Crossroads

The teacher assistant can’t really dance and yet she’s dancing. Nobody knew this was going to happen and still it feels as if it was meant to, while, don’t get me wrong, none of this should have ever occured. 

I’m standing at the crossroads of hell. 

We are locked inside a windowless white room so we can be anywhere. Any place we like, no place, not here: we choose. 

I look to the left, I look to the right. 

We shall move around, own the space and clap to the music. We shall not move in a straight line. It is ok to step away from the walls. 

There’re hands to grab me on every side. 

I translate once and then we all just start moving, grudgingly at first, bashfully. M has neither Spanish nor need for it. She has turned into something between waves and a radioactive particle splitting people up, never still, and always in the right place. I must have looked like a drunken parrot, but was too close to be sure. Stop. 

I’m trying to protect what I keep inside.

Gazes lift and limbs loosen up. There 's laughter. Time is watching, letting us steal from it. We shake and share and offer our names and moves to the group. We let ourselves be seen. Our fingers touch and the walls are so far now.

Some say the devil be a mystical thing. 

We have long left the windowless white room, located in Tapachula, Chiapas, México, Southern border, migration hot-spot. More specifically, inside a refuge for people from Central America who seek asylum.  

I’ll save my soul, save myself. 

Concerns

Nguenyyiel. Refugees. Refugee camp. South Sudan. War. I just can’t picture it. Visualizing it is still near to impossible even after weeks of reading about it, or what’s worse: the more I read the more complex it all gets and thus harder for me to imagine. 

I also read that important international organizations, the kind that have many acronyms in their names, agree that education in refugee camps is of paramount importance because it restores a certain sense of normalcy to children, in addition to helping them to become productive members of society.

Leaving issues about normality aside, I found it hard to reconcile this statement with the appalling statistics we are presented with a few lines later about fear, violence and hunger. 

Confession: Even though I have been a teacher for some years, I can’t really say I know what education is, regardless of my serious attempts to face the question. 

What I do know: At Nguenyyiel there are children, there are teachers, there is some sort of school and my task is to help the teachers from that school provide a better education to those children. 

What I don’t know: What to do. What kind of curricula is relevant in situations like these? What deserves to be called education in those cases? What can you ask from them and what should you offer children who have been first hand witnesses of the worst sides of men?

Right now I chose to weave through dialogue with questions that can help us find each other. If freedom was to be a colour, which one would it be? If family was to be an animal, what animal would it be? What about peace? However, there is one that sticks with me: If education in this site was to be a bird, could it fly?