A Journey of Growing with Knowledge, Empathy and Care.

In my childhood days, I was always frightened of talking with someone in English, especially with a foreigner. Fortunately, I had a teacher who changed all my stigma related to it. During the WLL & Empatico fellowship  journey, I noticed that my students were also quite frightened of international students. They felt somehow inferior that they were not all equal, and had a mindset that as the foreign students speak better English than they do, they are more learned. Most of the Bangladeshi parents and people are habituated to create an atmosphere of inferiority with the prejudice speaking better English means higher intelligence. I faced this as my first challenge of my fellowship journey to eradicate inequality among the students to attain all the sustainable global goals successfully.

Before the first video exchange, the students shared their concerns that helped me and my partner to design the video exchange session together. We had an off-class discussion where the students and I talked about inequalities and how we face inequality by planting inferiority complexes within us and many around the world. On the very first day after talking after a few minutes of video conversation, I surprisingly noticed that they were feeling much comfortable and enthusiastic to talk in proper etiquette and manners with my partner’s students. There were more than 30 students who were much more eager to interact. Among them, in the first video call, about 20 of my students exchanged their introduction and got to know each other. They were very enthusiastic in making new foreign friends.

Video Exchange

Before the 2nd call, the students learned that to achieve the global goals, also known as SDG (sustainable development goals), proper collaboration is needed. They discussed the global goals, impact and importance of global goals upon our lives and living through drama and poster presentation in the class. During the video call, they shared culture, language, country and hobbies to know each other more effectively. They literally used to wait for my partner’s students to be online and share their exciting moments, love and emotions. The students learned that the society, country or world would be better if we treat each other as equal, rather than by language, colour, religion, country or ethnicity. After a while we got a slogan as “The world is a village. We all are for each other”.

Poster Presentation

However, during the 3rd call we had a discussion on how the global goals are related with our community, why it’s important and what we can do. Hence, together we proposed our role and activities for achieving the global goals. We discussed the skills and technological support we can share with each other. I noticed their eagerness to engage family and community for sharing their ideas and thoughts to achieve the global goals. After the call, my students arranged a guardian meeting to engage the community, share thoughts, and aware the community about the goals.

Guardian Meeting

I feel very glad having a cooperative partner like Mr. Muhammad Nashat. This fellowship and the activities helped me as well as my students to connect overseas students, grow and learn on an international platform. My partner was very helpful throughout the journey. I believe that each moment, each challenge, each idea and thoughts we’ve shared was a key to discovering more about self-improvement in order to enhance opportunities for our students and ourselves as well as the world around us. I saw his inspiring passion, care and love for the kids. I hope to have furthermore learning exchanges and learning sessions with him.

Group Work

I am thankful to The KIND Foundation, as well as Empatico for giving us the opportunity to stimulate curiosity, kindness, and empathy among us through video interactions. It seems quite unusual to imagine that some students of a remote primary school in Bangladesh would be sharing their introduction, concerns as well as finding out their solution, activities, feelings and knowledge with their foreign friends. This fellowship journey has given me and my students the opportunities to explore our potentials and to fight against global challenges collectively.

During the process they were developing a great sense of leadership, empathy, respect and collectivity. The overall number of complaints and bullying had decreased very rapidly. Most of my students feel confident in sharing their opinion in the classroom and are aware of protecting the environment now. When they work or talk in pairs or groups, they are able to patiently listen to each other and have calm discussions.

I saw a sense of empathy when they were bringing food for each other specially who could not bring tiffin. Even during this world pandemic period, the students have broadened their hands to help the poor people nearby by making them aware to stay home, donating money, food and other necessary household resources. This sense of responsibility and benevolence from my students inspires me to work more with them to achieve global goals together. We are fighting against poverty, inequality and the rising world crisis together. We believe in our slogan-  “The world is a village. We all are for each other”.

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