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.

chin

I am nervous as I walk up the path to the less-than-modest brown brick house. The railway runs behind it. A small silver SUV sits at an off angle in the middle of a decaying double carport. The garden is Spartan. I am here in the late afternoon to meet TZ for the first time. I am to be his English tutor.

At our second AMES training session last week each volunteer gets a folder with the details of the refugee or migrant we will help learn the language. My ‘student’ is 41 year-old TZ, a Chin from Burma. His English is rated intermediate, but that’s only his reading. His speaking and comprehension are a level below.

We are able to converse well enough, though he struggles to find the right words for some things.

The Chin constitute about two per cent of Burma’s population, though the regime is trying to reduce that figure. They are concentrated in the Chin State which borders both Bangladesh and India. In the 19th century the British occupied the region and suppressed the Chin who didn’t take kindly to the British presence.

American missionaries arrived in the 1890s and between 80 and 90 per cent of Chin converted to Christianity, further enhancing their minority status in Buddhist Burma.

“On 20 February 2002,” TZ begins, and I compliment his memory for dates, “I and others in my village must build … “ (long pause as he tries to find the right word) “ … a house to celebrate Burma’s national day. It is ‘not good enough’ so the soldiers beat us.” TZ had his front teeth kicked out. My compliment to his memory grows ridiculous.

He spent nine years in India before being accepted into Australia.

Over an hour TZ tells me he has ten siblings, four in Australia. He has two daughters and two sons. I meet the younger of each. His wife S comes into the room. She speaks no English. TZ wants to be able to go to ‘offices’ and speak for his family and not need an interpreter.

When I ask how he feels about Australia he sheds tears and cannot talk. He has rights here, he says; he owes Australia so much for taking him in. He works at a trailer factory in Kilsyth. He has no education but wants to study and learn English to be able to help other Chin settle more easily into the community, to save the Australian government money.

I ask the word for his sarong. In Chin it is hni. I am honoured to be his tutor and his student.

Rock on.