Kindness that Grows
Kindness that Equips us change lives
Do you remember what it was like to be in middle school? Take a moment and picture yourself at 13 years old. You are becoming more aware of your surroundings, your friends and you start to think more about your identity apart from your family. You are growing up. It’s a lot to navigate with everyone watching and waiting to see how you turn out.
Middle schoolers are often given a hard time for being moody, unaware and distracted but some will argue that middle schoolers are in an incredibly important stage of their life and they have immense potential to demonstrate great acts of maturity and kindness. By the time that this critical life phase is reached, there are defining moments where we make decisions about the kind person that we want to be that impacts those around us.
For one of our middle schoolers at Roshan, Hassan, now 14 years old, he has had to make choices about who he is and how he responds to the others around him in impactful ways. Hassan started at Roshan in middle school in the Foundations program. He arrived in Indonesia in 2015 from Yemen, and was homeschooled by his father leading up to his enrollment in 2018. When he started, everything was new and exciting for Hassan. The teachers were kind and he quickly made new friends. Hassan remembers that one friend in particular, would always play football with him even though he was not much of a football player. His friend patiently taught him almost every day after school.
Often, Hassan would gather together with his friends and other students during lunch. They would share their food and sometimes teachers would buy food and beverages when some of the students forgot their lunches. Hassan experienced a culture of kindness at Roshan. There came a time when one of the students in his class who was newer to Roshan was not treating his peers with the same kindness that Hassan was used to at Roshan.
This classmate would often tease him about his dark skin and appearance without reason. Other classmates were also being affected by the students' attitude and behavior. At first Hassan did not pay much attention to it, this was not the first time someone belittled him because of his appearance. “I am used to it. My skin color is a little black,” he mentioned. This went on for almost a week, the teachers unaware, before the experience was shared with them.
After being spoken to by the teachers, the classmate kept to himself in class and during lunch and stayed away from everyone else. The other students who had negative experiences with their classmate, seemed content to keep their distance as peace had seemed to return to the dynamics of the class. Hassan watched as the classmates sat alone and seemed to have no friends. It was then that Hassan felt a mix of emotions and did something against the established status quo--he reached out in kindness and friendship to his classmate.
“We were in the same class so I talked to him. I later asked him to eat lunch together,” Hassan recalled. Instead of pushing him away he wanted to know what was going on with his new friend and to be there when those moments of negative behavior crept in to tell him to stop. After some time Hassan learned that his friend had himself experienced bullying before and that someone had taught him how to bully others. He knew it wasn’t good but it’s something he had learned to do so he had yet to learn what kindness really is. He needed someone to come alongside him to act in kindness because it’s not what he had known before. After spending time as classmates and growing in kindness together, Hassan shared that this friend, who is now resettled, no longer makes others feel bad and has changed his behavior. He is now resettled abroad and he and Hassan still keep in touch.
When Hassan was asked why he chose to be kind to someone that was not kind to him, he talked about how for him, kindness means action and that for him it comes quite naturally. Kindness equipped Hassan to take action and he was equipped to come alongside his classmate and help change his course and change his experience. It could be debated that Hassan may be kind by nature of nurture, but in the end Hassan knows that kindness is a part of him and that kindness helped him change someone’s life for the better.
It’s incredible to see that Hassan was equipped and acted in kindness. Hassan shared that he knows Roshan to be a place of kindness and peace. From this story, we know that it is through continually acts of kindness just like this that Roshan is able to remain a place where kindness grows.
A middle school classroom in Roshan before the pandemic.