Employed

It seems that I have managed to find myself a part-time job. Yesterday was my first day. I am tutoring little Hispanic kids in English and Math. Yes, you read that right, I'm tutoring someone else in math. Talk about the blind leading the blind, but thankfully it's elementary school math so I'm pretty sure I can handle it. I think the most interesting part of this job is that I go to the kids homes to tutor them. They all live in Santa Ana. For those of you unfamiliar with Santa Ana, there are parts that are really nice, and then there are parts that are pretty sketchy.

I pulled up at the first house and thought that it looked really nice for Santa Ana. Unfortunately the student didn't live at that house. It was an old address and I had to call the agency for the new address. Although the new address was only a few blocks away, the neighborhood is a little rough. Pulling up in a neighborhood where a lot of the houses have bars on the windows made me initially wonder if this was really such a great idea. Then I went inside and met the student and her father. Her dad's English was surprisingly better than his daughter's, but neither of them spoke very well. He was thrilled to see me, and repeatedly told me in his broken English how much he wants his daughter to learn to speak better than he does so that she can have "a better life than this."

The next student lives in an apartment building in a neighborhood that seems rather unsafe. I had to call and ask her mother to come unlock the door to the stairwell so I could get into the complex. The mother doesn't speak a word of English. She just handed the phone to the daughter to translate. Once I was in their home the mother seemed very embarrassed trying to communicate with me via her daughter at first, until she realized that even though I can't speak Spanish, I can understand most of what she said. After that we had a little discussion about things where the mother would speak to me in Spanish, I would respond to the daughter in English, who would translate my response back to Spanish for the mother. It was a little weird, but it worked. During the lesson we were sitting in the living room on a couch, and I couldn't help but notice that the corner of the living room was set up like a little bedroom. It's a humbling thing to see that, and then drive 15 minutes and be back in my home, where I sleep in a bed that would have taken up half their living room. It's sad that sometimes that's what it takes to remind me how very blessed I really am.