The Dutch have a word — gezellig — which roughly translates as 'warm and welcoming'. Cosy, if you like. Gezellig the classrooms are not. They are places of angular blandness, white-walled, sharp-edged, purely functional.
Into mine creeps a tide of brilliant colour. Under the cold fluorescent light, vibrant cloth billows gracefully over the sparse chairs, and beaded turquoise slippers peek out from beneath fringed hems, putting the dingy beige carpet to shame.
I'm often surprised at the speed with which timidity and fear evaporate, as stories start to spill out, by word or pen. In broken English, tales of children — missing, injured, dead — of husbands vanished into God-knows-where, bombs, betrayal, flight, perilous treks through strange and hostile lands. The camps. The long, long wait.
On paper, the skilled and better-heeled select their words with care, tinker with verb tenses, parts of speech and form. But the agony leaks onto the page all the same, alive and writhing.
There are few places on this planet where these poignant confessions could emerge with such absence of restraint. Yes, these men and women have swapped tales with fellow-travellers, with soldiers at border checks, with aid workers in the camps, with embassy staff. But these are often sites of peril and uncertainty where the teller guards her tongue and the tale itself is closely doctored.
Who here can be trusted? Will my date of birth, my faith, my family name, disbar me from escape? What blameless fragment of my past might lead to my arrest? The classroom may be cool and unencumbered by distractions, but it is also safe, detached, thousands of kilometres from their devastated homelands.
There is safety, too, in the presence of the teacher. To their knowledge, she knows nothing of war, of famine, of dispossession. And she is mostly content to listen.
"When hostility and suspicion are not the default starting positions, the surface differences between us seem to arouse genuine curiosity and are often sources of great amusement and delight."
These journeyers have now arrived. They are no longer jostling with one another, weighing horror against horror, counting loss against loss, comparing the depths of their despairs. Someone is catching their terror, has witnessed their fragility and pain, believes every word spoken or written, and is holding it all closely and quietly.
In the last couple of years, I've begun to reduce my teaching load and look to new horizons. I take an English class once or twice a week