July 1, 2015 – Final day at Hermitage Primary School
“Children are meant to be seen and not heard” was the quote that I read on the massive information board on one of the deceased Jamaican artist in the National Gallery this past Sunday. The artist could not have been more wrong. This LearnServe trip to Jamaica is yet another example of the power of the youth, the voice we have, and the ability that each of us carries to make lasting change both in our local and global communities. The past few days at the Hermitage school epitomized this mindset in so many ways.
On our final day at the basic school we allowed ourselves to consider the fact that we have helped in developing the lives of the children- not only through the bonds that we created and the trust that we have gained, but by the life lessons taught both in the classroom, through our individual lessons, and through the vegetable garden that we finished building today, emphasizing “Healthy Living” in big, bold bubble letters.
Getting up in front of, and controlling, a classroom of wild three-year old kids was exhausting! They were almost always moving! It has made me believe that preschool teachers deserve a larger salary, because on the final day at Hermitage it was hard to face the kids. And it was in these wild, crazy, rambunctious moments where we as a group saw the different ways that us LearnServe members dealt with things. There were those of us that responded by picking the kids up and throwing them in the air playfully while they laughed and threw their heads back begging to be picked up again. Some of us responded by yelling and lost our voice the next day, while others of us were naturals, and these people often had 3-4 kids pulling on them begging for attention. And it is in these small moments that lead me to believe that this trip has acted equally on tearing down cultural walls with Jamaicans and on tearing down barriers between the different types of students that are in our group of fifteen. We have been learning so much about each other, our different cultures, and our different passions on this trip.
Tomorrow we start working with the foster children at the Maxfield Children’s Home, and I hope that we can make just as big an impact on them as we did with these students.
Soon, maybe even by tomorrow, or by next week, the kids at Hermitage Primary School will have forgotten us, and we would have moved on to our next project. They will have forgotten what we look like, what our names were, and what we taught. And by then, we will be the same strangers we were on our first day when all they could do was look at us and whisper. But we will never forget them. We will never forget when Breanna finally learned how to write the number two, we won’t forget when Tyshawn finally chose the callalo (a Jamaican vegetable) picture over the chocolate cake picture, we won’t forget the excitement on the faces of the teachers and principals when we presented them a vegetable garden, and we also won’t forget when Patrice finally smiled and told us her name. These moments will become a part of us, and they will inspire us for years to come. In that way these kids have made a bigger impact on our lives then we could have possible made on theirs.
Raman Khanna, George C. Marshall High School