KATY (ENGLAND)

Volunteered From MAY 2017 TO JUNE 2017

2017 I volunteered at the Habibi Centre from May-June 2017 and assisted the children at the school with their English, Maths and Science. Steph, who runs it, asked me to write a testimony about my time teaching there; and my initial response was to write about the leaps and bounds that I saw the children make. I began to write how easy it was to tell the difference between the children who came everyday and the ones who didn’t; how their understanding increased each time, how broken sentences in English became whole; and difficult maths problems became simple… and I will write about that, but I think the most important thing to mention is the doorbell. A doorbell might seem like a strange point to begin with but bear with me. The Habibi Centre is based in a top floor flat in a less desirable part of Athens. School starts at 10 everyday…or at least it is supposed to. As usual some children will stroll in at 10:10 or 10:20 and laugh or smile when you remind them the time that school actually began. So now, back to the doorbell. It’s a buzzer which rings through the whole flat. It sounds like a very loud and very angry bee. It’s not a pleasant sound. The doorbell would usually begin buzzing at 9:30 – sometimes earlier. One of us would answer and remind the children waiting outside that school doesn’t start until 10am. The area isn’t the nicest so we’d buzz them in and let them wait in the corridor outside. Then five minutes later the buzzer would ring again. Again, another group of children had arrived early. Again we’d buzz them up and they’d wait outside. Sometimes by the time 10am rolled around, the corridor outside would be packed with children chatting away, sat on the floor and each other’s laps. They’d cheerfully walk in with ‘hello teacher,’ – the go to greeting of any of them who couldn’t remember my name. The point about the buzzer and the children arriving early for school is that, having volunteered in Greece previously, I’ve seen how many educational projects struggle to get regular attendance. I heard of schools with just two children in attendance even though there were hundreds in the actual camp. So many children turn up to the Habibi Centre it’s often bursting at the seams. The strength of the school is that children want to come because they have been shown that that they belong there. The children would wake up early of their own accord, often unprompted by parents (I know this because so many of them told me) and would wake up their other siblings to come to school. I point this out because so many children in the UK would not wake up of their own accord to go to school. I saw how the three rooms of the apartment provided a space for them to learn and grow. I saw children grapple with science questions in English, which was often their second or third language (after Arabic, Kurdish etc.) and which many had only been speaking for a matter of months. The children are exceptional and this is down to them for the most part, but they were shown a place where they could be normal children at a school by Steph and those who support her work at the Habibi Centre. This isn’t to say things were always perfect. It’s a school and these are teenagers. I often had to remind specific kids that watching cartoons on YouTube would not supplement their learning; and others who dramatically lay down on the floor when they couldn’t do a Maths problem that it was a school and not a theatre performance. And yes…the buzzer got on my nerves but I made my peace with it. Every time it buzzed, it meant another child had turned up. Many of the children at the Habibi Centre have been through trauma that is unimaginable to most grown adults; and many in attendance right now will be living in a situation that is less than desirable, often waiting to hear if their asylum will be processed and unsure of what country they will end up in and what new language they will have to learn next. But still they get up every morning and walk through the streets of Athens to a school on the 7th floor. They will press that buzzer until their fingers get sore. And that is something quite amazing in my opinion.