Over the past year, I’ve been fortunate to volunteer with Nashville International Center for Empowerment (NICE), teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) for adult refugees and immigrants living in the greater Nashville area. Since my time with NICE was cut short by the current COVID-19 outbreak, I want to reflect on one of the many spontaneous decisions I’ve made during college and what I’ve learned from my time as an ESL instructor.
How did I get involved?
When I came to Vanderbilt, I wasn’t looking for any particular “service opportunities” to complete my college experience. Nor was I especially passionate about any sort of political or social justice issue—at least, I wasn’t passionate enough to actively seek out ways to get involved. I did know, however, that I was curious about issues such as immigration, the refugee crisis, and climate change. When my second semester came around, I decided to take classes that could help me study these issues more in-depth.
One of those classes was a small seminar on “The Refugee Experience in Nashville and Beyond,” and it was through this seminar that I was introduced to NICE. Our class spent an evening at one of their community nights, getting to know some of the students and helping them figure out ways to achieve some sort of long-term goal they had set for themselves.
By the time NICE announced that they were looking for more volunteers to come regularly, I was already sold. Between the stories I’d heard from some of the students and what I knew about the work NICE was doing with Nashville’s immigrant community, I decided that theirs was a mission I could get on board with. I reached out via email, attended training, and within a few weeks the girl who once swore she would never become a teacher found herself doing just that.
What was it like?
Initially, I felt like I’d been thrown into the deep end with no warning. I was nineteen and suddenly found myself teaching people two or even three times my age. I had no formal educational training beyond what I had received from NICE, and there I was leading two-hour lessons every week. In my class of less than 20 students, there were at least six different non-English languages spoken; I was barely passable in one and knew only a handful of phrases in another, and somehow I was supposed to teach English without really being able to explain anything to my students in their own languages.
In short, I felt inexperienced and way out of my league.
However, between the resources NICE provided, different language-learning apps, and by coming up with creative ways to explain a concept on the fly, I found I was more than equipped to lead a lesson. Classes were often wild, loud, and full of hilarious moments as we played games and laughed together over how utterly crazy the English language could be.
As time went by, I learned everyone’s names and at least a little bit of their stories. I said goodbye to some of my students as they moved up to the next level and, a few minutes later, welcomed half a dozen newcomers. I watched happily as the woman who sat at the front and barely said a word in September confidently raised her hand to read in front of the class five months later. I came to love teaching, for all its ups and downs.
What did I learn?
I was concerned about the refugee crisis and immigration long before I started volunteering with NICE. I kept up with current events, I went on a mission trip, and I did my senior research project on the subject. I could have continued along a similar vein in college, donated money to various nonprofits, or gotten more heavily involved in advocacy and policy. These are things I’ll likely find myself doing in the future, and they are absolutely essential to ensuring that those who are displaced and seeking better lives are able to do so.
But I was presented with an opportunity, and I made the spontaneous decision to get directly involved in the lives of the people I had studied and written about. It was exhausting. It was time-consuming. At times, I ended up angry and disgusted at what I felt was ignorance and privilege surrounding me on campus—I couldn’t help but make comparisons to my ESL students who showed up week after week, determined to learn, after working long hours at multiple jobs.
Yet I was also exposed to some of the realities of working with nonprofits and Nashville’s immigrant community. There were weeks when we had to combine our ESL classes because there simply weren’t enough volunteer teachers available. Shortly after I started with NICE, I heard about another local refugee resettlement organization that had recently shut down; policy changes at the federal level, including travel bans and cuts to immigration quotas, had drastically reduced the demand for their services.
These national policy decisions—the ones I analyzed and critiqued for years—have become a little more personal. They affect people I know and care about, and for better and for worse, they alter the fabric of our Nashville community.
For those who want to get involved with some form of service but don’t know where to start, look around you. Your local community will always have organizations that need volunteers. Think about the issues that catch your eye as you scroll through your news feed. Pay attention to opportunities that come up in your classes. Talk to your professors, mentors, and leaders and find out where they serve.
If you have the capacity, and if you can make the time, there is always more work to be done.
To learn more about Nashville International Center for Empowerment, visit www.empowernashville.org or check out @nicenashville on Instagram and Twitter.
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