Expect the unexpected

March 26, 2019: Expect the unexpected

Now that our parent organization the Washington English Center is on break, Slavica and Jaume have returned.  As we have been doing for the last several weeks, we make short work of introductions and divide into three small groups where people will get to know each other better.   Each group will discuss three different articles from “The Week.”    With their sophisticated vocabulary, these articles are not easy.  Nor is their task easy.  While conversation in the small groups is casual, there is some pressure.  Towards the end of our two-hour session, representatives from each of the small groups will teach their articles to the large group. 

“My” group, from Brazil, Japan, Barcelona, Lithuania, and Serbia, spends most of our time on an article about the use of A1 to detect shoplifters in Japan.  Coming in late on the conversation, Natsu treats us to a discourse on, among other things, how the Japanese buy a lot of stuff to boost their economy with the result that they need organizers like Marie Kondo to help them contain their acquisitions.  Following up on last week’s conversation about a notorious French art thief, Sabrina mentions that shoplifting can result from kleptomania.  

Although they do not reach the level of kleptomania, there are confessions from shoplifters among us!  Most prominently, Jaume as a youngster habitually stole chocolate bars and greedily ate them in front of the store.  While both Slavica and Dana recount instances of overlooking items they should have paid for, Slavica differentiates between casual shoplifting and taking things in order to survive.  Not surprisingly Jaume, a Catalan separatist, brings up loss of liberty as the flip side of surveillance to prevent crime.  

We move on to the second article, which gets a strong reaction.  Priscilla, an au pair from Brazil, is comfortable enough not hide her horror at the Trump administration’s travel ban that blocks family members from entering the USA.

But once again, Natsu has the most unusual reaction, this time to a superficially funny story about how parrots have become opium dependent feasting on poppies in southern India. Natsu is outspoken about her grave concerns about drugs; she feels that the parrots in question are innocent victims of an immoral practice.  

Hoon surprises me when the groups came together: although I had arranged the stories on the basis of their length, Hoon has noticed that her group’s three stories are all about empathy and giving back.  A former wounded warrior is helping veterans at Walter Reed; a young girl who as a premature infant listened to Mozart sonatas in her incubator returned to the hospital where she was born to give a guitar performance in the NICU; and an adopted daughter felt that it was her fate to donate her kidney to the adoptive father who had saved her life 27 years before.  I remind myself to look for connections among the articles I will choose for next week, although I am always delighted to be surprised by my students.