His Princess (A Royal Romance)(2)

The classroom—there’s just the one—is one of the only structures in the camp that has air-conditioning, and it drops from ninety-five degrees and high humidity outside to a glorious eight-five degrees inside. Any cooler and the generator will blow. We tried that once and sweltered in here for six weeks until replacement parts arrived from the capital.

The kids light up when they see me. They range in age from six to fourteen. Eventually we’ll divide them into two classes but right now there’s no point. We’re teaching all of them the basics. When Melissa and I first arrived, only two of the forty-six children could read.

There are no older children in the school. They’re out working with their parents. They “graduate” when they turn fifteen, so I’m going to lose some. The classes will grow soon. The crèche where three of my colleagues watch the younger children and toddlers while their parents build their new lives has over a hundred kids in it. Most of them are young. Most of the teenagers, two thirds, are girls.

There was a war, and around here they don’t turn you down if you can carry a rifle. There are a lot of old men and young boys here. Even though they’re surrounded by their peers, the boys can’t get enough of me and Melissa. I dress a little more casually than she does, though I still conform to the standards set by the church. That means a sundress. Being treated like a pinup model was flattering for a while but now it’s just tiresome. I have so much to teach them and so little time.

I handle the older kids.

For the most part they speak good English. They started learning when they started school. We’re hoping that by picking up the international lingua franca they’ll be able to find a competitive place in the world. It’s the little things that lift a whole country.

When you’re teaching thirteen-year-olds who can barely read and still can’t handle basic arithmetic, it’s hard to swallow that line of thinking. I want them to succeed so badly, but it’s like staring up the slope of a tall mountain that you have to climb. Nominally the kids are divided by age, but the six-year-olds and the fourteen-year-olds have the same skill level, so Melissa and I end up teaching the class together.

More esoteric subjects like history will have to wait until everyone can read the books. The younger kids are picking it up easier than the older ones. It’s strange to watch them as we break them into groups to read from the English texts we’ve been supplied by the church. You’d think the older kids, especially the boys, would be annoyed with their younger peers, but they submit themselves to tutoring with kids half their age without a second thought, sounding out the words and struggling to pick up what their cousins and younger siblings are doing with ease.

There’s an extra chair at every table. Melissa and I rotate through the room, helping the students with difficult words or just flat-out reading passages to them as they scan along. The little kids eventually give up and listen to the stories. I spend an hour reading Charlotte’s Web to a group of six students, four girls and two boys.

It’s strange how pliant and attentive they are. I don’t mean to knock the students I worked with back home, but when I was an intern doing pretty much the same thing, it was like pulling teeth. I had to hear lectures from twelve-year-olds about why the book was dumb, I was dumb, school was dumb, and the world was dumb.

It’s probably been the same through the ages, but something about them bothered me. I used to think that kids were growing up too fast, too interested in taking on the trappings of adulthood. Twelve-year-olds got into these fights over boys and dated and they all had smart phones that they’d constantly be checking in class, in flagrant violation of the school rules.

Sitting here with these kids, I realize what growing up too fast really means. I don’t have to hear the stories, and they don’t like to tell them. You can read it in their eyes. When you’re ten and you see your sister step on a land mine, or soldiers drag your mother away, it leaves a mark on your soul.

Young teachers, or interns as I was, I guess, are used to a strange tug-of-war with their students. They want to pull you into their childish world and they want to use you to pull themselves into adulthood. They want you to be a peer and are confused when you’re not. They don’t see where the line is. I was an aide, so I was in a subservient position to the teacher. That really confuses them.

It’s not like that, here. When one of the boys summons his full command of the English language to tell me I look like an angel, he’s not complimenting my looks. To him, I came from heaven.

For my first few months here I felt fat compared to the kids. I started to lean out on the MREs. They’re not bad, if you get the right ones. The vegetarian bean burrito is great. The other stuff, not so much. The chicken stew, my God. Sometimes a bunch of the volunteers get together and dump the nastiest, gloppiest varieties into one big pot, pour in a bottle of hot sauce, and make a disgusting but somewhat more palatable stew.

I really don’t care. There’s nothing for me back where I came from, and these kids need someone like me.

Class drags on until five in the afternoon. Tomorrow I don’t have to get up—local teachers provide some of their education in their native dialect for three hours in the morning. Melissa likes to get up, unfortunately. She’s read Charlotte’s Web about five times and has these stacks of lesson plans she’s never going to use. It’ll be a victory if we can get them to grasp the basics of the story.