The student news site of Westwood High School.

Westwood Horizon

The student news site of Westwood High School.

Westwood Horizon

The student news site of Westwood High School.

Westwood Horizon

Teachers After 4:10 — Mrs. Darcy Johnson

Mrs. Darcy Johnson, who teaches Spanish III and IV at Westwood, has always had a heart for travelling and helping those in need. When the opportunity arose, Mrs. Johnson leaped at the chancDarcy Peace Corps 1e to journey abroad, while providing aid for those in need – she was a member of the Peace Corps, and spent time teaching English to a Palestinian community in Jordan.

But what is the Peace Corps?

“The Peace Corps was started in the 1960’s by President John F. Kennedy. His famous quote ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’ was the premise of forming the Peace Corps,” Mrs. Johnson explained. “They send out what they call ‘Little Ambassadors’ to nations in order to serve the United States by helping developing nations that need education, or construction and health projects.”

Almost everyone wants to travel the world – Mrs. Johnson was no exception. Her wanderlust was one of the things that drove her to join the Corps.

“I was young and I wanted to travel, and I wanted to learn about the world,” Mrs. Johnson said. “I thought that after finishing my teaching certification it would be an appropriate time to go abroad, so I could come back home and not always wish that I had done it.”

After discovering where she would be working, Mrs. Johnson left America and trained for three months in a Bedouin community in Jordan.

“My village [where I was Darcy Peace Corps 2trained] happened to overlook the Dead Sea Hills, and you could see the lights of Jerusalem glimmering in the distance at night – we were very close to the border with Israel,” Mrs. Johnson said. “During those three training months I lived [in Jordan] and went to class everyday, then on the weekends we would go to Amman and have fun!”

Once her training was complete, she was sent to the facility where she would be serving the people in Jordan.

“I ended up in a Palestinian refugee camp that turned into a community, teaching English at an all-girls school,” Mrs. Johnson said. “On the side we did various projects for whoever needed help – we once had a volunteer at a nearby village that wanted help cleaning up a swamp! We would put on our swamp-cleaning cloths and remove trash and water buffalo dung – there were a lot of random assignments!”

The community where Mrs. Johnson was placed had a large need for English teachers: though the school systems required English to be taught, children weren’t instructed in how to use the language.

“It was very textbook-driven; there wasn’t a lot of application being used. In fact, when I tried to teach the way we do here in the United States, it wasn’t a very popular choice. They pulled me out of the classroom and would put me in different classes every day, just trying to find a spot for me instead of actually letting me teach a class, so that was disappointing,” Mrs. Johnson admitted. “But definitely there’s a need for the English language: there is a lot of British influence in Jordan, so there’s more English in their culture than you would expect. Also, as an international language, to be doing business with other nations in the area, English is important.”

Ms. Johnson faced many difficulties while  in the Peace Corps, but the experience was also extraordinarily rewarding.

“It was an amazing time of my life – Dickens says ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’, and that describes it perfectly. There’s a lot of difficulty in terms of surviving in the culture: in some Peace Corps assignments, people have trouble adjusting to an environmental component, or the aspect of a nation not being fully developed. Cultural assimilation was probably the biggest challenge: trying to assert myself as a young female in a culture that respects people who are older, generally – that was challenging,” Mrs. Johnson said. “But it was a learning experience! I learned great humility, which has been very beneficial in life. I learned tenacity; I just kept going everyday. I would get up in the morning and go to work, no matter how frightened, frustrated, or lonely I might have been feeling. But I also learned about Jordanian and Bedouin culture – I learned a lot about the difference between Arabic speaking cultures, and I learned the Arabic language – most of which I’ve forgotten. But the culture, I haven’t forgotten. The strength that I gained from having to cope with adverse circumstances will stay with me forever.”

Along with the simultaneously  difficult and rewarding work that Mrs. Johnson and the others did, they also got to enjoy the opportunities available to them where they were stationed.

“On my 25th birthday, [my fellow volunteers and I] went backpacking and camped out on the sand in a place called Wadi Rum,” Mrs. Johnson recalled. “We were out in the middle of the desert, near a place called Aqaba. I remember that the silence in the desert was so deafening – it was so silent that you couldn’t hear anything, and it was amazing. To sleep on the desert in the middle of nowhere, in the Middle East, was pretty awesome.”

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