Yes, YES!,” I was thinking. “This is going so well! They really dig it! I'm such a good teacher!”
I asked a co-worker to put on the recording of “Trouble in Mind.” A few feet started tapping. A few heads were swinging back and forth. One of the teens said, “This is really cool.”
GO BABY GO! Slam dunk! Sing it, Nina!
And then it happened. Something horrific. Worse than the cocaine. Worse than the “Suicide is a Sin” sermon. Worse than anything I could have predicted.
The world's biggest RAT---carrier of the Bubonic Plague, eater of dead things, ruiner of lesson plans---ran in the front door and straight into the middle of the group. It was probably about the size and shape of a two-liter soda bottle, with its boa-constrictor tail whipping back and forth. I don't know exactly what happened after that...I think that one of the kids bashed it's head in with a flip-flop, and as it lay twitching on the floor one of the guards skewered it with his rifle's bayonet and tossed it out the open door. All I know is that when the excitement settled, I was still on top of a table, and no one was thinking about Nina Simone.
From there, it was a complete lost cause. My pathetic attempt to refocus the group and get them to sing the Blues together in a circle resulted in nothing but giggles and imitations of the rat's twitching death-throes. I had to have a sense of humor about it...after all, even I can take a hint, that after sermons, cocaine, and rats, some things are just not meant to be.
Here's the real kicker, though. After the rat disaster, one of my co-workers took over with the devotional part of the class. (We are, after all, a religious organization.) Jenny had prepared a few reflections for the group—Power Point presentations that tell life-lesson type stories of the sort one might receive in an email chain letter or a “Chicken Soup For the Soul” book. They were chock-full of smiling puppy pictures, cheesy flash animations of dancing flowers, etc. And would you believe that as I rolled my eyes, the teens sat there and literally Ooooooed and Awwwweeed over these slide shows? “Would you make me a copy of that, Jenny? Where'd you find that, Jenny?”
Praising Jenny on how well her presentation was received, I asked her where she learned to put together such fancy Power Points. She said, “I just download them from free websites, and they're always a big hit! The teens really liked my stuff, didn't they? ”
Well, if I hadn't yet gotten the message that I ought to take myself a little less seriously, It came through loud and clear last night. I had built myself up in my own mind as being such a thoughtful teacher, a radical pedagogist—How lucky those teens were to have me there to teach them! And yet it was the person who downloaded her presentations from the Internet that actually made an impact on the group! Maybe I'm looking at this all the wrong way...
I realized last night, as I was laying in bed, that I had started taking on some of the arrogance that I so frequently denounce in foreign aid workers. Who am I to say that a lesson on the Blues is more culturally appropriate or effective than Jenny's way of teaching?
This brought me to the larger question of purpose. I say all the time that I'm here to learn, to absorb, and to be changed. And yet I've allowed myself to develop a thought process that suggests the opposite. THEY should be learning all of these great activities that I've brought. THEY aren't absorbing any of this exciting teaching style that I'm trying to demonstrate. THEY are still doing things the exact same way...aren't they open to any type of change?
All this doesn't mean that I'm going to put less effort into my lesson plans. But it does mean that I need to be more vigilant about self-evaluating, re-assessing my goals, purposes, and attitudes here. If I wanted to be in control, the master of my own classroom, I should have just signed up to be a teacher in the US and ruled with an iron fist. But that isn't the kind of teaching environment I want to facilitate. I want to be a facilitator of the open exchange of ideas and methodologies. And that means that sometimes I have to let go of my pride and accept that maybe there's a better way to do things than my own way.
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