My name wasn’t Chelsea this month. Instead, people called me Teacher. No one had ever called me Teacher before. I’d never been a teacher before.
It was wonderful to serve as a teacher of English, geography, religion, writing, and music this month. After being in school my whole life, many of the people who have challenged, encouraged, inspired, and, well, taught me the most have been my teachers. There’s no way I will ever be able to show enough gratitude for the wonderful things I’ve been taught. So being able to pass on some of those things I’ve learned and become passionate about has been an honor.
Here is a picture of me teaching students something.
I don’t think it was a teacher or professor who taught me how to play the game Mafia, but it was what Bre and I decided to do last Friday, for our final 8:00 a.m. English Vocabulary class.
The object of the game is to catch the mafia before all the townspeople are wiped out. Three players are secretly assigned roles: one is the mafia, who can choose one person to kill each turn, or “night.” One is the healer, who can choose one person to save each night. One is the detective, who can choose one person to accuse each night. The rest of the players are innocent, vulnerable townspeople.
When the narrator tells the town to go to sleep, everyone closes their eyes except the mafia, who points at who they’d like to kill. The mafia closes his or her eyes and the healer wakes up and picks someone to save, hoping it will be the victim the mafia just chose. The detective is next, and points at who he or she thinks the killer is. The townspeople wake up and the narrator makes up an elaborate story of what happened “in the night.”
As this was a vocabulary class, we prefaced the game by saying that we wanted to teach them a new word, and would be using it for an activity. I wrote “Mafia” on the board and asked if anyone knew what it meant. After a long moment, one student raised his hand.
“Is it like the gang?”
“Yes! Good!” I said, and tried to explain the mafia light-heartedly. “The mafia… well, they hunt people down!”
It had been awkward explaining the rules of Hangman to them too: “Spelling is important. You have to figure out how to spell the word before I hang a stick figure from this gallows on the whiteboard.”
It took a few minutes to explain the game, but when we sat in a circle and drew our roles out of a hat, the fun began. We played two rounds of Mafia, each murder or close call vividly narrated by Bre, who leaned toward stories about explosives. (Here’s a photo of the tense murder case–sorry about your arm, Bre.)
“I have terrible news,” she’d begin. “Last night at ITCS, Srey Leak was heading to bed after a long day of studying. And on her way, she decided to wash the dishes that were in the kitchen, because she has a servant’s heart. And then… a plate with dry crusty yogurt exploded. Poor Srey Leak. She is now with our Lord. I only hope that the detective can find whoever committed this heinous crime!”
The second round of Mafia was the strangest one I’d ever played. The detective is the only one who can guess who the killer is in the version we played and therefore needs to be alive, but somehow, the mafia killed off not one, not two, but four detectives!
This is just one of many, many wonderful moments with our students. It was a blessing to be there, speak with them, and laugh together for an entire month. All the students at ITCS are so driven, passionate, and kind that it’s hard not to be inspired to do our best to serve them. And they have all been so open and eager to let us into their lives that it was hard to not become friends with them.
Today, we left ITCS to stay the night at a hostel before flying to Malaysia tomorrow morning. It was the most difficult goodbye of the entire Race. All the students gathered and sang a song that a student, Malen, meant “love forever.” A couple gave us cross keychains. Our host gave us all a box of “the best Korean parasite medicine, to take when you’re back home.” We prayed together and almost everyone cried.
Tomorrow, Team Twelve and the rest of C Squad will fly to Kuala Lumpur, where we’ll be doing manual labor at a school. I can’t believe we’re going to our last ministry. I can’t believe I’ve done this ten times now. I can’t believe I’ll have to say goodbye to my team and squad soon.
I’m excited. Don’t get me wrong. But right now, I’m still reeling from that painful, touching goodbye this morning.
To put it in Mafia terms… it kills me.
