On Making a Difference

September 6, 2009

When I first opened the door to my new apartment in Dortmund, Germany (I seem to be curiously drawn to places beginning with a ‘D’?!), I was enormously moved to see that my new next door neighbor, Bettina Broekelschen, an artist, had left me two prints of local scenes as a welcoming gift – the kindness of strangers! As I did not yet have a coffee machine, I suggested that as a thank you perhaps I could invite her to a local cafe where we might sit and get properly acquainted sometime.

Today was that day, and what an inspiring story she has to tell! She can read artwork the way other people read books, she explained, and she often uses the medium to understand troubled young people. She spent years working with a nonprofit organization helping local homeless children. She has great empathy for them, for she grew up in the north of Dortmund, which even today is considered quite rough, and managed to get herself kicked out of school not one, not two, not three, but FOUR times! She excelled in sports and in art. This is how she managed to rally all the kids in her class on her side, to the extent that they did a great deal of her schoolwork for her, which is how she muddled through. She always found school and its restrictions too boring to hold her interest and sought various ways to spice things up, generally to the deep and abiding displeasure of the school’s leadership.

She had a lot to say to me on the subject of disenfranchised youth, and as a schoolteacher I lent an open ear. “Think about how much time a child actually spends each day with his or her parents. By the time the exhausted parent comes home, there’s time to eat and prepare for bed, if that. The kid is given plenty of material goods and a list of rules and restrictions to live by but no quality time, so he or she feels cast aside and often suffers from low self-esteem. Moral values are not necessarily inculcated, the kids are bored and/or depressed and seek excitement, which is how they can easily end up running with the wrong crowd.”
I asked her what tips she had for motivating such kids in the classroom, and she said that coming across and trying to be the big disciplinarian is not necessarily the best answer. This often backfires as the whole class unites against yet another person trying to impose more rules and restrictions. The best way to motivate them is to set them an achievable goal where they can taste the fruit of success, something meaningful they can accomplish on their own. She described an incident in which she was working with five boys and five girls. A handsome boy passed by and all five girls simultaneously raised their hands to go to the bathroom. After hesitating for a second, she let them go, knowing full well that they would probably spend the rest of the hour tagging after the boy (which is precisely what happened). During this time, she told the boys, “All right, let’s get to work, we are going to paint a gorgeous picture, let those girls eat their hearts out.” When the girls came back and saw the pictures, they were flabbergasted, and at the end of the week-long course they approached her to ask if she could coach them for one additional session so that they might do this particular picture as well. Bettina spared herself useless nagging and scolding or attempts to coerce obedience, opting instead to give the girls a long enough leash to see the consequences of their actions for themselves.

Because she is a self-taught artist, it took a while for her to be taken seriously in the art world – particularly in Germany there is great emphasis placed on diplomas, certificates and the like — but now she exhibits regularly and her work is becoming known not only locally, but nationally. Her work reflects different phases: some of it is surreal, some of it almost Cubist, some of it impressionistic, and much of it portrays local scenes such as Dortmund’s picturesque music school, the big outdoor market, or a charming local café at the end of our street called El Mundo. This cafe is where the conversation I am recounting took place, just a few days before Bettina is scheduled to go into the hospital to have a breast removed. She is keen on making a difference in the world, no matter how much time she may have left.

As far as I am concerned, she already has.

To visit her link, please see: http://www.use-it-clever.de/tina/

About the Author : Tamara-Diana Braunstein brings us her stories from Senegal every week. She was born in Brooklyn, New York. She is a restless wanderer who earned an MA from the University of Freiburg and has worked in a youth hostel in the French Alps, a law firm in Montreal, the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as in university press publishing. At the moment her home base is Dakar, Senegal, where she is supposed to be teaching but is doing far more learning, as you will see by reading her blog at www.senegalschoolmarm.blogspot.com