I have officially been here for two months. The main thought in my head at this moment is sadness that I'll be leaving in another six months... it's odd.
However, I do have a difficulty. My difficulty is that I feel like a complete jerk. If you think about it, most of our difficulties are like that. It is not the problem itself that vexes us so, it is the emotion that said problem causes. This is why hard work and drug addictions are about equally popular as a means of dealing with life.
...but I digress.
The thing that is causing me to feel like a complete jerk is as follows:
About a month ago someone came to me and asked me to help them write an essay. They were hoping to get into a university in China, and the essay was in English. I weighed the ethics of such a proposition, and agreed. I asked them to bring a copy of the essay they had already written to the school the next day.
We sat down at the computer the next day and I read the essay. It was appalling. The quality of the English itself was admirable, though the style of writing was not very academic. The main problem lay with the fact that the content and organisation of the essay was simply terrible.
We set to work.
Please try to picture what I mean by "we set to work". I mean that I tried as hard as I possibly could to bring about the creation of a reasonably good essay without putting in any of my writing style or ideas, and the Mongolian guy tried as hard as he possibly could to get me to just write the essay.
In the end I think he won. I'm not sure if that was a good thing from his point of view, because the University had already rejected an essay he had submitted, so they had a copy of his writing on file. I kept some of the poor phrasing from his original essay, but that made me feel even more deceptive and immoral.
To make myself feel better, I reasoned that I had simply taken his original essay, separated it into a series of statements, re-ordered the statements so that the logic flowed nicely, and corrected some grammar. This was, unfortunately, a complete load of crap. For one thing, one of the purposes of these essays is to demonstrate English proficiency, so correcting grammar is probably unethical in and of itself. For another, changing the order of a series of statements is just a fancy way of changing the meaning of the essay as a whole.
Today one of the church members asked me to help her with an essay on sociology. She took out her sociology book, showed it to me, and said she didn't understand it.
Brilliant. I can do that.
I told her that I would explain anything she wanted me to explain and help her with her essay. She brought the sociology book, a stack of notes, an English - Mongolian dictionary, and a Mongolian - English dictionary into the staff room. I sat down and stared at her expectantly.
Things started well enough. She asked me several questions about sociology... rather basic questions... and I answered them. She then asked me to explain a passage from the book, and I explained it. She asked me to explain some major theories of sociology. I flipped through her book, scanned the major schools of thought in sociology, and then tried to condense the ideas down to sentences composed entirely of monosyllabic words.
...which, by the way, was incredibly difficult.
After about half an hour I finished explaining everything she asked me about. I then opened Word and stared at her, expectantly.
After about 10 seconds of silence I suggested we make an outline, and asked her what we should write about first. This too went well, and we soon had a perfectly respectable outline for a paper on the history of sociology and it's purpose in helping us understand systems functioning both within and between societies.
Suddenly her cellphone rang. She answered it and began talking to someone in Mongolian. Understanding Mongolian is like doing algebra for me: I can usually do it if the topic is ordinary and mundane, but it takes thought and makes my head hurt. Because of this I paid no heed to the conversation. I played a game of freecell instead.
When she hung up she turned to me and said "My sister say it's ok if the paper has not very good English because she doesn't speak very good English".
This statement took a moment to process, but then I finally realized why I had spent so much time waiting expectantly, and why she had been asking such basic questions. She hadn't taken the sociology class, her sister had. She just wanted me to write the essay.
I tried to explain the ideas "unethical" "intellectual property" and "lie" using a 10,000 word English - Mongolian dictionary. This too was incredibly difficult, and I soon realized that I was dealing with concepts that were culturally foreign. At one point she said "My sister and I are same!".
So, to keep myself from feeling like a lying, essay-mill running, friend hurting jerk, I have delayed the matter. The paper is due on Monday. I said that if her sister writes a paper in anything resembling English and comes here herself tomorrow night I will help her with the grammar.
I just hope that's what will happen. That's what I have thought each time, and so far it just hasn't turned out that way.
What is one supposed to do in situations like this? People expect favors to be repaid with more favors here. They value individual friendships and family highly, and have little regard for society as a whole. I'm an English teacher, so I'm supposed to return favors by helping people with difficult things involving English, even if those "difficult thing" are entrance essays and term papers. No matter what I do I'm going to feel like a complete jerk. How does one deal with situations like this?
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Being a missionary means finding the rock that kind old ladies stand on.
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1 comment:
Y'know what? I didn't have to deal with that in Hong Kong, even though it was also a collectivistic culture. There was enough sense of individual effort and accomplishment to offset the culture as a whole.
Many times the cultural differences make a relative measure out of right vs. wrong. But if you're not feeling right about it, then your conscience is doing its work (albeit in your cultural context). Maybe this is a good opportunity to explain honesty and your expectations as it pertains to English/literary favors. Just because a whole culture does something doesn't mean it's correct, yes?
P.S.: I'll be visiting your folks just after Christmas. =)
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