Well the term is ending — 10 months ago
and I want to write a tribute to the students I’ve had who’ve meant soemthing to me, especially Hilda.
Hilda came to England from Hungary to improve her English so that she could progress in her job as a speech therapist trainer at a University. Her understanding is good, and she is very literate, but she is shy and so her speaking is slow.
She first took a job at Beech Care where she drove around the district and cared for old and inform people in their own homes; lifting setting them on a commode, bathing and dressing them and making them comfortable twice a day. The workers at Beech care live in fairly squalid conditions – 3 to a room I think, and are paid about £3 an hour. They work from 6 am to 11 pm. They are trained for the first two weeks by “shadowing” an experienced carer, and they pay £200 for this training. They mainly come from Estonia.
After a while Hilda’s clients liked and trusted her sufficiently for her to continue to care for them independently of Beech Care. She had very little money, so she could only visit clients whom she could reach by bicycle. She also took cleaning jobs, which pay £8.00 hour round here.
Hilda realised she must have a car, and took another job 4 nights a week stacking shelves in Tesco to pay for her car.
Hilda is 37. When she was 21 she fell in love with a young man who was very famous in Hungary as a martial arts champion. They married and had a daughter. Her husband was very attractive to women. Although he loved Hilda he was unfaithful to her. Hilda found him with another girl and “something broke inside”. She divorced him. However, I am pleased to say that Hilda now has another fiance. He is 32 years old and a social worker who used to run a home for single mothers, but at present he is working in Tesco’s at night. His English is very bad so he cannot work in Tesco during the day. She says this is a very cheap form of birth control!
Hilda’s mum died when she was very young, leaving her to be the main carer of her mentally handicapped sister. Her daughter is 15 years old and is at home in Hungary, where she is looked after by Hilda’s aunt and uncle. These relatives have also been looking after Hilda’s sister, while she sends money home to pay the bills for her flat and for her daughter’s living expenses.
Hilda was thrilled when she got a job as a learning assistant in a school, as a helper for autistic children. She tried to help them to communicate. However, the children are very troubled and are sometimes violent. But Hilda’ really liked the job: it was much more useful to her in her speciality than care working.
She had done so much to make a life for herself in this country: she had a learning assistant job, cleaning job, Tesco job and English lessons for 3 hours a week, which she hardly ever missed. She hoped to be able to bring her daughter over to live with her, and went to the local school to talk to the head and to fill in the necessary forms and then…
her sister became very depressed and troubled that Hilda had gone away, and her aunt and uncle told her they could no longer cope.
So next week, after a whole year of effort, Hilda is returning to Hungary. i feel so sad that she hasn’t made more progress at English, and I feel that I should have done more to help her make accelerated progress. She was one of the strongest in the class, and I often asked her to help another Hungarian who had poor understanding and was very slow, and Hilda is so kind and patient that she did that. I wish now that I had found some way of giving her a differentiated syllabus. The trouble is, I found the class really hard work so I kept them all at the same pace, to avoid extra preparation. Hilda took E3 exams anyway in writing and reading, so I guess at the end of the course, the result was that she had learnt more.
She gave me a card to say thank you and she wrote that I am a nice person, but I am not nearly as nice as I should be, and I wish I had done more for Hilda.
