Volunteering

As most of you know, in order to keep one of my scholarships, I have to do a pretty decent amount of volunteering. So, while I’m here I will continue to do that. It’s a nice way to practice my French—which isn’t the greatest. I began my service this week at an organization called “Deux Rives.” This association was formed by a group of Algerian students who wanted to aid students of a certain ethnicity with their studies in France. It’s quite an impressive organization with up to a hundred volunteers and about ten full-time workers who help about seventy students or more a week.

While there, I will be teaching/tutoring an English course. I’ve already helped out a few students with their English homework and it has been an immense failure. I tried and tried and tried to explain how forming questions worked and was desperate for it to make sense in French. Ugh. I helped two students who are in their first year of English. First, I cannot understand a word these teenagers say. They use a lot of slang and I don’t think they understand the meaning of e-nun-ci-a-tion. Second, trying to teach English to someone who barely knows the language is very hard. Needless to say, I got a lot of exasperated sighs and eye rolls from both of the students I was trying to help. If that doesn’t make you feel like an idiot, I don’t know what will.

However, there are a few students there who are always excited to meet me. In order to be accepted in to a college (which is often paid for by tax money—college is free), students must take a long, difficult test called the bac. So the students who are in their last year of high school are thrilled to have the help of an English speaker. One student, after I was introduced as an American asked excitedly in English, “You speak English?!” To which I replied, “No. Do you?” Ha. If only I’d had a camera….

Coming in to the neighborhood for the first time, I was pretty terrified to be honest. Not only am I in the English-speaking minority, but in this neighborhood, I’m also in the ethnic minority. I would be shocked to see another white person by Deux Rives. And it seems that everyone else in the neighborhood is always a little surprised to see me. Talk about NERVES. It doesn’t look like the greatest neighborhood, but at least all the students are glad to have my help. It’s a nice change from helping American students who just plain don’t care. And continuing on my anti-American tangent, students here are a lot SMARTER. Their school system is quite a bit more vigorous and it pays off. Many of these students are fluent in at least two languages. It’s impressive and a little intimidating—coming from a person who’s older and can barely speak English correctly every day.

I start my first English course on Wednesday, so wish me luck! We’ll see if I make it through the week without someone strangling me due to frustration. Fabian—the director of the organization—finds my struggle absolutely hilarious. He has offered lots of helps in the form of big, fat books and brushes off my own frustrations with, “It’s good for you!” Yeah…we’ll see about that.