Family Pet

On my 12th birthday, I was in Wisconsin with my grandmother and aunts on my mom's side of the family. Birthday's are big in my family. That day, we do not have to do any chores, get presents and money, and get whatever cake we like best. My favorite cake is a german chocolate cake, so that is what they made for me. I remember that it was about 1:00 pm when I got to make a wish and blow out the candles. After that, my aunt and I went outside to the backyard of my grandma's house and swang on the bench swing. She asked me what I wished for. I replied with the usual, "If you tell someone your wish, it won't come true!" However, since I was an easily persuaded person, eventually I said, "I want a cat!" That day was August 12th, 2001. On September 9, 2001, my mom and I ventured to a friends house down the street who's cat had just had a litter. My dad is from Benin, Africa, and had superstitions about cats--he did not like them. However, my mom and I picked a gray and white male kitten from the litter. I named him Pepper. He was very entergetic and would sometimes bite me for no reason. But, he was my cat, and I loved him nonetheless. In December, we decided to get him neutered so that he wouldn't end up fathering a litter of cats. My mom and I were in her green mini-van, about to go to Wal-Mart when her phone rang. I heard her say, "Okay, I'll bring the kids over to say goodbye." I could not figure out what she was talking about during the conversation. As soon as she hung up the phone, I asked, "Is it Pepper?!" Her eyes teared up, and we both began balling in the car. My mom and I went inside the house to tell my brother and sister the bad news. At first, my brother would not believe us. We all got back into the car, this time to go the the vet's office. I cried hysterically as I walked into the office. Immediately, the vet assistant knew who we were and took us back to the room with Pepper. I saw his lifeless body, and closed eyes laying there on the silver platform in which he had been operated on. He looked asleep and all I wanted at that moment was for him to jump up and bite me as he had before. But he just layed there. I stroked his face, and it was stiff. I had never felt a loss like this before; this cat was my baby. We decided that we would take him to home and bury him in our front yard. In the box that he was in, we placed a match so that he would "keep warm." I also found a favorite toy of his, so that he could play with it. We dug a hole in the front yard, and placed the box in. My mom found some verses in the Bible that she said are usually said at funerals and recited them. Then we placed four stone tablets over the area, with a porcelain angel on top. To this day, when I pass the angel I stop and think that Pepper is watching over me.

Service Learning

In high school, I was in the JROTC program for four years. This is when I first heard the term "service learning." As a class, we had brainstorm and then vote on a place to do a service learning project. We learned that the whole purpose of it was not simply to volunteer, but to "get something out of it." I use that vague phrase because the benefits of service learning are many and varied for everyone depending on the length and type of project. Some people may just want to gain people skills, or learn how to work with children. Other people may want to learn more about the inner workings of an organization. Whatever the case, I "got something out of" the service learning project we did in this class.

My partner, Dolores, was one of the "good" partners. She always showed up to our meetings, and would call and let me know if she couldn't. At the meetings, she was prepared with questions and even practiced what we had went over the previous week. It was like she was taking a class, and I was the teacher, or at least the mentor. In all we had about 5 meetings. We had begun to develop a friendship; when she practiced her English just by talking, I began to learn more about Dolores as a person. She is a very hard working, understanding and nice person. She has been in the United States for about 20 years and is still struggling with her English because the people she is surrounded by mostly spoke Spanish. The fact that she still wanted to improve speaking English gave me hope. I often get frustrated with the language I'm taking, French. The fact that she is still willing to learn inspired my not to give up even when it gets hard. Also, I learned that the small things matter. Just by talking and listening, I am helping her in her quest to be a confident English speaker. Hopefully, she learned as much from me as I did from her and she keeps on her quest to be the English speaker she wants to be!

What Pico Iyer Meant

"A writer has to be accountable to the truth, and catching the truth of any situation is his first mandate. But the truth is not the same as facts...I think the writer has to be true to the mystery as well as clarity of life. To some extent we live in shadow with everything around us...Writing for Time magazine, I came to see that you could make every word of an article true...and still not come close to the truth at all."
-Pico Iyer

Broadly, Iyer meant by his quote that it is impossible to truely be objective when speaking about a subject. We all have our prior knowledge, experiences and motives that influence the way we are towards a subject. Being objective is relative, because no one can define what the ultimate standpoint of being objective is. The same rhetoric that makes an author's writing unique is the same rhetoric that makes it subjective. When writing, you "select and arrange" what you want to say. In this way, an author can make a situation, event or person seem different to different people.
In his short story, Khareef, Iyer conveys his truth of Aden how he sees and remember his experience. As an author, he selects which facts to put into his story, which may alter what we see as true. The people in Khareef are seen simply as people. He tells about "happy shirtless boys" and a "homesick man" who we are able to relate to, and is the truth of the people who live in Aden. It took an event such as two planes flying into the World Trade Centers to pull "Aden, Oman...out of our subconscious, and back into the forefront of our minds." Because the fact is Aden is near where Osama bin Laden was born, and "was to be taken to be the center of all evil," what we believe to be the truth changes. We may now view this place, and its inhabitants as evil although the truth remains they are still "happy shirtless boys" or a "homesick man."

Meeting with Dolores #3...Really!

I feel so bad because last week, I didn't tell Dolores not to come to our meeting because of fall break. Even though I wasn't the only one that did this, I felt that it was my responsibilty to call her to let her know if I have a vacation. I'm going to try to be more diligent about doing that. This week, I came late to the meeting! This is not usually like me! I woke up at 9:40, and realized that I was supposed to meet her at 9:00. After running to the rec center, I found Dolores. Suprisingly she wasn't angry. At this meeting, I basically answered any questions she had about how to say things to people. For example, sometimes when she's working, the bath tub is clogged. Whent that happens, she has to tell her boss, but didn't know how to explain it. Whenever I tell her something new, she writes it down for future reference and study. She also asked me about pronouns, such as when to use "her" instead of "she." I didn't know how to explain it, so next time we meet, I want to bring a table that may help her. I'm really happy with Dolores. She makes it easy for me to tutor her, because she comes with questions, yearns to learn, and doesn't expect me to know everything.

Meeting with Dolores #3...kind of

This past week we were supposed to meet, but she called me about an hour before the meeting saying that her son was sick and she wasn't able to make it. The only complaint I had was that I could have slept in an hour longer!! But it did get my day started early...

Meeting with Dolores #2

By the end of our 12 meetings, I project that Dolores will be able to read the Star Telegram without my coaching. I was about 5 minutes late to this meeting, which was again located in the downstairs of the rec center. On my way there I decided to take one of the tips that Lucia told us about so I grabbed a newspaper on my way out the dorm. Dolores was already down stairs waiting for me. She told me that on her breaks at work was when she studied what we went over, and she proceeded to show me the green notebook she had from last week. I was impressed and surprised to find she had written numerous times the various words we went over last week, such as "vending machines" and "fire extinguisher."

The first story in the Star Telegram was about a woman who had died in Tarrant County Jail because she needed antibiotics she never recieved. As Dolores began reading aloud, she asked me how to pronounce every-other word. I think she would have done fine with out me, but just needed some reassurance. Unlike me, she had to think about the words in each sentence before she knew what the sentence meant. At first she didn't realize that we were reading about someone who had died. I now know why Lucia gave us the "ESL" magazines. Sometimes, she had trouble distinguishing a name from a noun. At times, I learn some Spanish from her. I also brought a sheet I printed from the internet that had irregular English verbs. She commented that English is hard to learn because of these irregularities. I didn't feel comfortable going over these words because she would ask me what the difference between the past participle and another past tense verb is, and I wouldn't know how to explain it. I just know that it comes naturally to my head when I need to use the words. She was happy, though, about this list, and wanted to keep it. "Of course," I said.

This meeting went by before I knew it. Because I have a class beginning at 10 AM, I have to leave our meetings at 9:50 to ensure that I make it to Smith Hall on time. I would suggest that we make our meetings closer to my class, but at 11 AM, Dolores meets with Omir. I find it easy to understand the frustration Dolores encounters, because my 10AM class is French!

Meeting with Dolores #1

I am kind of reluctant to tutor the same person as Omir because he has an upper hand: we are tutoring Spanish speaking individuals and he speaks Spanish. I didn't want Dolores to say that she wished he was her only tutor because he can better explain what he's talking about in Spanish, if need be. But my fears subsided after the first meeting, which I thought was productive. Also my mom is an ESL teacher at a middle school who isn't fluent in Spanish. For 7 years, she's gotten up and gone to work. I thought, too, that she's here to speak English and not Spanish.

When I first went to the downstairs of the Rec Center, there was only one white guy there, and he didn't look like he needed help with English, let alone someone named Dolores. Up the stairs and around the corner there was a program I'm in called Student Support Services (SSS) in which I get access to the computers and printers. I decided to go up there and print of my outline for speech class, which I originally planned on doing after my meeting. I didn't really have a direction in mind as to what we would do that day. I thought that we would meet, get to know eachother, and I would ask her for future references what she wanted to learn. After I went back downstairs, I sat next to the pool tables and about 5 minutes later, a man wearing a physical plant shirt was escorting a Hispanic woman in a brown blouse. I figured this was Dolores.

First, we just introduced ourselves. I told her that this was a service learning project for my English class and we are being paired up with people from the Physical Plant in order to help them with their English. I assured her that although I am fluent in English, I am by no means an expert teacher. Then she told me that she has 4 sons at home, one of whom goes to TCU. That day, the 5, 7, and 15 year olds happened to have no school, and so they were at home without her. My meeting with her began at 9 and Omir was meeting with her the same day at 11, meaning that she would have an hour gap doing nothing. I would have gladly switched my meeting time to 10, had I not had French class then. Since I didn't have Omir's number, we went to the computers at SSS and I accessed frogcalls my.tcu.edu. We couldn't get a hold of him, so she decided that day she would just have to wait. As we were walking around, I would ask her if she knew some random words we saw, such as "Recreational Center." I had to explain that "Rec Center" was short for "Recreational Center." I didn't really know how to explain what goes on there. I said something along the lines of "a building people gather where there are alot of activities going on, which is usually has something to do with sports." She kept telling me that her son told here that she's not bad at English, but she just needs to practice more. I thought this too; she just needs more confidence. In the green spiral notebook that she brought, she would ask me to write down some words that I was saying, such as "vending machines." She couldn't quite get the "V" sound out and said "Bending machines" instead. Towards the end of the meeting, I broke up in syllables the words I had written down. That helped her to pronounce them better. The next meeting, I told her I would bring a dictionary or something of that sort, that we could go over. After I finish with this blog, I'm going to look at http://www.eslcafe.com/ to see what I can find.

The street I grew up on

The street I grew up on is perfect for walking dogs. And that's convenient because we have two dogs. It's also perfect for walking in general. If you can imagine the outdoor tracks that you used to have in high school, with the grassy field in the middle but with houses lining the exterior and backyards on the interior, then you can imagine the street I grew up on. We moved there in December of 1998 and though it was just to the other side of the "Meadowbrook area," it was supposed to be a better area for us kids to live. No "ladies of the night" walking the streets at night, no drugies living across the street from you, and no fear of being harmed when going outside unsupervised. The only harm you could be afraid to acquire is a tree branch falling on you from the large oaks that tower over the houses.

There were only old people and other kids that were our age. When I say that I've never dealt with kids it's because on my street, all of us "kids" on the street grew up together. Eventually, they all moved away and it was just my brother, sister and me. I almost forgot to mention, there is a golf course across the street. I'm not going to tell you that we've snuck in someones backyard and onto the golf course at night, because that would be admitting to trespassing, on two different properties. But I will say that we got the occasional golf ball in our front yard.

Living on my street has made me a very open minded person--first there is my parents, who have an interracial marriage. Then are some gay/lesbian couples, a hispanic couple, some black couples, white couples, old couples, a super-religious couple, singles, widows, and divorcees. Though none of us have huge mansions, I don't wish I grew up in a "richer" neighborhood. All except 2 are one story. Ours is the biggest and oldest on the street, with about two acres of St. Augustine grass and a red bricked house on top. The rest are about 1 and a half acres and multitudes of different painting styles. Some bricked, some painted, some red, some beige and some yellow. I love the community aspect of my neighborhood. I especially like the fact that when one of our naughty yellow haired mutts finds a way to runaway, someone will always bring them back to our front door, because they knew who they belonged to.