Asakiyume mita

I’ve always thought that education was one of the only things worth going into debt to obtain—and boy did I go into debt obtaining mine—but that was about the extent of my suffering for education. But for some people? We’ve all heard stories of hardship and sacrifice, but sometimes new ones can strike with fresh force.

This morning, I was blown away by a description an Australian educator shared of the dedication of Timorese teachers, seeking out instruction in English and Portuguese (bolding mine):

In 2001 I taught English to classes of 40-odd teacher-education students in Kaikoli, "the burned campus" ... Students came to classes often with nothing more to eat than a packet of dry Super-Mi [ramen noodles] and even sometimes shaking with fever. Alongside me, other teachers taught Portuguese to classes of future teachers in classes of often twice that number. We worked in noisy, dirty, mosquito-infested rooms with no glass in the windows, no desks and no books. Yet student attendance was high and their enthusiasm for learning both languages was immense.¹

But even in this country, there are stories. The tall one told me on Friday about a young woman he’d struck up a conversation with on the bus from Northampton to Springfield. Those two cities aren’t very distant, in terms of miles, but because of the route the bus takes, the journey takes about two hours. The young woman, like the tall one, rides that bus daily. He works in Springfield; she’s going to school at Springfield Technical Community College. But her journey is even longer than his, as she first takes a bus from Greenfield to Northampton . . . and even before that, she is driven by her parents from one of the hilltowns in to Greenfield to catch the bus. All in all, she spends three hours each way on her commute.

That’s how precious education is--so precious that you’d attend classes feverish and half starved, or spend six hours a day traveling for the privilege.

¹Quoted from Kerry Taylor-Leech, with permission.