TRUST me, you’ll SEE….

 

Two months here now.  One successful visa run… for me at least.  We’ll see how Char’s goes.  Things are changing.

I’m starting to see change in the kids we’re working with.  Although it’s slow, and often times painful, change is happening.

One of the schools we work with is particularly difficult.  I don’t know what makes the kids in this school so different from others, but these kids are mean.  Mean with their words and mean with their fists.  They are so violent.  All of our sessions with these kids have been trying to get them to understand that when they are with us, violence (whether physical or verbal) is not tolerated.  We make sure they understand that it is their choice and if they choose to behave in such a disrespectful manner, then they chose to accept the consequence.  More often than not, they end up choosing to accept the consequences.

A couple of weeks ago, however, I caught a small glimmer of hope.  They come along every so often and when they do, they warm my heart and encourage me to keep going.  We were doing a trust walk with the kids.  We have them pair up and one person in each pair is blindfolded.  The seeing partner then has to guide their blinded partner through a series of obstacles or down a path, but they cannot touch their blind partner.  It must be done verbally. 

Now this was our second week attempting a trust walk with this group.  During the first attempt the week before, we learned that when sixth graders a blindfolded, it must release some kind of chemical that causes them scream and thrash and punch and kick and to break loose all manners of hell.  Having learned that lesson, we were quick to review our expectations of their behavior and their choice to participate before we let them put on the blindfolds.

It went much better the second time around.  Kids successfully led their partners through doorways and around chairs with only minor injuries.  Then we switched so each partner got to experience each role.

Afterwards, we sat down to debrief and discuss our experience.  We talked about listening and how hard it can be when there’s people screaming all around us, and how we can remedy that problem.  We talked about how listening can build trust.  More often than not when we begin to talk about how to apply what we’ve learned in this activity to our own lives, the younger kids say something to the effect of “we can help blind people without touching them.”  Very true, says I.  While that is an obvious, correct, and for most kids, un-relatable answer, in this case it held some water.

You see, in their sixth grade, they actually have a blind classmate.  So instead of these kids pumping out answers like “help blind people,” what we got was “It must be hard to be blind and always having to trust other people to tell you where to go.”  And “Achmed (the blind kid) has it tough, we should be nicer to him.”  Of course at this point, my colleague and I are beaming with pride, not only because they get it, but because now they have taken the conversation on themselves.

They go on to tell us that the other kids in Achmed’s class are not very nice to him.  They purposely guide him into walls and trip him on stairs, and how Achmed will always take the blame as if it’s his fault.  The more they explained to us how unfairly Achmed was being treated, the more infuriated they became at the injustice of it all.  Back and forth they were sharing of how hard and scary it had been for them to trust their partner not to crash them and how hard it would be to have to do that every day, all day.  Then one kid had an idea.  “We can take way better care of Achmed than his classmates can, can you get him transferred to our class?”

WHAT?!?

Well, turns out we couldn’t get Achmed transferred, but they promised to look out for him when they could and they said they’d talk to the other kids.

Just to see this group of kids realize someone else’s hardship and consider someone else above themselves… that was HUGE.  And we haven’t seen that selflessness since then, but it’s one small step in the right direction.