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By Dennis deGroot
ONE of our teachers was at the travel clinic the other
day, to get her immunizations in preparation for taking a team of students
to Sierra Leone, West Africa.
The students will live for a few weeks in the
Christian community we have partnered with to build a school – in a
country that finds itself at the bottom of the UN poverty index.
The doctor at the clinic wanted to know what in the
world we were doing bringing students to that part of the world.
I love that question. What in the world are we doing? There are
many answers to that question.
We want our students to experience the legacy of
colonialism: what poverty is, what impact AIDS has, and what a global food
crisis looks like. We want them to see what it is like to be in a minority,
to not understand the language and cultural situation – and to face
fears, real and imagined.
Many parents want a ‘safe place’ for their
children to go to school. At Fraser Valley Christian High and Surrey
Christian School, we do want our students to be safe from bullying or
harassment; but we do not want them to be safe from the challenge of living
like Jesus – living the life that got him killed.
It might come as a surprise to some Christians that we
are teaching the new Social Justice 12 course in our school.
The course has been controversial in Abbotsford
schools, because of some of the topics it addresses – including
homosexuality and animal rights. But if we are not teaching about justice,
then who will?
This reminds me of the question asked of Aslan the
lion, the Christ figure in C.S. Lewis’ Narnia
series: Is he safe? No, but he is good.
Gerhardt Frost captures this in his poem, The Goal: “In parenting
and teaching / let this be our aim: / not to make every idea safe for
children, but / every child safe / for ideas.”
We offer the Social Justice course to engage our
students in the questions of poverty, homelessness, racism, biotechnology,
global warming and creation care, among others.
These are tough issues to sort through, but our
students graduate – and go on to become parents, who may have to
wrestle through infertility and hard choices of medical intervention. They
will be confronted daily with homeless panhandlers. They will need to make
choices about stewardship of the earth when it comes to buying fuel for
their cars.
We partner with parents to help students grapple with
these questions. But it doesn’t start in high school.
The grade 2 class at Surrey Christian’s Primary
Campus have pen pals in our partner school in Sierra Leone. From each
other, they are learning things about the vast differences in their lives,
as well as the similarities – their shared, childlike
humanity.
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For two years running, the children and their teacher,
along with parent volunteers, have held a garage sale – and have
raised more than $6,000 toward child sponsorships. This enables children
overseas to go to school.
Our kids are also taught about the bloody civil war
that ended in 2002 – and was known for its legacy of amputations.
Many of our grade school students recently listened to author Mariatu
Kamara, a double amputee and survivor of that war, speak at assembly.
When students get to the senior grades, we want to get
a bit riskier. Taking Social Justice 12 is an obvious choice for students
who have a passion for engaging these issues.
The students recently had a speaker from South Africa
talk about the AIDS crisis that country faces. Teacher David Miedema said:
“If we really believe that Jesus came to
‘search for the lost and bring back the strays, bind up the injured
and strengthen the weak’ – then should we not ensure
our students have the opportunity to recognize and engage with ones
such as these? And give them the chance to play some part in the
searching, binding and strengthening as well?”
For some of our students, that means choosing to go to
Sierra Leone and experience life on the margins. For others, it will mean
going to Costa Rica over spring break.
There exists an enormous chasm between where our
students live and where the world’s poor and marginalized
live. In order to make our students aware of this, we must literally
move them closer to this other distant reality.
That is not always safe. But it will be good.
February 2009
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