Volunteer vacations

Imagine a class of Polish 10- year-olds attending English class on a beautiful spring day - after school. Butterflies and the sounds of a football (soccer) game float through the open windows.

My bunch had just come in from break, and one of the boys was missing. The question, "Where's Luke?" started a lot of hemming and hawing in Polish and English, and plenty of gesturing - but communication wasn't happening.

I figured he'd had enough English for the day and just gone home. But one of the little boys seized my bilingual dictionary, thumbed rapidly through it, then raced to the blackboard and wrote, "Luke escape."

I couldn't have put it better myself, and I certainly couldn't have said it as well in Polish.

Call me crazy, but I actually paid money to teach. I was with a like- minded group who had volunteered to teach English in Poland. We were with Global Volunteers, a nonprofit group based in St. Paul, Minn. It offers service programs for people who want to test the volunteer waters without committing to something as lengthy as the Peace Corps, or to get to know part of a country for a few weeks instead of touristing from one site to another.

Agreeing to shut yourself into a room with students who do not share your language gives a person something to think about the night before the first class. Thanks to a couple of days of training before we started, the logbooks maintained by former volunteers of these students, and the library of teaching materials supplied by Global Volunteers, we came out unscathed.

Our students were schoolchildren of every age and some adults. We taught about four hours a day, some of us splitting the time between two different schools.

My teaching experience had been in high school English more than 25 years ago. So it was with some surprise (and delight) that I found myself leading the hokeypokey a cappella for a little singing/wiggling break and passing boxes of crayons.

Global Volunteers encourages a "servant-learner" attitude with its participants, in which volunteers serve by sharing their talents with local people. All projects are selected and directed by locals. My students stayed after school on their own. Their parents and other members of the community drove us to our schools and back.

In the end I think I learned far more than I served, especially about a hospitable country working hard to overcome its past.

The major difference between Polish students and the American students I've taught is that a rambunctious Polish child sent to cool his heels in the hallway for too much enthusiasm seems to suffer real remorse at being cut from the herd. In fact, the students left in the classroom with me would bashfully remind me that so and so was still out there.

In general, children in Poland seemed to be better behaved than their American counterparts and more mature at an earlier age.

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