As I entered the classroom to prepare for the next lesson a little girl our team has nick named “Sunshine” locked her arms around my knees and, babbling incoherently, smiled up at me widely. “1, 2, 3, I am WAL-LY”, she announced and then promptly marched to her seat, where she copied the other children in the class as they raised their hands and called out answers. If I ignored her efforts to get my attention she would become restless and decide to make sure I heard her answers.
She does this because Sunshine has down syndrome.
At first, if I’m being completely honest, I had a big problem with having Sunshine in class while I was teaching. She was a distraction to the other kids and she disrupted the flow of the class making it harder to maintain control of a group of children who I was already struggling to communicate with. It was frustrating to be around her and even more frustrating, (almost virtually impossible), to try and get her to understand and listen to instruction.
There were several times during class that I found myself bitterly thinking that teaching in Pouk would be so much easier if she wasn’t there. Even outside of class I struggled with my attitude towards Sunshine and I did my best to avoid her aggressive hugs and sloppy kisses. I mean, I know that God loves Sunshine and I know that I need to love Sunshine but she makes me uncomfortable and I guess I felt entitled to my own comfort. In my opinion it was okay for Sunshine to visit the school while classes were not in session but it seemed really excessive to have her in class disrupting the learning of the other students.
And then I met Sunshine’s mother…
She approached Cathy, our contact Roselet and I as we were visiting houses in the village. She thanked us for allowing Sunshine to come to school. She told us that the public school where the children are taught in Khmer would not allow her to go to school because she was difficult to handle. She explained that every night Sunshine came home with a great big smile, sang the songs we sung to her in class and told her mother the new words she had learned. Her mother smiled widely as she told us that Sunshine does not call us teachers, she calls us “her mother’s” and she loves to go to school because her mothers there love her very much.
All of this time I had convinced myself that it was a waste of time for Sunshine to be in the classroom without realizing how much of a blessing it was to her mother to be able to send her to school every day. I have been humbled by her and God has given me the ability to be patient and gracious towards her. That doesn’t change the fact that Sunshine is hard to deal with and it doesn’t make me enjoy it when she wipes her runny nose against my neck but my perspective is completely different and for that I will forever thank God.
