I am writing in ‘back to school’ week. Summer holidays are over. I sit with a newly arrived family from South East Asia, father, mother and a lively, shy six-year-old boy in the office of the school Principal. It is late afternoon already and school starts tomorrow. The principal and his assistant give total attention to this one little boy and then to his parents. The first task is to learn to speak the complicated family names correctly. The principal listens carefully to the unfamiliar cadence of a new language, writes it phonetically on his note pad and pronounces it until the family agree that he has it precisely right. He speaks the boy’s whole name and asks him how he would like to be called. ‘Things are often shortened in Australia’. Now he has a guide for everyone on his staff; this family will be spoken to with names pronounced correctly. They have found common ground. The little boy meets his teacher for tomorrow. She crouches down to speak to him face to face. He understands English. He is tri-lingual already. She smiles at him. ‘We are going to have fun’, she says. This little boy, supported in a web of co-operation, will learn messages for life. We could never have managed that when I was teaching Preps.
The way things have changed during my span of life intrigues me. In 1963 I was teaching Prep at St Andrews Werribee where, due to the influx of migrants after the end of World War 2, the class size was unimaginably large. There were close to 100 little children in my classroom. Before I joined the Josephite community my State School classes were much smaller, but migrants of south European origin chose to enrol in Catholic schools. One afternoon a woman who spoke no English came to the classroom door; I understood that she wanted to collect her child Francesco. I turned back to my crowded room where desks were stepped up in tiers as if in a stadium and the children were busy with blackboards and chalk. I caught their attention, smiled and said, ‘Francesco’. A bunch of little hands shot up; I had about as many Francesco as I had Giuseppe. I invited the mother inside knowing that her own Francesco would come to her.
Australian politicians both Federal and State, good persons in dialogue across the political divide, have worked to create a range of schools, all able to provide an adequate education. They still work towards this. Change happens gradually; it ebbs and flows.
I think of 1962 when the world watched a political and military standoff. The crisis was triggered by the Soviet Union’s deployment of ballistic missiles in Cuba, a communist nation on an island very close to the American mainland. By October the world was in fear of nuclear war. In the previous year President John Kennedy had met Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna and engaged in what Kennedy described as ‘full and frank conversations without threats or ultimations’. Both politicians understood that they had very different political beliefs; nevertheless, they respected and trusted the human decency of each other.
Now there was a wedge between them. John Kennedy informed his nation that the Soviet weapons could cause annihilation from Canada to Peru. Since the Northern Hemisphere was under direct threat, he would do all in his power to blockade Cuba. Nikita Khrushchev wrote an ‘electronic letter’ to Kennedy noting that they could be on the brink of war. He warned ‘If indeed war should break out, then it would not be in our power to stop it, for such is the logic of war. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction’.
There was a backchannel of communication between Washington and Moscow. The intermediary was a man named Norman Cousins; he was acceptable to both. Between October 23rd and November 28th there were intense communications between Khrushchev and Kennedy. These men already had a basis of respect and trust for each other. They found common ground. Both wanted to avoid mayhem; neither wanted to lose face. On November 28th an agreement was reached. The Soviet Union would remove its missiles from Cuba in exchange for the USA pledging to not invade Cuba, and to remove its missiles from Turkey. The world breathed again. Is such a thing possible in our time of social media, hate speech and conspiracy theories? I can hope and pray. There are good persons leading in various roles in communities and in nations; I could quote examples of human decency that I have seen. In fact, I keep quoting them in all these stories.
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Stories and Musings 