The Urgency of Education

This is serious stuff.  The mother and siblings of one of our students lives here.  When we visited yesterday, they were out of rice and had only a few fish to sell (which we purchased).  Try to image when it is like to live here during a typhoon.  Or try to imagine what life is like for this family when the mother falls ill.  We've seen this kind of thing over and over, but it never fails to shake us.  I wish that I could tell you that this is an exceptional case here at Bahay Pag-asa Youth Center, but I can't.  Nearly every family we visit is struggling to survive from day to day.  What does that mean to us, the staff and volunteers at BPYC?

It means that our work is terribly urgent.  Each day we have to educate the boy whose family lives here so that he will be able to rescue his family.  Each lesson we teach is the necessary next step in a life-saving procedure.  We look at the time we have available to us and we survey our resources.  We try to identify the motivations and hopes of our students and use those to create new possibilities for their lives and the lives of their families.  One of our volunteers said yesterday, "I think I need some time to reflect on this."  Some of us stayed up late trying to comprehend what our role could be in all of this.

As a Brother and teacher, I have left positions at schools knowing that the teacher who takes my place will most likely do a better job and that the school will be just fine.  But we can never walk away from this thinking that somehow it's all going to be okay.  Once we see, we become responsible and that means that we have to act.  What that means to Lasallian educators is that we have to take seriously our conviction that our work is part of God's plan of salvation.  All of our schools state this, but here we realize it in a way that both unnerves us and inspires us.