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Archives: March 2009
Reality...
Archives: March 2009
Cultural clash...
By Patrick Regan...
‘Will you two just be quiet?’ I shouted. I liked to think I was pretty good at controlling a class and keeping them quiet without resorting to raising my voice but on this particular day I was losing it.
While I was trying to conduct a lesson on peer pressure, two boys behind desks at the back were hunched over, constantly whispering to one another. They’d been this way ever since I started and I’d had enough. ‘Sorry sir,’ one replied quietly. ‘I’m just translating what you’re saying for my friend so he can keep up. He’s doesn’t understand any English.’
That shut me up! In many classrooms this could be a good line to get away with chatting to a friend for an hour, but here in Peckham I knew it to be true. One of the schools we worked in had 65 mother-tongue languages – 65 in just one school! Often the kids spoke English but many of their parents didn’t, so you’d get these bizarre situations with young people being told off by the head and having to translate to their mum or dad what was being said.
Sometimes even the English expressions the young people used seemed like a different language to us. The West Indian kids would say things like ‘I ain’t skinning no teeth with ya’ and it took me a while to work out that they meant ‘I don’t want to talk to you’.
There were so many cultural differences to get used to. I’d been amazed when I’d first come to Peckham that it was the only place I’d ever seen where you could buy a goat and a mobile phone in the same shop! That was nothing compared to some of the challenges we faced in understanding where many of the kids were coming from.
Two boys we worked with were from Sierra Leone. One had a bullet still lodged in his skull where he had been shot as he and his family fled; the other, at the age of 18, still slept in his mum’s bed on Guy Fawkes Night as the fireworks reminded him too much of the sounds of war he’d heard back home.
A kid called Ibrahim from Sierra Leone told us about his horrendous experiences as a child soldier.
In terms of religious differences you had to tread very carefully too – if you asked a class who they most feared, some of the kids from Asia or Turkey would immediately say Allah. You couldn’t talk about God as a father to them, as it was so outside their realm of thinking and offensive to the things they had been brought up to believe.
Teachers would ask us for our help and opinions on things like parents taking their kids back to Morocco for abortions, or how we thought they should tackle the issue of the illegal female circumcisions they knew were taking place. This wasn’t the kind of stuff you could read in the average schools work manual!
When I first started schools work I was so ignorant about black history and culture. To be honest, I didn’t even know how black people had come to be in this country.
The only black person I knew very much about was Martin Luther King and so I used to do a lot of lessons on him.
He was such an inspirational man in so many ways but one of the things that always stood out to me was his ability to persevere.
When he was born, black people had to give up their seats on the bus to white people. Black churches were burnt to the ground by the Ku Klux Klan who terrorised whole communities and left dead bodies hanging from lampposts.
Martin Luther King wasn’t beaten by all of this violence and degradation or his people’s history of being continually downtrodden and abused. King’s passion for justice was stronger than all of that.
I’m sure you’ve seen the images of the marches he led: men and women peacefully protesting their rights to be equal meanwhile being set upon by dogs, being flattened by huge water hoses, being beaten and abused at every turn. The thing I love to remember is how often people were struck down, but they would pick themselves up, dust themselves off and carry on.
The tests in my life have been nowhere near as hard, but often when XLP have been short on money again, or another kid who has been making real progress gets into a fight and gets kicked out of school, I can feel like giving up.
It really helped to remember Martin Luther King and his ability to keep going because of what he believed in. He sometimes received up to 50 death threats a day telling him to stop what he was doing, and people tried to petrol-bomb him time and again, but nothing dissuaded him from what he knew God called him to do.
In fact it was one night when he received another phone call threatening his life that King’s faith became real to him. He was full of fear for the lives of his family and feeling totally weak, and that was when he cried out to know God for himself. I love the honesty of the prayer that he prayed and the promise from God he received in reply. This is an extract from one of his sermons:
“I got to the point that I couldn’t take it any more. I was weak … And I discovered then that religion had to become real to me, and I had to know God for myself. I bowed down… I will never forget it… I prayed a prayer and I prayed it out loud that night. I said:
‘Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I’m right. I think the cause we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing courage.’
And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me:
‘Martin Luther King, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth, and lo, I will be with you, even until the end of the world.’
I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.”
And God still promises to never leave us alone when we follow his heart. It gets hard to sometimes see what is right, let alone do what is right, but our God calls us to look and respond.
About the writer...
Patrick is a legend. He head up XLP, a initiative that works with young people in South London. Recently he managed to close a van door on Tim Westwood's head. This is an an extract from his book 'Conspiracy of the Insignificant'.
Soul Survivor is a Christian charity that puts on events for young people. Our registered charity no. is 1080720. We are also a company limited by guarantee in England & Wales. Our company registered number is 03991111, which is nice. Thanks for caring.
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