Sometimes first impressions can be mistaken. Yesterday I taught my second English lesson to a group of teenagers at Blue Dragon Children's Foundation in Vietnam. Two of the keener students arrived early and chatted happily in Vietnamese before a boy I didn't know came into the room. They argued. The new boy looking intimidating with a tattoo and angry face. When he left, I asked if my two students were OK and they smiled and shrugged it off.
At this stage the angry boy with the tattoo came back into the room. He came around the circle and sat close beside me. I handed him some lego and watched as he tentatively tried to put them together. I showed him how to pull blocks apart and he experimented and grew in confidence as he discovered how the lego worked. I tried a few English words for numbers and colours but he didn't engage. So I started building a bridge. One block at a time I made a base and a series of steps and my newest student copied the process to build his side of the structure. When each of our sides was big enough, we joined them with a final block and added our bridge to the others spanning a piece of paper. He turned to me and smiled.
Only today did the rather blatant symbolism of the task occur to me. The bridge I hope I built was one that takes a young boy from insecurity to a little more confidence. A bridge that makes him feel more accepted and confident. A bridge that builds his humanity. That's the bridge he built for me.
