How powerful can 22 life stories be?
I sat in the room full of 22 teachers, all from the communities Reality Gives serves and in whom we are are trying to build leadership capacity. This was the last day of our annual teachers’ retreat where we went crazy and did everything from a Public Narrative workshop to ways to educate Refugee kids.
Today started with each teacher having to present there public narratives. We have gone through 3 days of it already using Marshal Ganz’ workshop structure focusing on the story of self, story of us and story of now. And finally they had to tie it together and present it. What actually happened when we started this is that the story of self clearly monopolised the entire speech.
Somewhere after 4 teachers I realised that we need to convert this into a “life maps” session where it needs to be their struggles, and how they came over it. Some teachers were talking for the first time about the deepest scars from their lives.
Stories of loss, bravery and perseverance started to come out. Some teachers had lost a parent at a young age and become the sole bread winners in the family, to some being called a liar when they finally became a teacher by their neighbours (“you must be a cleaner in the school, not a teacher!”). At some point the room became a safe place where everyone was crying and letting it all sink in.
I was left wondering how were we able to create this space where these very different people could open up themselves. Getting to know each person in the room was an irreplaceable experience. I could connect the dots between their childhood and their classroom teaching and other skills. A teacher didn’t miss a single day of school and was infamous for coming even whilst sick. Her father was ostracised from many places for being illiterate and his daughter taught him how to read and write, and there she understood the value of every single day. Another teacher begged her husband for 2 years before he allowed her to come back to work in school after taking a year off after her baby was born, and you could see her commitment levels in everything she did. Another teacher, arguably amongst the “best” performers never finished her grade 10 because she was running her family from age 15.
One common thread was issues that women face. Many proposed that it is the women in the in-laws family that actually discriminate against the new daughter-in-law and only they have the power to change the situation. “Women need to support women!” said one.
The other thing that came out of everyone’s speech is that sometimes it feels like the end of the world, when we lose someone super close to us or find ourselves in a mess and feel like there is no way out. To add to that maybe all our savings went into hospital bills. And also perhaps, we failed multiple times in class because we just can’t study. And everything else is going wrong too.
But that is the exact time to take a deep breath, and take a second to get ourselves together. And to remember that we need to think about tomorrow. What do we do tomorrow to be a little happier? Small-steps.
Many of our teachers after going through immense struggles, tried to look for jobs or opportunities to get trained as a teacher; and some became responsible and started helping out the family more, and some just cried for days. Whatever it is, one must must must not give up hope and look into how to have a better future.
I know that going forward, I will remember their stories and accept them as realities not of sadness, but of hope. Of immense bravery and persistence to not accept negativity and fighting hard to be happy. We all deserve to be happy.
