A Second Home

We don't always realize just how many lives are reached through the Social Village and a good number of those lives are touched through our teachers. It’s true everywhere, whether they know it or not, whether they want it or not, they are indeed making an impact on their students.
 
In this case we didn’t realize that we were making such an impact until a couple of years later. In fact it’s pretty rare for us to ever hear feedback about such things.
 
Our top level English Course is actually focused on leadership and we call it the Global Citizen: Leadership Course. This course teaches the concept of being a Global Citizen, helping to open the eyes of its participants to the beauty and brokenness in the world and the ways that they can be a part of the healing process. This particular story is about a young girl who took some advanced conversational English courses at our centre a few years ago and came back recently to join our Global Citizen course.
 
During one of the lessons, the students were asked to write about a time that was really difficult in their life and what it was that helped them get through that time. This young girl wrote about her experience with two of our foreign teachers in the advanced English courses. She explained that at the time she was enrolled in those courses she was going through a rough patch, feeling empty and alone, but what kept her going were those English courses. She looked forward to them and couldn’t completely understand why. She witnessed and experienced a kind of love that seemed unheard of before. She felt accepted and cared for by her teachers.
 
We continue to hear more and more reports of students feeling like Salem Social Village is their second home. Students feel loved by their teachers here and tend to prefer taking courses at Salem to other English Centres in the city. Why is this? It’s more than an English Centre, it’s a Social Village where Global Citizens grow through learning, serving and loving together.