learning from Mosi

 

Mosi was finally focusing on the essay worksheet I had placed in front of him. His distraction was understandable – the community room that held Homework Club was filled to the brim with the boisterous voices of his fellow students and neighbors at Kateri Park. Children of all ages and ethnicities were talking, singing, chatting, laughing, teasing, and most importantly, studying. The adult and teenage volunteers, most of them from Portland State University and surrounding high schools, were seated one or two to a table. Each volunteer had their head bent over a student’s homework, offering the child encouragement and support.

I turned back to Mosi and his essay about a friendly giant.

Mosi was only in the second grade, but he was large for his age, possessing a deep voice and a commanding presence. Mosi seemed to feel that his calling in life was to be ringleader to the rest of the children, so it was challenging to move his attention away from the conversation and homework of his fellow students and back towards the business at hand.

Just as Mosi was finishing up his brainstorming, a teasing little hand tried to snatch his pencil away. It belonged to the tiny and mischievous Abasi, whose innocent face hid a true prankster. Both boys were Somali Bantu. Mosi spoke sharply to Abasi in their mother tongue and received an impertinent reply in return. Though I didn’t understand the language, I could see that the conversation was about to get heated. I made an effort to turn Mosi’s attention back to me.

“Is that Swahili you’re speaking?” I asked. Mosi shrugged his shoulders.

“It’s what we speak at home.”

As an Applied Linguistics student, I had been drawn to Kateri Park because of its immigrant and refugee population. Ten different ethnicities were represented here, Somali Bantu being the majority, along with Ethiopian, Nepali, Burmese Karen, Nicaraguan, Cuban, Russian, Vietnamese and others.

“I think it’s so great that you speak more than one language,” I told Mosi, “I wish I could too.”

“Mmm,” said Mosi, gazing around the room with a neutral expression.

The linguist in me nudged again. “Do you think you’ll want to speak only English when you get older? Do you think you’ll forget your other language?”

Mosi turned to look straight at me, for the first time. “I will never forget.” His young face was suddenly very serious. “I remember everything from before.”

I wanted to ask him if he meant before this family came to the United States, but I reminded myself that I wasn’t here as a linguistics student, but as a tutor, and we returned to his essay.

            Homework Club serves the children living at Kateri Park, a community of cheerfully painted apartments in Southeast Portland developed by Catholic Charities. Homework Club is organized and run by Elisabeth Gern, Kateri Park’s Resident Services Coordinator since 2006.

Homework Club in its current form could not exist without the cheerful and energetic presence of Elisabeth, whose relationship with the children is a marvel to behold. While the volunteer tutors occasionally struggle to keep the children seated and quiet, Elisabeth, though a small woman, will plow into the fray and put the room in order with a tongue that is both firm and good humored. She knows each child by name and can knowledgeably speak of their personality, schoolwork, and family life. Elisabeth’s affection for the children is contagious, as is her belief in each child’s academic success and personal worth.

Although Elisabeth is the heart of Homework Club, she is vocal about the necessity of volunteers, who act as the backbone: “It’s been going on for some time that we’ve got this solid core of people who we can count on twice a week. So every Homework Club day there’s a crew of people who I know are going to be there, supplemented by high school students and community helpers. But the core of it is the capstones. It makes a huge difference. So from being chaotic and unmanageable, it became sustainable. It’s an asset to everybody, to the kids and to the community, and you know, it’s also a really interesting capstone partnership.”

            And indeed it is. My experience with visiting Homework Club and Kateri Park twice a week has been both enjoyable and fascinating. After a few weeks of tutoring, I began to see the value of what we were accomplishing with Homework Club – helping the children with their schoolwork was of course essential, but more importantly it was the act of creating a space in which our time and attention was completely at the disposal of the children. You could tell how much they relished all that focus – despite all their complaining about schoolwork, every day they formed a line outside the door and argued over who got to be the first one to go into Homework Club. 

~ Mary Paleo, March 2014