Face paint

                 During the last four months, I’ve rarely (let’s be honest, never) looked forward to Monday and Wednesday afternoons. Mondays and Wednesdays after class have meant an hours’ trip to the margins of north Quito and an exhausting hour with twenty or so kindergarteners who try to climb my arms and legs like tree limbs. (Let’s be real: I don’t make a very tall tree.)

            I am, however, going to be a teacher. Understandably, I feel a little guilty about dreading my volunteer-placement twice-a-week, especially considering I only spend an hour with the students during each visit (hence the confession). But although I often find myself preparing for classes rather last-minute and always somewhat reluctantly, I always—or nearly always—enjoy giving classes.

            I’ve had my fair share—more than my fair share, I could argue—of challenges. Just a few weeks ago, I walked out of the foundation nearly crying. And sometimes I’ve felt like the children scratch at my patience like starved Michigan deer stripping winter tree-bark, leaving me naked, oddly ashamed. Somehow, twenty crazy kindergartners have peeled away my false image of myself: patient, immovable, un-provocable.

            And then, my last day with the students. I can’t say I anticipated the placement’s conclusion with any degree of extreme regret. (Translation: I looked forward to it.) During nearly every visit, I give the students brief lessons in English: we've learned the English alfabet, our colors, the family, expressions and emotions ... (As an aside, I think I have only one student who has retained anything I’ve taught. Oh well.) I wanted our last lesson, however, to be fun, creative. 

            I decided to make our theme world-citizenship: local and global belonging. “Somos el mundo” I told my students, which we wrote at the top of our cardstock world-maps. Bordering each edge the students wrote “local” and “global,” and at the bottom of their papers we printed our ascending place-belonging: Comiterio del Pueblo (their barrio), Quito (their city), Ecuador (their country), América del Sur (their continent), el mundo (their world). Then, with the students sitting knees-on-benches around square tables with one volunteer directing each table’s activities, we used our fingers to paint the seven continents.

             My pointer-finger coated in white paint like packaged ice-cream, I made to paint a child’s nose. She squealed and turned away. I knew, of course, that face-painting would inevitably result in chaos, but for some reason I welcomed the chaos, I wanted it. “No one leaves Ñeque without a dot on their nose!” I told the students playfully; for the first time in four months, they executed my directions without protest.

            And as we were playing with paint—as students were finishing their finger-painted maps, flying in and out of the classroom, squealing, grabbing my shirt and rising on tiptoes to reach my face with their multi-colored fingers—I realized I loved it. I realized I loved them.

            And perhaps that’s why I’ve struggled during these four months, why I’ve dreaded every placement even while I’ve often enjoyed the brief hour I've spent with them each time. Because I didn’t love them. Oh I liked them—I'm not entirely heartless—I thought they were sweet, and funny, and enormously mischievous, but I didn’t love them; I didn’t know them.

            And now, four months later, I am only grateful. Climbing my body like trees, pulling at my clothes like Michigan does in winter, they peeled away my layers, they reached me: Nina the fallible, the vincible, the sometimes-defeated. And they awakened me to wonder: nothing more than face-paint on a Wednesday afternoon. 

             And because of them, I think I am discovering what it means to be a good teacher:

            Choosing to love. Merely to love. Only to love.