Excited to Learn

I come from a family of teachers.  Both of my grandmothers were teachers and all three of my sisters are as well.  


Now my oldest and my younger sister are spending three weeks of their summer break to volunteer to teach in Kenya.  I'm not sure what organization they went with, but in essence what they are doing is volunteering their time to try to help provide an education for children who otherwise wouldn't get one.


It's only been two days since they arrived at the airport in Nairobi, but already it seems to have been a bit of culture shock.  

When I talked to Dad earlier today, he said that my sisters had called him this morning after arriving at the school.  They didn't really know what to expect, so when 40 young girls came running to meet them, smiling, and looking for hugs it was a bit overwhelming.  But those kids were excited to meet their temporary teachers.  That kind of enthusiasm is, well, pretty absent in a country with compulsory education.

But imagine where we would be if we didn't get to go to school for free.  Where if we wanted to learn how to read or write we would have to figure it out ourselves or pay for lessons.  Or where girls aren't supposed to go (or aren't allowed to go) to school.  Those kids don't have to imagine it, and they're so enthusiastically grateful for the chance to go to school that they couldn't wait for my sisters to get out of the car before running to meet them.

I wish the middle class here in the States could look around more often at what we have and realize how sweet a deal we have.  Our problems are not like the problems in many other places in the world.  We get to go to school for free K-12.  We get to be insulated from wildly fluctuating food prices.  We have the choice of having one car or two or take a bus or ride a bicycle.  We can choose to grow a vegetable garden in our backyard, or porch, or windowsill.  We are free from having to seriously worry about the supermarket being blown up in the middle of a grocery trip.  Hell, we even have supermarkets to begin with.

When we in the middle class get a pay cut or lose our job, we look at changing our shopping habits, eliminating cable television from the budget, selling a car, downsizing to a smaller house, holding a yard sale, selling things online, eating at restaurants less often, cutting out the data plans on the cell phones, cutting out the land-line telephone, or even God forbid cutting off internet service.  How lucky we are to have been born in a country where those are the "sacrifices" we make in hard times.

We can barely fathom cutting out a meal (or two) from the day.  Or not sending our children to school.  

I'm not saying that we shouldn't strive to make things better for ourselves or work hard to take advantage of all the great benefits we get from living in a wealthy country.  Heck, I love my Kindle and wouldn't mind getting a smartphone someday.  But I think a little perspective is good, too.  It keeps us grateful for what we do have.