| Kindness Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you every where like a shadow or a friend. |
 | Naomi Shihab Nye from The Words Under the Words: Selected Poems |
What is empathy? How does empathy affect the way you treat anther person? How does a person learn empathy? Must we personally experience the loss and sorrow that Naomi Shihab Nye speaks of in this poem in order to feel kindness towards others? I believe that as we learn about others and their strengths and their goodness and about the challenges they have overcome we become more kind. We become that person in the crowd to show the kindness that others are looking for.
Literature is a powerful tool. Reading literature about other people's experiences of immigration can help students develop empathy and understanding toward their classmates, neighbors and friends. It will help foster kindness. The books found on this blog are about children who have come to the United States for many different reasons and from many different places. Some long ago and some not so long ago. Some were welcomed, some were not. As we learn about their experiences we will gain greater understanding of loss and of sorrow which will help us grow in kindness.
Literature is a powerful tool. Reading literature about other people's experiences of immigration can help students develop empathy and understanding toward their classmates, neighbors and friends. It will help foster kindness. The books found on this blog are about children who have come to the United States for many different reasons and from many different places. Some long ago and some not so long ago. Some were welcomed, some were not. As we learn about their experiences we will gain greater understanding of loss and of sorrow which will help us grow in kindness.
"Bibliotherapy is the process of using books to help children think about, understand, and work through social and emotional concerns. Reading with children can be therapeutic.... Adults can use reading to help children come to grips with issues that create emotional turmoil for them. Reading can also be...very effective in preventing and resolving behavior problems."
- from Positive Child Guidance by Darla Ferris Miller
