Teaching refugees is something that I’ve been trying to break into in the UK so it was lucky when my friend said she knew someone who might be looking for help. The Shropshire Support Refugees is a local charity and deals with refugees from all over the world, not only the guys who come illegally on small boats but also Ukranians and Hong Kong and Afghans settled on the ARAP scheme.
I have done volunteer teaching for the small-boat-boys (also back of lorries etc.) but it is these Afghans settled here legally by the UK government with whom I am mostly working. They are all professional men their wives and children ranging from infants to high school age.
When I first started teaching them it came as a shock to me that most of them could not form the letters of the alphabet properly. Three of the 16 I have, have no schooling whatsoever which means that they cannot read or write even in their own language. Hence teaching them is very challenging and I now have some help from a teacher who takes the weaker ones.
Even with the stronger ones, I have to go back to basics and do handwriting. This is something I did a bit with the Chinese students but generally they are pretty good and writing, neat and tidy. The challenge I have teaching the Afghans to write is that they don’t write on the lines, they write with the line cutting through the middle of the letters. Also, in their Arabic-type script, they do not have two versions of each letter – one capital and one small – which, if you stop to think about it, should not be necessary.
Getting them to understand that some letters sit on the line and have a tail with dips below the line, is tricky. So I am constantly correcting the p, y, g, f, y etc.
Reading is also difficult for them because they are used to a right-to-left system. I told the ladies to the library and one of them who has no schooling, opened the book upside-down and started from the back. I look at her and I wonder how on earth she and her husband, who is also illiterate, can ever settle successfully in the UK. They will need a translator 100% of the time.
The others are progressing slowly and are really motivated to learn and get a job and get their lives back to normal. Some of these people held high office in Afghanistan, like lawyers, judges, accountants, businessmen, soldiers etc. and now they have lost their hard earned status and have to start again in another country in a culture which is so alien to them that I marvel at their resilience and positivity.
I suppose anything is better than being tortured by the Taliban – even a future in damp, dark, sleepy Shropshire! (no images here for security reasons)