being present/presente*

It's been quite the week--news of Nick's death [Grinnell class of 2013] really shocked me, and left me speechless. and really wanting just to be able to sit at one of the tables in Saints Rest and be with Grinnellians. talk. listen. watch each other. be with each other. hug. cry if we need to. be present with each other. 
it's the social part of mourning that I both need, and is oh so place/community specific.
and not quite possible via skype (although it was wonderful talk talk with you Heather!)

and then friday, getting word about the school shooting in CT.

 
it hits me on the emotional level--of being a human being, mourning the senseless death of other humans; of being a teacher, being the child of teachers. as someone who profoundly believes in education. School, for me, has always been a sanctuary (not that I have a lot to escape from) but schools are sacred spaces for me, the school in West West was literally the heart of the community, and classmates, colleagues, teachers, friends, parents--these are the people who define my life. and events like this both remind me how lucky I am to have school as such a positive place in my life. and how easily violated that sacredness is.

 One of the things that I kept coming back to in my research in Bosnia was schools being spaces of violence, literally. Several of my interviewees talked about being detained in schools, and other research/narratives from the war talk about schools as actual sites of violence. and I can't wonder if the symbolic desecration of schools was intentional.

[you could also argue that they are currently sites of violence --structural, gender, and complicit in state-sactioned violence (they're certainly places where power dynamics are played out--which, some peace educators would also term violence).]

it's something I still don't quite know how to wrap my head around. but in these moments--something about our educational system (let alone society) feels broken--be it issues of gun control, violence (individual, structural, state-sanctioned), gender/gender norms, conversations about mental illness (not to add to the stigmas already surrounding mental illness--and not to imply that people with mental illness are dangerous (in fact quite the contrary), but I feel like it's a conversation we need to start having more/more frequently about how our society supports all its members). and then of the media coverage of such events.

One of the issues this brings up is how do we break cycles of violence/norms around violence--and what is my responsibility as an educator to tackle these issues with my students. much of the response that I've heard has been to pressure politicians to change gun control laws. yes. ok. great! let's do it. but I also feel that there's a deeper issue at stake--and one which I'm not quite sure my society is really ready to address--and that's violence in general. Although so much of my gut-reaction to these shootings is "'that' can't be normal"(although as Vahido pointed out--"my story is your story because we are both human. we all have the capacity to be as kind as angels or worse than devils.")--there's so much "legitimate" violence in American society-whether you look at american pop culture or political culture. and a lot of places in between. Gun control is one place to begin combating violence in American society, but it's going to take something deeper and more radical than that to really uproot the many ways in which violence has permeated American society.

and oh man is that going to be more difficult than the debate over the second amendment. 

I found out about the shooting over breakfast of the first morning of a non-violent training run by the NGO Loja (someday I'll have to dedicate some serious blog-time to writing about them.) the training was difficult for a number of reasons--and I think, for me, having these two events "set the tone," as it were, only made it harder.

I arrived for the final weekend (phase III) of a three-part training for university students, many of whom are studying to be teachers. Phases I and II consist of a series of workshops around different identity/dialogue/mediation skills, and part three is forming working-groups and designing projects to be implemented in local primary schools--which should be right up my alley.

I think part of my difficulty stemmed from some unclear communication as to what the training was--so it was only a day into the training that I understood what we were about to do. One of the big pieces of culture shock that I remember talking about before going abroad was the role of different/differing/unmet expectations--and how startling (and emotion provoking) that can be. and yes. if I didn't believe it then, I certainly believe it now.

another huge complication was the issue of language--the training was conducted in Albanian/Macedonian (it was a mixed group, with mixed trainers), and I felt really uncomfortable asking for translation in English--in part because I could watch the two main translators getting more and more tired as each day progressed because as translator/trainer--they never had a minute's rest, in part because of my own complex of not wanting to bother or impose on other people, in part because I didn't want another member of the group to remove themselves from the group/discussion to be my translator,  in part because I didn't really see my role as a "participant" but more as an observer--and there's a lot to observe without following the dialogue. and thus there were some unaligned expectations. and for some tasks, language really wasn't a problem--there was certainly a language barrier, but not (at least for me) a communication gap-- or at least not significant enough to pose a real problem. but discussing what informal education is, and designing a project are really hard things to do without shared language. let alone shared cultural knowledge (what does the Macedonian school system look like? what sounds crazy? what sounds reasonable? what is "realistic" mean in this context?). and then I also realized that my pedagogical training is different than that of my colleagues in the training--and that also became a source of tension for me because I felt like, on a philosophical level, we were just in different places around issues of power and control in the classroom. and then throw a language barrier on top of that.
and then this feeling of being responsible for what the outcome is--and how to resolve that tension within myself.

in short, I think identity (and the power/ability to define yourself) is at the crux of the matter (at least from my perspective). and I want to preface this by saying that I also understand how much more sensitive identity is (and differently organized--if that's the right term) here because I think that there's a lot of fear around identity being threatened, and I'm not quite attuned to what or how identity will be sensitive, in part because the ways in which I think about my own identity follow a different logic. For example, one of the activities we did was to pick the three most important items on a list (for example, having the right to choose, time for myself, keeping traditions, being on time...) and the overwhelming majority of the participants chose family relations as being one of their three top priorities. In general, I think individualism is valued (and expected) a lot more in the US, and so I don't quite fully comprehend or understand the importance of family here as a significant component and source of identity.

Additionally, during one of the breaks, when we were walking around Struga (which, like many former-Yugoslav cities (and I don't actually know if this is a result of Yugoslav city planning or something older) has a large pedestrian street (similar to Belgrade, Banja Luka, Sarajevo, Prilep, Bitola, Ohrid, Skopje...), I asked one of my fellow participants how they thought Tetovo would be different if it had such a public space, because for me, I experience Tetovo as a city with a lot of people, and not a lot of places for them to go. There--in my eyes--isn't a lot of public space set aside for pedestrians (most of it we have to share with cars (or in this time of year, snowpiles)). and she (the group was overwhelmingly female) responded, "well, Tetovo is a divided city. if we had such a pedestrian walk, there's be more inter-ethnic violence. who would want to walk down that street?" and this fear, I think, is part of the logic behind, part of the rational of living in a divided society--divided schools, divided public spaces (that's a Macedonian bar, that an Albanian), and as perceiving your context as so unique, so tense, so whatever, that whatever works someplace else couldn't work there. for example, Tetovo doesn't really have a dancing scene, a dancing culture. There aren't many places where you can go out and dance. it's in part, (I think), because Tetovo is a bit more conservative than other places, I think that conservatism is coupled with fear of what could happen if people got together and danced (and yes. it is important to acknowledge that violence does happen here. it is a legitimate concern--but I don't believe it's a healthy status quo to maintain. and, at least to me, the danger of dancing is a far cry from the problems posed by corruption, the mafia...). and yet, when we go out in Struga everyone's up dancing, and having fun. You could watch the Albanian and Macedonian students becoming more integrated through dancing together--in part because you literally couldn't talk (or at least you couldn't be heard) so we had to resort to body language, signing, smiling, the occasional wink. and yeah--the band was clearly Albanian (although their range covered Oh Suzannah, to We will we will rock you, to another song about balkava, to Xhamadani (Xh makes a hard j/g sound) vija vija (proud to be an Albanian)) and in the middle of a long Albanian set, you could see some of the Macedonian students feeling a little uncomfortable. but then the music would change and the dancing would begin anew. I know that participants in a non-violent conflict transformation training are probably not the members of society I need to worry about picking fights. but. how are we going to actually transform the conflict if we're afraid of even dancing together?
  People talk about the Čaršija in Skopje as being one of the last multi-ethnic spaces in Skopje and (not to sound like a broken record, I feel like this is all I write about these days) god, I think that's important for this society. because there's a lot of territory marking going on.

but I know that I also need to be vigilantly mindful that violence--especially inter-ethnic violence, or violence between ethnic groups spurred by any number of issues--is a reality. here and all over the place. including the United States. and it's going to be really difficult to transform the conflict here until there's a meaningful way to express/acknowledge/assuage this fear.


I was really happy that the issue my group chose to tackle was bringing students together from different schools (MK/AL) because we all agreed that this kind of division lead to stereotyping, fear etc. and I think my whole bend as an educator is trying to facilitate meaningful experiences for students (and again, let me introduce Brene Brown, she's got a great article on I-thou-it and cell phones)--and part of that process is letting students define what is meaningful for them. As one of my colleagues said today in a staff meeting for the Language Center--"well, by giving students those choices, we lose some of our autonomy as teachers." Yep--but I'm not sure that's such a bad thing (but, I can also see how loosing (or if we want to put more of a positive spin on it--transferring) that authority feels threatening to teachers). and I keep thinking about what it takes to "know" someone else--and how does education/educators help facilitate that process. of course it has to start somewhere--be it conversations about how we celebrate holidays, or how we cook or dinner. but I guess, my fear is that these getting to know about you activities also help shape and define who "we" are, who "you" are--and makes a lot of assumptions about similarities and differences between students, and already lays out the "identity vocabulary" available in this context, the lens through which we should see ourselves and "others."

how do we give students the power and opportunity to do this themselves--to pick who they are? what they are? and what do we have to do as educators to be ready to hear students?

 Obviously, this also raises the question (for me) of what do people here actually learn in school, and, perhaps more to the point, what do they learn about each other in school? but I got physically uncomfortable choosing the topic of "traditional identity" as the mechanism for "getting to know the other." in part because, for me, I'm much more interested in the skills--not the knowledge--that gets transferred (between trainers and students, students and students, students and trainers). and in part because I worry about conflating identities--between the individual and the collective, between religious and ethnic. I feel like tackling the issue of traditional identity will take a lot of skill as trainers/leaders, and honestly, I'm not sure I'm able/trained/ready to facilitate that kind of interaction.

in the face of all of this discomfort--on top of processing these emotional events, on top of linguistic isolation (being "lost in translation" literally, figuratively) on top of being dead tired--I felt myself pulling back, retreating.

and I hate that feeling in myself. I think for me it really gets back to this idea of being present with each other--and my own frustration when I feel that I'm not being adequately present/present enough with those around me, as well as challenging myself to constantly work on being more here.  


* at the School of the America's Watch protest I went to last fall, the event culminated in all of us carrying white crosses with names of the dead--and someone(s) reading the names of the deceased. after each name we chanted "presente," and walked in a processional, laying the crosses at the gate of the school. most of us were crying by the end of it.