Volunteering: Highlighting Your Impact

My grandfather took the report card in his hands like a fragile object, held it for a long time without saying a word, then read it aloud to my grandmother from beginning to end, every comment, every subject. A 'mention bien' for an eight-year-old was objectively not much. Yet on his face that day, it was immense. It was only much later that I understood what that little piece of paper represented for someone who had never stepped foot in a classroom.

Nothing spectacular triggered it, just a small ad seen in passing, looking for literacy volunteers not far from my home. I read it twice before closing the tab, then reopened it an hour later to fill out the form. No grand inner monologue, just a belated realization, the feeling of repaying a debt that no one had ever claimed from me.

During the training, we are made to play the role of the learner, deliberately understanding nothing of a written instruction in an unknown language, just to feel that vertigo for two minutes. I thought I was coming to learn methods, materials, and pedagogical frameworks. I leave above all with this physical sensation in mind—that of understanding nothing of what appears before you—and the thought that my grandfather probably lived through this every day for years without ever telling anyone.

Nine people in the same room, none like the other: a sixty-year-old woman never schooled in her home country, a young man who reads his own language fluently but not the Latin alphabet, a mother who simply wants to be able to read her children's school notices. The training program had planned for everything except this—this raw heterogeneity that no textbook truly captures. I return home exhausted this first evening, not discouraged, just blown away by the true scale of the task.

Another meeting to renegotiate our room slot, threatened by another association's schedule deemed a priority. I'm spending more time this month putting together a grant application than preparing my lessons, while the learners' waiting list keeps growing without any additional slots appearing. I come out of this meeting almost trembling with cold anger, not at anyone in particular, just at this absurd gap between the energy we give and the means we are left with to make it useful.

She returns from her first job interview conducted entirely in French, without an interpreter, without anyone by her side to translate. She doesn't say much upon entering, just that she answered all the questions, and I see on her face exactly what I had seen on my grandfather's face looking at a report card, years earlier. It is not the grammar nor the vocabulary that matters in that room that day; it is that specific door that has just opened for her.

A new school year, a new group, and once again the room is too small for everyone. I have nothing to prove to my family; no one ever asked me to do this, and perhaps that is why it lasts. I am giving someone else the chance my grandparents never had, without any grand speeches, just a room, a table, and one more hour each week.