Tell Me a Story

At 5:30 every day, I teach an English class. Right now I am just helping with an existing class; at the end of August when the other interns have left I will be starting my own classes. Anyway, the task at hand in this English class is to write a story. Every class for the month that I have been here, each girl will dictate to me or Crystal the next page in their story. We will write it down, and then they will illustrate their page.

Yesterday, I was early to class and Crystal ended up being late. She was bringing the supplies, so to fill the extra time I decided to attempt an educational game. I had come to class with only a pen, which (thanks to my year at SIT) quickly became a “talking piece” and I gathered all of the girls into a circle on the floor. Thursday’s class is our youngest and craziest class, so I was cutting out quite the chore for myself (but they are also my favorite class J). We sat in a circle and I explained to them that, since we were writing stories in class, we were going to write one big story together. You were only allowed to speak if you were holding the pen, and you were only to dictate a little bit of story.

As far as the rules go, the game was a failure. Each girl ended up telling her own story, and, although I would try to thread them together, one story was not even the same genre as the next. (This is an accurate reflection of what happens in their books, as well…each page is a story in and of itself. One page they are putting flowers in their hair and going to their sister’s wedding, and on the next page they are doing agriculture work.) However, since the end goal was to get them speaking creatively in English, I would say it was a success.

The success was reaffirmed tonight when I was hanging out with some of the girls, helping them with homework and shooting the breeze. Sunitha (an 8-year-old whose crooked-toothed underbite and uneven bangs captured my heart on day one) left her group of friends, came to me and said, “Auntie – story – mine” and proceeded to regale me with one of the most creative but saddest stories that I have ever heard leave an 8-year-old’s mouth. One baby was bitten by a snake, a lion ate the other baby, and the older brother and sister hung themselves from the fan. I expressed my sadness at the morbidity of the story, and she decided to change the ending to the mom and dad dying in a car accident. Still pretty gruesome, and it is times like these that I wonder at the sadness and trauma they have seen in their young lives (or if it is simply a product of what they watch on TV). Nevertheless, the fluency with which she spoke when telling her stories was absolutely incredible compared to the halting English that she speaks on a daily basis. I praised her creativity and her capability…and lo and behold 10 minutes later she came to me with “Another story, Auntie” and I said, “Is it a happy story?” and she said, “Yes, Auntie” and proceeded to tell me a story about schools and festivals and chocolate and lots of happy children and happy families…I’d say we have a gifted storyteller in our midst, and I’d say that my little English game was a success J