A “Human” Dilemma

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

My ten-year-old grandson has a problem. Last week he climbed into his carpool ride home from school shaking his head in serious fourth-grade angst. According to the volunteer mom driving that day, he was literally wringing his hands. Since that grandson is by nature disarmingly candid and straightforward, she was worried about his mental state.

“Henry,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

He heaved a deeply disturbed sigh and answered, “I just found out that three girls at school have crushes on me, and I only like two of them.”

There it is: a first-world problem. I asked my husband the other day, “If we have first-world problems and third-world problems, what kind of problems would be labeled second-world problems?” He thought about it a while and decided there are no real “second” world problems—just small gradients between first to third. One day in the distant past, somebody arbitrarily assigned a number to my problems as compared to those of other cultures we assume must be somehow less civilized than we are. Never mind that those societies may date their existence back two or three thousand years (or more) beyond the origins of our own country.

I considered that in light of an experience I had a number of years ago. My principal asked me if he could bring a group of foreign exchange students from Russia who were touring the U. S. into my classroom to observe what happened during an average day in an American high school? “Sure,” I said. Since many of my students had never been outside Utah, I always welcomed an opportunity for them to interact with kids who didn’t have the same background experience or even, in this case, the same political philosophy. Plus, a couple of my journalism students were in that class, and I suggested to them that this visit might be the basis of an interesting story in the school newspaper.

That day I took the class through our regular routines, including what I called “explorations” on which we spent about 20 minutes almost every day. In my never-ending quest to engage my students with the world around them, we daily read a brief article from current news together—some frivolous, some serious–at the beginning of every class. Whether it was law-making or fashion design or space exploration, I asked my students to write a response of at least 200 words. Any response was OK as long as it adhered to the standards of appropriate academic composition. The Russian students listened with interest as we discussed my students’ observations.

When I asked our guests if they had any comments, my students were floored as they realized the foreign students were articulate in not only their native language but in English as well. By the time we had finished that discussion, the two groups of students were sharing family info like number of siblings, personal goals for the future, similar travel goals, current after-school employment, etc. Dating was a big topic, and my students suddenly realized how much more latitude their own parents allowed them than did the parents of our guests. The two groups compared notes about soccer vs. football and which brand of jeans was the best value for the price.

One of my newspaper kids asked, “What has surprised you most about the differences between our high school and where you go to school?”

There was a thoughtful silence, and then one girl answered, “Your parking lot.”

“Our parking lot?”

“Yes,” she said. “In our country some people save for years and still never have enough money to buy even a used car. It’s unheard of for a student in my country to own a vehicle. We walk or we ride mass transit. In your parking lot are all kinds of cars, trucks, four-wheel drive vehicles, and expensive sedans. We have no need for parking lots at our schools.  None of us own a car. There’s a good chance we never will.”

For a moment my students were dead silent.

A couple of Russian boys interrupted the quiet, eagerly firing a series of questions about the specs of cars they had passed when they came in. There were a few minutes of lively back-and-forth discussion before the principal reminded our guests that they had to leave for the next stop on their schedule.

After the Russian students’ visit, my class and I spent some time talking about what they learned by listening to kids from halfway across the world. Some students vowed to work harder in their foreign languages classes; a couple of kids expressed interest in email exchanges with their new friends; one or two sighed that they were unlikely to ever get to go out with that “hot” boy or girl from Moscow. No one mentioned politics at all.

This morning I realized that my grandson Henry’s dilemma was not a “first world” problem after all; it was a “human problem.” Every ten-year-old worries at some point about making friends and keeping them, whether he lives in Utah or Ukraine. The current conflict forcing millions of families from their homes is not a ‘first” or “third” world issue; it, too, is a “human problem”. Those Russian students who visited my class are likely parents now. Perhaps unknown to one another, all of us who love our children are praying for the same peace from both sides of our uneasy earth.