Tutor Reflections 3

There she was greeted by five children, five inquisitive ebony skinned faces. They were Sudanese refugees. She was there to tutor them English through a volunteer group at Melbourne University. ‘I will never forget…I will never forget their faces, I can remember what they were wearing, I can remember the way they wrote their names on a piece of paper, like it was yesterday,’ Hopkins reminisces. As she left a young girl made Hopkins swear that she would return. She agreed. At the time Hopkins remembers thinking, ‘Oh my god, what am I getting myself into?’

As it turned out, that morning would be the small beginnings of what is now the hugely successful Sudanese Australian Integrated Learning (SAIL) program. The program, in the words of its website, is ‘a volunteer, non-profit, secular organisation that provides English as a Second Language tutors to the Sudanese refugee community in Melbourne, Australia.’

Given that the Sudanese community is one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in Melbourne (since 1996, roughly 1,560 Sudanese have migrated to Victoria), this is a big statement. However, through enlisting the help of Matthew Albert (also a university student), Hopkins is now the co-coordinator of a large group of volunteers (about 128) who work together with roughly 200 Sudanese refugees. Most of the refugees have fled from the south of Sudan, escaping from the atrocities of the country’s ongoing civil war.

Every Saturday morning, tutors from all over Melbourne (and in some cases, country Victoria), arrive at All Saints church in Footscray, bringing with them carloads of Sudanese families. Not only does the program aim to provide one-on-one English tutelage to children and adults but it works to integrate a group of people into a new community and surroundings.

On Saturday morning people mill around the church. What is most striking upon arrival is the appearance of the Sudanese people. They are tall and lean, with sharply cut cheekbones grafted out of clear dark skin. A group of kids with a soccer ball tear recklessly around on the grass. Posses of tall lanky boys lean against cars, shaking hands and laughing with each other. One Sudanese man has taken it as his job to keep the children from running onto the road. He has a lined forehead, a concerned look as he gently guides the children by their shoulders, back to the footpath.

The foyer of the church is filling as tutors and buses arrive with families. Fat cheeked toddlers roam in and out of the glassed room littered with toys at the back of the church where the SAIL Junior (ages 0 to 5) program runs. This is so that mothers can leave their children to be looked after while they work with their tutors. By 10:40am, the foyer is packed with people. A young girl, beaded plaits swinging, runs up and throws her arms around her tutor.

Tutors and students spill into the small one-roomed library, crammed with books and posters of animals, maps of Africa and black icons - Halle Berry and Denzel Washington accepting their Oscars, Herbie Hancock playing trumpet. Worksheets and books are procured and people disperse to every corner of the church, sitting in the pews or the hall out the back, to learn.

Later in the afternoon, when the hordes have gone home, Albert and Hopkins have a meeting with one of the newest coordinators. They perch on brightly-coloured child size plastic chairs in the library. Apparently when they met with the mayor, they sat on the same chairs. The “serious” talk of the meeting is dispersed with laughter and stories about the kids and the latest events of the day. It is clear that Albert and Hopkins love what they do and genuinely care about the countless names of kids and adults in the program that they reel off (both students and tutors). They interrupt and finish each other’s sentences to explain the success of the program, which has resulted from a grass roots approach.

‘We turn up, we have no idea what we’re doing, we have no model we’re working on, and we’ve got no basis, but we start at the ground level’, Albert laughs. The pair have found that whilst other volunteer programs often address a group in need by developing external research and strategies to provide help, SAIL’s achievements are the result of working with the Sudanese themselves and developing relationships.

‘Having talked to a lot of people who work in this region…the biggest thing they say is that they can’t get the [Sudanese] community to trust them, and they can’t get in close on the ground…And so we’ve kind of come the other way…’ Hopkins says.

‘That’s exactly right’, Albert agrees, ‘We did it backwards.’

Working backwards has enabled Albert and Hopkins to pragmatically solve various issues that arise. The most basic of these is transport. Many families often have trouble getting to the church, as they are without cars or without money to pay for a bus fare. This fact became clear very early on.

‘Well there were two families and if one didn’t turn up, you’d…notice’ Albert laughs.

The solution is to have buses and tutors picking up families from their homes. Once they found a way of getting the community to the church, another question had to be addressed: the possibility of one-one-one tutoring for the students.

‘We used to just laugh and say wouldn’t it be funny if the kids could work one-on-one with a tutor? Well that’d never happen…’, Hopkins remembers dryly. But through Albert’s persistence in convincing her, the pair embarked on expanding the program, seeking out new families and putting out a call for tutors through Melbourne University.

The programs expansion has meant that they can now offer SAIL Junior for children aged 0 to 5; SAIL X-tend in the afternoon, a program for school aged children that runs short courses in drama, music, art and craft, AUSLAN (sign language), soccer and cooking; SAIL Senior, which runs concurrently with the kids program to provide English as a Second Language (ESL) for adults and Home Help: three hours of home assistance for single mothers during the week. SAIL also runs camps and excursions when possible and Arabic classes and talks for tutors on topics concerning teaching and refugee issues. And now a large proportion of tutors work with one student, which has proved a beneficial approach.

‘The strength of sail…being an unconventional structure for ESL learning, is that it’s a free form organisation, to the point where you’re self directed in what you do with your student’, says 23 year old tutor Kristen Smith. ‘It means that I have established a relationship with my student and I know what her interests are, her likes and dislikes and what will get her to engage in the learning, so I can hone my lessons to fit what she is interested in.’

In the church hall a relaxed kind of mayhem pervades the air. A young boy is standing at the pulpit grinning and pretending to give a sermon, whilst a group of girls hide behind the altar table playing bingo with pictures and words. The leader, a popular girl, with long hair, platted tightly from the roots to the ends, holds up picture cards and reads out the words to shrieks of excitement. Peg. Wind. Car.

A man sits in one of the pews reading to two solemn faced teenage boys, carefully articulating each word and asking them questions: ‘What do you think is going to happen next? You read.’ Meanwhile, the sound of a child banging on a piano can be heard from another room. A young girl is sitting with her tutor, flicking through a magazine and cutting out pictures. The girl chants snatches of rap songs, in between talking non-stop. A small boy wanders down the aisle, wearing a hand me down red vinyl suit, straight out of the seventies.

Organised chaos seem to be fitting words to describe SAIL, and despite the premise of learning it seems that fun is central to the whole experience. Gwilym Elias, a tutor of 22, is sitting and reading with a young girl. Other children run past and pull at his sleeve and he throws them smiles and teases them. He says later ‘Coming here to Footscray is doing my little bit to help people. I suppose you have to ask, why the Sudanese community?…I guess I don’t really have an answer to that…I feel really comfortable working with this community…I get so much out of it... Just hearing about their stories and the way they’re adapting to living in Australia, you learn so much about what they’ve been through and human nature.’

Footscray. Braybrook. Sunshine. The western suburbs. This is where the majority of the Sudanese refugees are being relocated to. These suburbs have grown up around bypasses - highways, factories, concrete. Turning off the Ballarat Highway in Footscray, the streets become narrower. They have colonial names: Devonshire, Suffolk, Essex, Norfolk and then amongst them, the odd aberration: Khartoum. Soudan.

In the street of one Sudanese family, the houses look out on the backs of other houses: scratched garage doors and dilapidated wooden fences. Most families will initially be housed in a commission flat. Albert gestures to the surrounding room to illustrate the dimensions of one flat (barely larger than the size of two cars), and says ‘We’ve had one housing commission flat…Three or four families all lived in it…’

Hopkins interjects, ‘Although when you’re used to living in those kind of conditions in a refugee camp in Cairo…you know big deal!’ One tutor tells the story of a boy she drives to SAIL. Each week, he says hopefully to her, ‘I want a bike.’ This boy knows his way around Footscray, probably roaming to the shops, to the bus stop, back to his house, on foot. He has come from the dry landscape of Sudan, then to Cairo and now here: Footscray. To Melbourne’s desertous west, with a growing Sudanese heart.

In the foyer at noon people are gathering around the table where all the students’ files are kept. Albert stands behind the table, people swarming around him. There are pictures to be wowed over, stamps to be given, good worksheets to be signed (three good weeks of work, approved by everybody involved – Albert, Hopkins, the tutor and the student – results in a reward in the fourth week, which the student and tutor decide on).

A girl of six pushes in and hands Albert a picture and story she has written. It is an abstract squiggle of colours on the page, accompanied by straight up and down words in a painstakingly neat hand. Albert is effusive, gesticulating enthusiastically and bending down to the child’s height to make eye-contact, ‘This is great! Good work!’ The young woman who is her tutor stands proudly to the side. She explains what she and the child have done for the morning. Albert listens carefully and manages to offer each person who approaches him the same consideration and encouragement. He is attentive and warm as the tutors gush proudly about the work of their students.

Hopkins, meanwhile, is ushering people into a lunch queue outside; free lunch is provided for all involved at SAIL. She is somehow achieving several tasks at once: placating a crying toddler in her arms, offering work task suggestions to a tutor and keeping the marauding line of people inside the orange cones so that they don’t spill into the next door property.

A coffee table book that has been donated to SAIL’s library features exquisite photos of the Dinka, one of the southern Sudanese tribes that many of the refugees at the program belong to. In one photo, a man stands tall, his slender naked form - long lean legs, protruding ribs - is silhouetted against a stark background of grey dust, burning dung piles and a herd of sullen cows with half moon horns, their necks tethered by ropes. Land and sky blend smokily and stick-like trees are the only forms to rise from the barren earth.

This is Sudan. One of the remotest places on earth.

Turn the page and a tribe stand in a roughly assembled line before the photographer. Children and adults crowd together. They are barely clothed, wearing a scrap of cloth at most which covers their genitals, their faces open and curious to the invisible photographer. It is possible they may never have seen a camera before. Albert and Hopkins point at the faces and start to name names. They game-play with each other, joyfully guessing who they think each child is. Do they know these children, are they the ones in the program? No, but there is a marked similarity between so many of the faces. They could be any of the children at SAIL.

‘This is where they come from,’ Albert says awestruck, pointing at the photo. ‘From this, one day, straight to here the next.’ He gestures at the surroundings of the church and shakes his head in disbelief.

Sudan, the largest country in Africa, is a country in turmoil. In 1956, Sudan became independent from Egypt and Britain, who had ruled the country for over 50 years. The British divided Sudan into pieces, splitting the Muslim north from the Christian south and carving the streets of Khartoum, the capital, into the shape of the Union Jack. After gaining independence in 1956, the country has been at war from the inside: a civil battle between the north and south, between the enforced Islamic Law and the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), an ancestral war between southern tribes (the Dinka and the Nuer), a war that is about cows and blood and land and peace. And the results of this war: a toll of over 2 million bodies and thousands of displaced people.

Refugees.

Once they have left their country of origin, refugees are able to apply to the Australian government for a humanitarian visa. Angelo Tat, a 33 year old Sudanese man who has been in Australia for two years, tips his head forward to reveal the bald patch on his head where the Islamic government hit him with an electric iron bar, believing he was an informant for the SPLA. He bares his teeth, to show two gold incisors: these replace the teeth they knocked out. Forced to leave his country, for fear of his own execution, he fled to Libya. He is a tall gentle man, who works as a supervisor at SAIL, stooping to sweep the hall clean at the end of the day with his two-year-old son pattering around at his feet. Tat smiles warmly when he talks about Australia, this country which his child was born in, ‘Australia is good…a peaceful country’.

Many of the families at SAIL fled Sudan to refugee camps in bordering countries, such as Kakuma in Northern Kenya. These camps are often dangerous place with high rates of rape and violence. Places where people who don’t belong are lumped together, in barren and remote conditions. ‘What was Kakuma like?’ a woman asks the young girl she is tutoring. ‘Like Phillip Island,’ the girl replies, ‘we played basketball everyday.’

The disparity between illusion and truth can be a fine line for many children, who have suffered innumerable shocks: fleeing their home, witnessing violence and death, or even suffering from abuse themselves within the refugee camps. Despite these circumstances, the Sudanese people are extremely warm and cheerful, eager to share jokes and laugh. But as a result of this unstable existence, many of the children have had interrupted learning, making it very difficult for them to concentrate whilst being taught.

In one young girl, “Abul”, a tutor describes the classic symptoms of attention deficit disorder: a short concentration span, excessive energy and an inability to focus on any one thing. Watching the pair, Abul is boisterous and loud but her eyes flit around the room barely making contact with her tutor who is working incredibly hard, joking and playing with her, to get her to sit and read. So how does the program cope with the challenge of the students’ life experiences?

‘We deal with it by providing…lowest student-tutor ratios we possibly can’, Albert says, ‘developing mutual responsibility, being able to build up that relationship [and] having someone to depend upon is really at the centre of the healing process.’ The key, as Hopkins puts it is ‘consistency’. And even after a few weeks, Abul has started to concentrate and open up more, as her friendship with her tutor develops. A real leap forward comes when she spontaneously begins to teach her tutor Arabic, writing the characters on the page and translating them into English.

In 2001, from a list of 5000 volunteer organisations across Australia, SAIL won the National Community Link Volunteer Award and was also acknowledged by the City of Maribyrnong for Contributions to Education. SAIL continues to expand and develop to meet the needs of the burgeoning Sudanese population. Only last week a tutor arrived at a families house and instead of two kids, four fell out of the house: new arrivals from Kenya.

It is clear to Albert and Hopkins that to cope with the program’s expansion, the infrastructure of SAIL will have to be reshaped. Given that they have taken on what is a full-time job, along with study and work, how do they manage to invest so much of themselves? The answer is clear when Hopkins tells another story.

She describes two children who arrived at the program, who were extremely fragile, ‘They did not speak, interact with anyone. They were like cyphers…just like a child with heart beating, that’s it,’ she says awestruck. A few weeks after arriving, she and Albert sat reading with them in the library and, Hopkins says with amazement, ‘they started to talk!…We were just like “yes!”. It was like a full on breakthrough.’ There is a moment of silence, of appreciation of this fact before Albert says, ‘I remember sitting here…And we said at that point, this is why we do it.’

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