May Boomerang

After retiring from her career as a high school English teacher and moving across the country to be near her grandchildren, some newfound free time and a simple Google search led Susan to LVGH. She knew that she wanted to volunteer her time and that she missed teaching, but never knew just how much she would come to love being an English tutor.

“I immediately felt so comfortable here,” Susan says. “The students are so committed to learning, so generous and kind, so willing to share their culture. There’s a huge difference in the tenor of the classroom because they are all here because they want to be.”

Now over half a year later, Susan says the community here is so much more than she expected. “I’m so impressed by how focused everyone is on the students as a whole. Not just teaching them English skills, but how to do things- how to get a job, how to get your taxes done. It’s interesting to think how courageous it really is to move to a country that you’re unfamiliar with and where you don’t speak the language, and yet they make it work. Having this kind of community is one of the ways that it works. The attitude of the whole community is that’s it centered not just on them as language learners, but as whole human beings.”

Susan teaches the basic level ESOL class, so many of her students are new to living in the United States. “My favorite part of being a tutor is the opportunity to build a relationship with people of all ages from all parts of the world, all different kinds of backgrounds. To broaden my own understanding of the world. When I walked in, I thought that I would be teaching them, but I’m surprised by how much they are teaching me.”

“This has saved me in some ways. To move, to lose teaching, to lose the community that I was a part of, and then to find myself in a place because of the pandemic where it was hard to make those community connections- this experience has just been so rewarding and really great.”