A Late-Life Adventure: My Two Years in the Peace Corps
By Lawrence Brane Siddall
It was past midnight and I couldn’t sleep. A cold wind rapped
at the leaky windows, and what little heat there had been in the
small fourth-floor apartment of my school had long since
departed. The building was like a fortress, almost 100 years
old, now empty and locked for the night. In a few hours a
torrent of 650 adolescents would be roaring through the halls
below. I was feeling restless and edgy. It had been my worst
day. Going through my mind was what to do about the noisy and
disruptive behavior in one of my classes. I was still having
trouble keeping this class quiet during lessons, and my patience
was weakening. I hadn't yet figured out what I was doing wrong.
I was thinking of going to the director, but what would I tell
him? After six weeks I was having doubts about teaching for two
years in this foreign land 3,000 miles from home. From under my
covers I stared into the darkness and wondered what I had gotten
myself into.
If any of my family or friends thought I was a bit reckless
or naive when I told them I was going to join the Peace Corps,
they kept it to themselves. I'm sure they wondered why a
67-year-old grandfather would want to leave the comforts of home
to live in a remote village in some far corner of the world. By
the time I retired in July 1996 I had already applied to the
Peace Corps to teach English and requested to be sent to South
America because I wanted to learn Spanish. Within the next
several months I had a massive tag sale, put my furniture in
storage, sold the house I had lived in for 36 years, and waited.
I received my "invitation" in April 1997. I was wondering
which country it would be: Ecuador, Peru, perhaps Bolivia. Then
I read the letter. I was going to Poland, with departure in two
months. The pang of disappointment was brief, however, because I
had lived in Munich for two years in the mid-1950s but had not
traveled in Central Europe.
In early June our group of about 80 volunteers assembled for
"staging" in Washington, D.C. After several orientation sessions
and an overnight, we flew to Warsaw and took a bus to Radom, an
industrial city of 250,000 located two hours to the south, where
we would spend the next 11 weeks receiving our pre-service
training. In addition to excellent instruction in Polish, there
were classes and speakers on cross-cultural issues. Fifty of us
had courses in teaching English as a foreign language. The other
30 would be serving as consultants to environmental agencies.
Each of us lived with a local family (who received a stipend
from the Peace Corps), so from the beginning we were exposed to
Polish food, customs, and the language. My "family" was a
friendly, 40-something factory worker whose wife lived in a
village 20 miles away, where she taught in an elementary school.
He spoke no English, but in spite of that, we got along well.
Most of the host families lived in apartment complexes
scattered throughout the city. Children or parents often gave up
their rooms and slept on the living room couch to accommodate
their American guests. I was fortunate to have more privacy than
many of my friends and was spared being witness to family
squabbles and pressure from "host moms" to eat more than some
thought humanly possible.
In late August I arrived in Swidnica, a city of 65,000 in
southwest Poland near the Czech border. The school director
greeted me with a warm handshake and a bouquet of flowers, as is
the custom. Dzien dobry. Witamy w naszej szkole. (Hello. Welcome
to our school.) I had only three days to get settled and prepare
for classes, where I would soon discover that my preparation had
little to do with the realities of what went on in the
classroom.
During the Communist era, Russian was the main foreign
language taught in the schools. The Peace Corps came to Poland
in 1990 at the request of the Ministry of Education with the
goal of having a new generation learn English. The agreement was
for volunteers to teach in high schools (lyceums) for about ten
years, thus the Peace Corps will leave Poland in June of 2001.
To be assigned an American teacher, a school had to provide
housing, either at the school or in the community. My modest
apartment was fairly comfortable, though to save coal in the
winter the director didn't heat the school on weekends; my
portable gas heaters usually provided adequate heat in my
apartment. During especially cold weather my students sometimes
had to wear jackets and mittens in class, where the temperature
wasn't much above 50 degrees.
The Peace Corps required a school to have a Polish teacher of
English grammar; the volunteer focused mainly on conversation.
To my surprise I was informed that I would be the only teacher
for 120 third-year students, teaching mostly grammar. For me, a
retired psychotherapist who hadn't been in a classroom for
decades, the task initially felt overwhelming.
I saw my students in classes of 30, two or three times a
week. I came to enjoy teaching, but dealing with classroom
discipline was another matter. The morning after my restless
night, the students in my problem class could tell something was
amiss by the look on my face. "I have something to tell you. I
have decided to go to the director today and tell him that I
don't want to be your teacher this year. This class is too noisy
and disruptive. There is too much talking during lessons. Some
of you have been rude. I've reminded you enough."
There was a long pause. Then Katarzyna stood up. Holding onto
her desk she said, "Please, Mr. Siddall, don't go to the
director. We will try harder to be quiet. Please give us another
chance." Then there followed pleas from Pawel, who the day
before had lent me a cassette of his favorite music; Lukasz, the
best student in class; and Magda, one of the worst offenders,
but always cheerful. Things were better after that, and it was
some consolation to learn that they were often this way with
their Polish teachers.
This was perhaps the brightest class in the school (almost
half were A students), and keeping them busy and interested was
a major challenge. I learned a lot from them about Polish
history and culture, of which they were proud. Once I asked what
I should know about their social customs, and Dorota informed me
that it's impolite for a man to talk to a woman with his hands
in his pockets. As I look back, most of my students were
respectful, hardworking, and often fun to be with. Many did very
well academically and went on to the university.
In my second year I shared teaching with the three other
English teachers who taught mostly grammar. I had 210 second-
and third-year students. Instead of 30 in each class session, I
had 15, which made teaching much easier. We spent more time on
writing and talking about a variety of subjects, such as the
environment, the culture of the United States ("Mr. Siddall,
were you a hippie?"), favorite films and movie stars, pop music,
geography, the NATO bombing in Kosovo, art history, listening to
selections from Handel's Messiah at Christmas, writing a brief
autobiography, and sports. "Have you seen Michael Jordan play
basketball?" Tomek, whose mother lived in Canada, asked one day.
"No," I said, "but in America I live only 30 kilometers from
Springfield, Massachusetts, where basketball was invented and
where the Basketball Hall of Fame is." Tomek and his friends
seemed delighted with this bit of information. It was his life
dream to see the Chicago Bulls play. We also had fun singing in
English, although girls enjoyed this more than the boys. Their
favorite was “Oh! Susanna.”
My school, with an enrollment of 650, was considered the best
lyceum in the city. Students were required to take an entrance
examination. Academic standards were high and a lot of homework
was assigned, which allowed students little free time. Unlike
schools in our country, there are very few extra-curricular
activities and no interschool sports programs. Students are
required to learn two foreign languages. Almost all the students
in my school chose English, which many had been learning for
several years. Other languages available were German, Russian,
French, and Latin.
Except for the teachers of English, none of the other 23
instructors spoke much English, so for the first several weeks I
was pretty much ignored in the teachers' room. I felt isolated
and wished my Polish were better. Then one morning a woman I had
not met came up and said, "Good morning. My name is Urszula and
I teach English here part time. How do you like it here in our
school?"
I thought to myself, Not all that great. We chatted for a few
minutes before the bell rang, and then she said, "I would like
to invite you to my home for supper sometime soon and meet my
husband and two sons." This was my first invitation, and over
time I would become good friends with Urszula and her family.
Her husband Alexander was an engineer who worked for the
municipal water department, and their two pre-adolescent boys
were quite good in English but a little shy. During many of my
visits there were relatives, friends, or neighbors sitting
around talking and laughing. I sometimes went with the family on
excursions in their VW Golf over winding roads through the
rolling countryside, with the mountains bordering the Czech
Republic in the distance.
I taught the minimum requirement of 18 hours a week from
Monday through Thursday, but many hours were necessary for
classroom preparation. I met with students after classes, too,
for practice in conversation. I was paid a beginning Polish
teacher's salary of a little more than $200 a month by the
school, and $90 was added by the Peace Corps. While this was
adequate, especially because I didn't have to pay rent, many
teachers in Poland struggle to make ends meet, even if they
teach extra hours. The average monthly wage nationally is about
$400. An extra project included meeting with a group of English
teachers from other schools in the city, and another involved
the local Lutheran church, known as the Peace Church because of
its association with the Peace of Westphalia that ended the
Thirty Years' War in 1648. It was built in 1656 and is unique
for its wooden construction, architectural design, and beautiful
interior artwork. Though the church could seat 3,000 people,
only about 50 attend Sunday services. Audiocassettes in Polish,
German, and English were available, but when I heard the one in
English I could hardly understand it. With encouragement from
the pastor, I did some research, wrote a new text, then recorded
it in a professional studio.
During my first year in Swidnica (pronounced Shvidneetza), I
was the only American or native speaker of English. (The
following year a woman from England came to teach in another
school.) One of the local weekly newspapers published an article
about me, and because of this I made another good friend.
Wioletta was an obstetrician whose parents and sister lived in
Chicago. She contacted me after reading the article to ask if I
would help her improve her English. Though she had an active
private practice in addition to her staff duties at the
hospital, she was considering emigrating to join her family in
the States. Also, she was earning much less than physicians in
Western Europe or the United States. Our lessons were informal,
often over coffee, or sometimes having supper at her home with
her partner, Jurek, who worked as a pharmacist, and she invited
me to special occasions such as Christmas Eve dinner with other
guests. When she had time we also did some sightseeing, driving
around in a white 1980s Dodge, an ex-police car that Jurek had
shipped over from California for reasons that I never quite
understood.
The Poles like to eat, drink, and socialize, so being invited
into their homes was always fun. Though Poland isn't famous for
its cuisine, there are a variety of interesting dishes as a
result of so many cultural influences over the centuries. Meals
on Christmas and Easter are the most elaborate, and, of course,
most celebrations would not be complete without plenty of beer
and vodka.
To fully appreciate these occasions I made a real effort to
learn Polish. I found it a difficult language, and though I
would eventually become moderately proficient, it would be a
source of frustration during my two years not to become more
fluent. My students enjoyed testing my pronunciation skills with
such words as przyrodoznawstwo (natural science),
czterdziestoletni (40 years old), dalekowzrocznosc
(far-sightedness), and skrzypce (violin), usually to much
laughter, but they cheered when I got it right.
My tutor and friend during my last year was Anita, a
newspaper editor who spoke excellent English. We met weekly at
the small apartment she shared with her Artur, who was also in
the newspaper business. Anita was widely read, easy to talk to,
and always patient as I struggled with Polish grammar. I
especially enjoyed her helping me write accounts in Polish about
my trips.
I traveled extensively during my tour, both within Poland and
in other countries. The high points for me, besides sampling the
food, were wandering through the art museums and going to
symphony concerts in Warsaw, Krakow, Venice, Florence, Milan,
Vienna, Munich, Dresden, Berlin, and, with a touch of the
exotic, Moscow and St. Petersburg. I usually went by train, but
flew to Russia because of the distance. Many Polish cities have
excellent opera and theater companies, art museums, and a
variety of on-going cultural events such as jazz and film
festivals.
In retrospect, the most difficult time for me was the first
three months, partly because of the adjustment to the demands of
teaching, but also because my Peace Corps friends were miles
away and I was just beginning to make Polish friends.
Fortunately, I had brought a laptop computer and portable
printer, so I could maintain correspondence with family and
friends.
I left Poland at the end of June 1999. After stopovers in Amsterdam and Cardiff, Wales, followed by three delightful weeks in Ireland, I arrived home on July 24. Since then I have bought a house, retrieved my furniture, and have begun studying Spanish. Maybe I'll get to South America after all.
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Born in China where his father was a medical
missionary, Lawrence Siddall grew up in Oberlin, Ohio. After
graduating from Oberlin College in 1952, he served two years in
the U.S. Army, the final year in Munich. Following his military
separation there he studied art history for a year at the
University of Munich. In September 1956 he began what he calls
his first big adventure by driving overland with a friend from
Europe to India in a VW Beetle. From there he worked his way
back to the States on a freighter.
Siddall eventually earned advanced degrees from the University
of Connecticut and the University of Massachusetts, and from
1962 until his retirement in 1996 was a psychotherapist in
Amherst, Massachusetts, where he still lives.