Christmas Gifts

Dedicated to my father and all those who have passed through my life for a season.

Today at LAMB school in Bangladesh, I had to give an assembly looking at Christmas and this gave me an opportunity to be thinking about what this seasonal festivity means to me as a foreigner abroad. At the same time, after the assembly, we said goodbye to two students who have been with us for most of their lives, I think. The boy, Mueed, I don’t know every well – incredibly he’s one of the few that I haven’t taught here! The girl, Anumita, I’ve always taught. I know her very well and I am really sad that she is leaving.

Anu is going to join the Bangladeshi school over the road from us. This may seem an odd move considering that the education at LAMB is undoubtedly good. You may be thinking, if there is a Bangladeshi school very close by, why have an English Medium school teaching O levels and English National Curriculum syllabus at all? What is the point of teaching a foreign system?

It is a good point and one, I’m rather glad to say, I was not involved with when decisions about the school were made. I came in with the knowledge that O levels had been decided upon and the teaching had already begun so I just slotted into a system that was already there. Likewise, the National Curriculum had been followed for years, long before I came. I have no preference myself.

Nevertheless, the school was set up to be an alternative – in almost everyway – to the national system and to give options to students and their parents that they would not otherwise have had. This is important when we live in an environment where head teachers can still demand bribes to take on students, where teachers (and heads) can beat whole classes of kids and get away with it because the school has to give a ‘Transfer Certificate’ if a child wants to go to another school. If you take your child out of school because they beat her you will not get that certificate. Or where teaching is deliberately poor so that parents are forced to pay for private teachers to teach the subject after school in their homes – often the same teacher who was teaching poorly in the class! This is the expected way that teachers earn a substantial part of their income. For this reason, all teachers at LAMB are forbidden to teach privately.

Not all schools are as bad as this, of course, and many children leave LAMB and go to other schools where they are perfectly happy. We see many kids come into the school (it has a large waiting list of students who wish to join) and we see many leave. So why am I sad about Anu?

I think, more than anything else, it is because I have formed a relationship with her over the years, as I have with all my students. I took so long to decide to come to Bangladesh because of this kind of attachment. I loved the company of all the students I taught in Whitehaven, England and cared about what would happen to their education if I left. Now, here, I think the same when I see a student leave. What will happen to their education, their life, their hope, their future when they leave here? I can’t help but worry and feel sad that they have slipped away. I feel like I have got it wrong in some way.

So then, I have to keep reminding myself why LAMB school is here. We provide an alternative to the national system. It is right that parents exercise that right to opt in or out. Our job is to make sure students are prepared for either option. It would not be right if we somehow ‘trapped’ parents into our system in just the same way they can be trapped in the national one. Still, I can’t help but feel I must have got it wrong if someone felt they wanted to exercise that freedom.

Thankfully, Christmas has come at just the right time to help me find some kind of an answer to my anguish.

As a Christian school we are preparing for Borodin and remembering the gift given us in the form of Jesus as a child. The act of giving presents to remind us of this gift has been lost or destroyed for most in the West by the greed of materialism. Many shops obtain a vital proportion of their income from Christmas so if they fail to get it one year they go bust. Get it another year and they are rich. I can’t see the difference between that and gambling to be honest.

I think the original idea of the gift needs to be found again. It is not a thing but a person - Jesus. If nothing else the importance of another human being given for us is, at least, part of the point of this story in the Gospels. The things don’t matter – people do. The gift I will receive, this year, is my family and my friends wherever they are. It is the love that comes from those you love that sees you through the year. It is the people who pass through your life. It is Anumita and Mueed and all the other many students I have had the honour of knowing – even on a very small scale.

This Christmas, I want to be more aware than ever, that I have all the gifts I could ever need right here with me now even if, physically, some of them are thousands of miles away. I need to appreciate that sometimes those gifts are temporary, meant to be in my life for a season and then to go again.

My family and I are struggling with not being home. We miss the UK, the snow that everyone there is complaining about, the decorations, the cheesy music and the warm glow that is all around at this time of year. But one day we will be back and then every Christmas we will be missing Bangladesh instead! We will see all the problems back in the UK and long for the perfect images that our memories trick us with and pine for Bangladesh. It is good to miss the past - but not if we fail to see the present slipping past us.

Instead, I need to be able to say ‘This is where I am now. This is here. This is the gift for me right now.’ I need to say thank you for those who have been put in my life. And I can be thankful for the gift of those that were with me in years gone by. Whether on the other side of the world or having gone to another world I can miss them and rejoice that they were entrusted to me for a little while.

And I can use this to remind myself that what I have now is equally entrusted for a just a short while. I must not let it slip by unawares.