All the time reports on new Islamic State members from Europe pop up in the news, and all the time I hope that they are not any of my former students from my time as a substitute teacher in the projects in Sweden. I try to see the positive in things and I have previously shared sunny stories from my time as a teacher, but when I read about a new young Swede having joined IS I always feel a sting of despair and I go online try to see if it’s one of my former students. This frustration of how we in my own country – the best country in the world, in my opinion – are now losing our young ones to IS sometimes spills over, and today I need to vent.
Teaching Swedish as a second language to children in the underprivileged parts of the city years ago, I knew we would lose most of the kids to poverty and drugs, it was an equation almost impossible to battle. Children should be the society’s main priority; our pride and joy; we should invest each and every penny in their well-being, but the case was the opposite. The area where I taught was the kind of area where buildings are falling apart in the hands of slumlords, infested with cockroaches, where gangs are ruling the blocks; the kind of area white hipsters move into because it’s cool to show solidarity with underprivileged people, then quickly move out of after their first robbery or the first homicide nearby.
The vast majority of the children were immigrants living under unfair conditions. They were often children of refugees with untreated traumas – several of them had themselves survived or had parents who had survived massacres in certain countries. The majority of the parents were on welfare. Some of them were violent to their kids. Me and most of my colleagues did what we could, but we had very little instructions from the management on how to deal with the social problems we encountered, and we had to try our own ways. Some became overly personal, gave the kids their private number and let them call at any time of the day. Others took on an authoritarian approach and cracked down on every single misconduct.
For me my work was not facilitated by the fact that I was myself a working poor, paid by the hour as a sub and therefore having to work evening shifts teaching adult classes just to pay my bills. Maybe needless to say, I was myself often running on empty, distressed by the inability of not being able to give the children what they needed, because they needed so much. This was at the time hard to verbalise since I, just like my colleagues, was trying to keep up hope, keeping my successes close to my heart. So instead of touching base with these feelings I usually put on a pair of hand-me-down heels, mixed water with my mascara to make it last longer, and hit one of the clubs where I knocked back the feelings of powerlessness with a cheap drink, trying to forget that the society that I represented as a white, Swedish teacher had nothing, often absolutely nothing, to offer these kids, my kids.
And here we are, several years later, with the murder machine of IS showing us how desperately we have failed some of our young immigrant kids, my kids.
A new news is coming up about a Swedish IS member, this time it’s a young man in his early 20s from the project were I taught, and I search on Facebook to see if it’s one of my former students. I hold my breath. I google. No, it’s not one of them. Not this time. I can breathe. Until next time, next news. Next battle about a precious young person that we have lost.
Sweden and the Middle East Views 