coincidence

I’m at my fourth and final training session as an AMES volunteer English tutor. All 22 of us already meet and work with our refugee or migrant ‘students’. I’ll miss the final session and graduation next week because I’ll be in Adelaide on other business.

I’m the oldest of three male volunteers. Robert would be mid-50s and Raymond mid-30s. There are four young women in their 20s, one around 40, and fourteen women from 50 to over 70 with names like Dot and Hazel. We’re all nice middle-class folk, fuzzy-hearted softies who want to welcome people to a new life rather than send them back to brutality and persecution.

I’m fresh from my second meeting with TZ. I tell him I want to find out about his knowledge of English at this session. He knows numbers and dates and weather and can speak about how he gets to work. His reading and writing is not bad, self-taught from a book during years in an Indian refugee camp outside Delhi. Listening and speaking is not so easy.

A small boy appears in the room. TZ tells me this is his nephew, his sister’s son. The child climbs onto TZ’s lap and stares at me from the security of TZ’s chest. I extend a finger but no child’s finger meets it. TZ’s wife and a small female enter. The child returns to the small female who I guess to be TZ’s sister. She is small enough to be a 13 year-old.

I ask how old the little boy is. He was born on 3 September 2010, the same date as Nerri, my grand-daughter. I introduce the word coincidence and try to explain its meaning. I find coincidence in his battered English-Chin dictionary but still he looks blank.

TZ shows me the classwork he is doing at Box Hill TAFE on Monday and Wednesday evenings. I read an essay he presented to his class about Chinland. He says he misses it so much, his home city Hakha, the lakes, the birds.

Most Chin are Baptist. American Baptist missionaries, the Reverend Arthur Carson and his wife Laura Hardin Carson, converted the Chin from 1899 onwards. On the wall is a framed oval picture of a bleeding-hearted Jesus, Catholic iconography. TZ tells me a local op shop gave it to him when he asked to buy it.

I ask about Chin cooking. Rice is the staple, of course. TZ’s wife cannot work because of her health so she cooks. Unlike African men, TZ can cook. I look forward to the day when we share a meal.

He shows me to the door where I put on my thongs. We are laughing.

Rock on.