Half Way

It seems crazy that this year is almost half-way over. I know that the rest of winter and spring are going to go so fast and I am not ready for that. For the first time ever, I wish I could slow down the rest of the school year! July has never seemed so close as it does this year. I have really enjoyed my time in Hungary and am not ready to think about it coming to a close.

The month of November provided a much needed break from the whirlwind that was September and October. Between adjusting to living in Hungary, traveling with and for Fulbright, and my own personal traveling, the first two months of the year went by in a flash and I really needed some normalcy and thankfully, November came through for me. I didn't think I would say this while I was over here, but I didn't really go anywhere in November and it was fantastic. We had one Fulbright trip to Budapest to the Jewish District, but I went up on Friday night and came home again on Saturday night. The other weekends I spent in Békés just relaxing and being normal and as a result, I finally felt more grounded and at home. As Thanksgiving approached, I started to feel sad I wasn't at home for the holiday. However, I am very blessed to work with some amazing people who made sure that Thanksgiving in Hungary was great. One of the other English teachers at Szegedi (my school) had me over on Thursday night for a mock Thanksgiving. She made chicken (whole turkeys are hard to find), mashed potatoes, vegetables, and even made sure to have cranberries. We had a great time and it was a wonderful way to spend Thanksgiving evening. The next night another English teacher at the other school where I teach had the entire English department over to her house and we had another mock Thanksgiving. This time we had turkey sandwiches and some other American type food. It was another great evening. Although I will be very excited about a traditional Thanksgiving in the US next fall, I truly enjoyed my Hungarian versions of Thanksgiving.

December made up for the calm of November in spades. I spent every weekend travelling. Nora and I went to Vienna the first weekend, I had a Fulbright trip and Christmas party in Budapest on the second weekend, Nora and I went back to Vienna on the third weekend, and then Katie Lorey gets here Monday the 23rd, Christmas is the 24th and 25th and then Katie and I leave for our Christmas trip to Spain and Portugal on the 26th. Whew! It has been/will be amazing, but I know I will be ready to relax again in January.

School has also picked up. I feel like I have "hit my stride" with teaching and as a result have been getting busier and busier! Now that my goals and student's skill levels are clearer to me, it is easier to create more meaningful lessons and I have started to see an improvement in my students abilities and comfort level with English. Since my job here is not to teach English grammar, but to work with the students on their conversation abilities, I do not work out of a textbook at all. In some ways it is great - I get to create all my own lessons and have pretty much total freedom with what I do. In other ways it is a huge challenge - I have to create all my own lessons and have pretty much total freedom with what I do! It has been fun however to learn what really works for teaching English as a language and I know I have grown professionally from this experience. I have started assigning much more writing to all levels of my students. While this has obvious benefits to both the students and myself because it allows both of us to see where they are making mistakes and where I need to focus my mini-lessons, I am right back to grading a bunch of papers! While obviously I am not grading 4-6 page research essays, grading shorter writings from 11 different groups of kids is still time consuming! I have been thinking a lot about what to do 2nd semester and have come up with, what I think will be, some good ideas. I am excited to see how they work in the classroom!

Reflecting back over the first 1/2 of this school year, and how much I have grown both personally and professionally already, has inevitably made me think about how this is the last year of the Fulbright Classroom Teacher Exchange and what a complete and utter travesty that is. While I am happy to see the other Fulbright Programs for students, scholars, and researchers continue because the people involved in them are doing truly fantastic work and have been professionally and personally inspiring to me with their dedication and skill, I cannot help but think the government defunding of the FCTE Program is an egregious error. 

FCTE participants interact with the widest range of people during their year abroad. On any given day, I speak with students from the elementary through college level. I speak with parents, senior citizens, teachers, business owners, professionals, stay-at-home moms, and everyone in between. I speak at school competitions, community events, and to other classes at school about American history, my life and school in Michigan, and try to show people the reality of life in America instead of the Hollywood version they get on TV and all too often think is real. I speak to people who live in a country less than 25 years removed from Communism about life and freedom in the United States. We have engaging and thought-provoking conversations about the social and cultural changes taking place in the US and around the world which are beginning to effect Hungary more and more. Through these conversations I am able to correct misconceptions about life in the US, discuss how race, religion, and homosexuality (topics I have had numerous conversations about) are viewed in the US and give assurances that not everyone in Michigan owns a gun (an actual question I was asked after my first presentation at the local library).  I am able to clarify answers to questions they have, even if that answer is "it depends on where you are from." I have been asked hard-to-answer questions about my country and my culture which have forced me to take a critical and introspective look at things I often take for granted. This ability to see the USA through the lens of people who have never set foot in my country has been both challenging and enlightening. Sometimes it makes me very proud, other times it makes me very sad, and often it makes me feel very humbled and thankful.

At the same time I am informing and educating people here, they are doing the same to me. I have had the opportunity to have my misconceptions about the world corrected by getting the opportunity to visit many places and talk with people who live there. My knowledge of the world has grown immensely in the five months I have been here and I know it will continue to grow for the next seven. This exposure to different cultures, beliefs, life-styles, and ideas will be invaluable to my teaching for the rest of my career and will help me to help thousands of future students in a myriad of ways.  In addition, getting the opportunity to travel, while fantastic on a personal level, is also incredibly important on a professional one. I make it a point when I travel to look for places to go which will improve my teaching. Visiting places I discuss with my students, enables me to bring another element to my teaching. Instead of just talking about a place, I can show pictures and give personal stories about my time there which helps my students connect to, understand, and learn the material.

While I see the value in the other Fulbright Programs, I wish my government saw the value in mine. It makes me sad, embittered, enraged, and disappointed to again witness the government devaluing education and its importance. In a time in our world when misunderstanding, ignorance, and intolerance are too often the leading factors in change around the world, it is shameful that the government is cutting the one Fulbright Program that has the most ability to change those things.

Fulbright Friday #2 - The Jewish District

Our second Fulbright Friday took place in Budapest, specifically the Jewish District of the city. We started out with a walk around the area of the city that was heavily inhabited by Jewish people before WW2. I am going to try to take you on the tour with me by posting my pictures and explaining then as we go.

This is one of the original buildings where Jewish people lived in Budapest

Being Hungarian and Jewish were both very important to Hungarian Jews. The marking on the left is the seal of Hungary and on the right is the Star of David. Both were inscribed on the original building above at the same time illustrating the equal importance of their nationality and religion.

The far stone wall (through the archway) is part of the wall that housed the large Jewish ghetto in Budapest from 1944 until the end of the war. For most of the war, Jews were not forced into ghettos in Budapest because the government hoped that it would discourage any Allied bombing of the city. That changed in 1944 after Hitler invaded the city and forced the ghettoization and removal of 400,000+ Jewish citizens within 2 months. This was the fasted deportation of Jews in the entire war.

Memorial to Carl Lutz who saved 60,000 Jews in Budapest. He gave them false papers that said they had permission to travel to Palestine and could not be deported.

The Great Synagogue of Budapest. It is the 2nd largest synagogue in the world (the largest is in NYC) but holds the most people.

This is inside the Great Synagogue. Traditionally, during services, Jewish women would sit in the upper balconies and men would sit on the ground floor. This was done to keep men and women separate so no one was distracted. The upper balconies used to be covered with fabric curtains so the women were concealed behind them, but this is no longer done.

The alter of the Great Synagogue

During WW2, 27 bombs hit the Great Synagogue, but it never collapsed. It obviously needed major renovation which began in 1991 after the Communist regime left the country. The renovation took 6 years.

Next to the Great Synagogue is a cemetery holding the bodies of the people who died in the ghetto and were only found and buried after the ghetto was liberated. Most of the people could not be identified or had no family left to identify them. The bodies were buried in several mass graves behind the Synagogue. Family members who were still alive and able to identify a body, placed memorial stones over the mass grave where their loved one was interred. In all, there are over 2,300 people buried in this cemetery.  

These two pictures are of the Tree Memorial which is also outside the Great Synagogue. It is a Weeping Willow for obvious reasons and if you were to vertically flip the tree 180 degrees it would be a Menorah.  

The leaves have names of Holocaust victims on them, but there are also many leaves left blank to represent the victims who are not named.

The alter of the Orthodox Synagogue. This alter is in the middle of the main floor, instead of at the front like the Great Synagogue and most Christian churches. 

The inside of the Orthodox Synagogue. Again, you can see the balconies that separate men and women during services.

What the Orthodox Synagogue looked like after WW2. It had been used as a stable for horses.Today it has been restored to its original beauty.

After we toured the Synagogues we went to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, which focused primarily on Hungary's experience in WW2 and the plight of Hungary's Jewish and Roma populations. Some of the information I knew already, but I learned a lot more specifics about Hungary's role in WW2 and the horrifying fate of its Jewish population. I was unaware that Hungary was talking with the Allies in WW2, trying to remove itself from the Axis Powers, which prompted Hitler to invade the country at the end of 1943. By the beginning of 1944 the Jewish people of Budapest were in ghettos and being deported to concentration camps. 1 out of 10 Jews in the Holocaust were from Hungary. 1 out of 3 people in Auschwitz were Hungarian.

The layout of the museum was perfect for its topic. Interestingly, the exhibit didn't follow chronological order; instead it was organized by the various phases of persecution (the deprivation of rights, freedom, human dignity, and life) the victims endured leading up to and during WW2/the Holocaust. Each section focused on that phase from its beginning to the end of the war and beyond if applicable, and then started all over with the beginning of the next phase in the next section. If you are like me and tend to like learning things in a linear fashion, this had the effect of keeping you slightly off-balance in your knowledge of what was happening.  I found this to be a successful way to give the tiniest echo of how people living during that time must have felt when they had no idea what was going to happen next.

It was dark in the museum, with the main source of light coming from the lights that illuminated the artifacts, signs, and pictures.  The path was twisty and wound around from sign to sign in each room.

In addition to the informational signs, there were lots of pictures and videos of historical images as well as images of the victims that were really hard to look at. Many of the rooms were dominated by huge projection screens showing videos about the particular phase of the room. These projection screens became especially noteworthy at the end, during the phases of the deprivation of human dignity and life, when they showed images of the victims of the Holocaust. The screens, and thus the pictures and the horror, were inescapable. In addition, the museum provided information about the fate of individuals and families. So often, in tragedies of this magnitude, history tends to gloss over the individual stories in favor of the bigger picture. By tracing the history of specific people and families, and allowing us to read the stories of the people whose images we were looking at, the museum personalized the horror of the Holocaust.

For a long time, I tried to think of how to put into words how impactful this day was to me and everyone else at Fulbright and found I just couldn't do it. Instead of trying to find the words, I want to share the reaction of everyone I was with as we made our way through the museum because I think this speaks louder than any of my words ever could. When we first began walking through the exhibit, people were moving together in small groups from exhibit to exhibit and making comments to each other about the artifacts, pictures, and music, just like usual in a museum. However, as we continued, the groups got smaller and smaller and the conversations got less and less. By the end of experience, we were all separated from each other, no one was speaking, and we were surrounded by a solemn, horrified silence which continued even after we left the exhibit area of the museum.  I think there are times in life when words are unnecessary and superfluous to understanding how people feel, and this was one of those times.