Tiny Dancer (18 page)

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Twenty-eight year old Kerrie Benson was in her fifth year of teaching at the Rosemead Elementary School in the fall of 2002, during “Staff Development Day” when Principal Rose Dunn took her aside in the hallway to give her important news. Dunn had carried out a number of conversations with a local woman named Rebecca Grossman, who had recently gained custody of an Afghan refugee, a girl. The girl was ten, but had never been to school, and was recovering from a series of operations to restore her after massive burn damage. She would not only require special classes in remedial schooling for the rudiments of alphabet and language, but her classroom teacher was going to be expected to “mainstream” the girl in with the rest of the class and find some way to keep her involved with lessons that were years ahead of her education level.

Kerrie Benson, it had been decided, was the best teacher for the task. Her third grade class of eight year-olds was close enough in age, in social terms, for ten year-old Zubaida. Bensen’s careful presentation of lessons and patience with her children had already convinced Principal Dunn that her personal style was suited to the range of challenges that this situation was sure to produce. As for those more advanced lessons that can only be expected for children with a couple of years of schooling under their belts, they would be replaced, for Zubaida, with equal time in a smaller special education class. There the more basic lessons were highly visual and hands-on, clear enough to cross all language barriers.

So in a few days, Kerrie Benson would be getting a new enrollee, and she might want to start preparing herself to receive a ten year-old girl who had never been to school at all, who spoke very little English, and who was only in the area in the first place because she was in the process of enduring a full year of surgeries to restore features that had been obliterated by a fire in her home country of Afghanistan.

It was pointed out to Benson that tremendous behind-the-scenes interest was focused on this girl’s development, and that it was very desirable for this experiment in late-stage basic education to demonstrate positive results.

Benson threw herself into preparation. She, as the main classroom teacher, would handle the task of including Zubaida with the rest of the students during those activities where Zubaida could reasonably be expected to understand and participate. Benson would also coordinate her class time with special education teacher Kendra Kreutzer, who took Zubaida into her special education classroom to work on filling in the pre-third grade schooling that she lacked.

In Benson’s classroom, she presented the regular third grade lessons, she took care that Zubaida’s fundamentals would be constantly reinforced by a number of simple techniques. An old-fashioned alphabet chart was taped to her desk, and she would be provided with a picture book of alphabet letters. To compliment and reinforce those learning tools, Benson also hunted down a set of soft, molded rubber cut-outs of each letter, coated in sand. These would be among Zubaida’s regular daily tools, so that she could not only see and draw each letter the way any other child learns to do it, but she would also have the tactile stimulation of handling each letter in 3-D, as well as trace her fingers over the roughened face of each letter, a process designed to help bury the knowledge of this letter deep into her mind.

Zubaida would be kept within the social structure of the overall class, but would also be provided with constant activities that focused on using “manipulatives,” as Benson called them—items she could touch and feel to reinforce a lesson through a number of senses at the same time. Every lesson would be fed to her through a variety of sensory stimuli, so that lack of common language was never a reason for her to become disconnected from the ongoing lessons.

A key part of Benson’s classroom plan for her newest student was to provide a constant level of challenge that would provide Zubaida with enough moment-to-moment satisfaction to keep the process an engaging one, but would also challenge her enough to prevent boredom from sneaking in. Benson already knew from years of experience that in order to communicate with kids that age in any meaningful way, you have to keep their attention consistently engaged. Any time that Zubaida might spend in being either bored and under challenged or confused and frustrated would only end up as wasted opportunity within the small amount of time that the medical situation allowed them. Those wasted minutes and added up hours would ultimately spoil the tremendous work that lay ahead: playing catch-up to several years of schooling with a student who spoke no English and had no American cultural background.

“But what an opportunity!” Benson later enthused. “And not just for Zubaida, either. Imagine the educational value to a classroom full of American third-graders who have never had contact with a girl from Afghanistan to begin with, let alone one whose appearance supposedly had a somewhat shocking effect, even though she’d already been through several surgeries.”

The trick would lie in how the class was prepared for her arrival. Benson knew that children that age are capable of both casual cruelty and equally strong gentleness and devotion. The devotion usually appeared to be activated when something caused them to empathize instead of judging. She immediately went to her class and began to prepare them, letting them know that there was going to be a late enrolling student joining them in a few days. The student was a girl from a country called “Afghanistan,” and she had never been to school before because in her country, girls are not allowed to go to school. She looked around at all of her girls and let that one sink in.

“Just think if all the girls here had to go home right now, and
never come back?
They would never be allowed to learn anything more about the outside world.” She elaborated on the description, constantly checking the kids’ eyes to make sure that the class was visualizing the situation.

Then she broke the touchy part. “Now, this girl had a terrible accident last year. She fell into a big fire and got burned, very badly. She barely made it through alive, and after it was over, the scars from the burns were so bad that she had to come to America for a whole year of operations to help her get better.”

Benson asked how many of them had ever been in a hospital and counted a few hands. “This girl has been in hospitals all over the world, but she couldn’t get the right help until she came here. She’s had a whole lot of operations just in the last few months, over and over and over. And she has to have more of them, too.

“So when she comes here, you’re going to see a girl whose features are still scarred, even though she looks better now, and she is going to have to leave school sometimes, to go back and have those next operations.”

Benson asked her class to try to imagine being far, far away from everybody that they ever knew, without their family or any friends. She actually saw a couple of faces blanch at the thought.

“What we need to do is more than just help her to learn things. We need to sort of be like her family and friends, because that’s what we would want other people to do for us.” That one hit home; she saw the impact on them, on all those faces that were already so full of the world but still innocent enough to easily accept such ideas. Benson went home feeling sure that the right tone had been struck.

Within a few days, the only thing left to so was to meet with the girl. She arranged for Zubaida to come in on an off day, so that Benson could get her acclimated to the classroom without the pressure of staring eyes.

When Zubaida arrived, Kerrie Benson’s first impression was that she was about as timid as any kid would be in such strange surroundings—but that at least she didn’t shrink back into herself, the way that so many children do at such times. She appeared to be fiercely alert and seemed eager to understand what was being communicated to her, paying close attention while Benson showed her to her desk and then pointed out the various classroom displays while doing her best to communicate something about the purpose of each one.

She felt good to see that Zubaida paid sharp attention even when she probably had no idea what Benson was talking about. For Benson, this was a process that was all about tone of voice and level of spoken volume, and eye contact, and of letting the warmth show in her eyes. The real lesson was not in the words or the class displays; it was in the very fact that Benson was spending this special, one-on-one time with her.

The Taliban had imposed their world view upon Zubaida and her people all of her life. Under their dark judgment, an American adult like Kerrie Benson whose job it was to fill the heads of young girls with skills of reading and writing and with knowledge of the world was a living example of one of the unacceptable Others. But instead, here she was speaking privately with Zubaida and addressing her in terms of gentleness and respect. These were the most important messages Benson had for her new pupil on that first orientation day.

Benson was relieved to see that by this point in Zubaida’s surgical progress, her appearance was not grotesque at all, so there was no reason not to insist that her third graders handle the situation without any destructive drama. The grafted scars were obvious, but Zubaida’s features were balanced at this point and Benson had been told that Zubaida she was not nearly as distorted as she used to be. She hadn’t seen the photos of Zubaida’s condition when she first arrived, but she had been told that the situation at that time was very grim. Now, at least, there was a girl standing right here who was restored enough to go to school and learn, even though she was alone in a foreign country.

She introduced Zubaida to her alphabet book and pointed from the letters in the book to the letters on her desk chart, then to the letters on the wall. Zubaida’s face lit up. Once she grasped that she was looking at the basic pieces of written English, she stared at the book and poured over the letters as if she were running gold coins through her hands.

They spent a while playing a version of the Helen Keller story, while Benson pointed to various objects and worked with Zubaida on the pronunciations. When she produced a drawing pad and suggested that Zubaida draw a picture of the two of them, Zubaida happily went to work at producing recognizable sketches of each of them. The best thing about it was that Zubaida had shown both of them with normal features.

Benson immediately saw it—this girl was more than ready and willing, she was eager to learn.
No,
Benson thought.
She’s more than eager, she’s hungry. She’s already soaking it up.

Kerrie Benson felt her pulse rate begin to rise. A child who is hungry to learn and devours every morsel of learning is the dream student of any good teacher; Benson was no exception. That was the primary image that she had in mind when she decided to become a teacher in the first place.

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Over the week of November 19, 2002, The Los Angeles Times reported on a rash of self-immolations by young women in Afghanistan who were distressed with their complete lack of social freedom under the ruling Taliban party. More than a hundred of these self-inflicted burn victims had appeared at various Afghani hospitals, up to that point in the year, which told nothing about how many uncounted others there may have been throughout the country’s sprawling, isolated regions. With the lack of burn care and treatment in that part of the world, these severely burned women, almost all of whom would go on to die, were cited as over-burdening Afghanistan’s few existing burn hospital facilities—which was used as justification for the implied prospect of turning them away in the future so that others could be saved.
After all, they did it to themselves.

The quandary for the doctors and clinics grew out of the need to show mercy and care to these agonized women, but it was also noted that this same care was wasted when it was given to someone with self-inflicted wounds who, realistically, was certain to be tomorrow’s problem for the grave digger. In that way, the region’s few resources were expended on these losing cases, creating a financial sink hole in the impoverished national medical services.

Graphs and charts fail to quantify the tremendous level of despair attacking the region’s female population. These women, within their own recent memories, had been painted into smaller and smaller corners. It was done first by the Soviet invaders, then by the opportunistic regional warlords, and finally by the Taliban enforcers, who brought with them their violent interpretations of Islam. Now the country’s women found themselves driven backward onto a tiny slice of the floor in each room’s darkest corner. More and more of these women were finding intolerable the prospect of a life spent on tiptoe in an imaginary corner so tiny that she couldn’t take a deep breath for fear of losing her balance and stepping out of her allowed space—with the dire consequences that could ensue.

Some of the self-immolating women were fully aflame before onlookers could extinguish the fires and carry the victims to the nearest aid. Those died quickly, trapped inside physical systems so heavily assaulted that they struggled to continue functioning from one moment to the next. Others were burned at about the same level of injury that struck Zubaida. Most of them would die, too, although it usually took them longer to succumb than the ones with full body burns. A lucky few were burned to a much lesser extent when passers-by jumped in and smothered the flames. But while those sorts of injuries shouldn’t have been life threatening, it was the infections that frequently set in after a burn that tended to finish the job. Even after word circulated all along the gossip trees of the villages and towns about the awful deaths that the desperate young women brought upon themselves, such a terrible means of ending their lives remained, for the most despairing among them, preferable to the thought of enduring a continued existence of repression and enforced ignorance—and the only way to express their rage.