“We are the world…we are the children.” To some people those are just lyrics to a pop song, but to elementary-school teacher Marissa Colston, they sum up her experience teaching abroad.
PGN: Born? MC: I was born in Germantown and lived there until I was about 11 when we moved to Vermont, which was a totally different environment.
PGN: What was so different? MC: Well, there weren’t a lot of black people in Vermont, so we really stuck out. We couldn’t walk down the street without people staring. My brothers are darker than me so they heard a lot of ugly racial remarks. Even those who wanted to be nice hadn’t met any black people so they constantly asked questions about our hair and other personal things and it was very tiring having to explain all the time. There was one other black girl in my class of 450 and we looked nothing alike, but teachers and students would confuse us all the time. One time this girl saw Amber (and she had short hair) in the morning and then saw me later in the day (and I had longer hair) and said, “Oh my gosh, you hair grows really fast!” It was crazy.
PGN: Tell me about your family. MC: I have two younger brothers: I’m about five years older than them so I did a lot of babysitting. We’re all very close. Most of them are still in Vermont. My dad was a chef when I was young and then later he started working in the social-service industry with his own business, helping disenfranchised and disadvantaged people get jobs and loans, cars so they can get to work, whatever they need to be productive citizens. He now works for the government of Vermont running a volunteer-services program, which for him is like being a kid in a candy shop. He loves to help people and now he can do it with a large budget and a large staff behind him. My mom works at the University of Vermont, she’s the director of the ALANA Student center — African, Latino(a), Asian and Native American — which helps students of color. They have a house and all sorts of programs for students throughout the year.
PGN: Craziest babysitting incident? MC: We were the house where all the neighborhood kids would come to play. My brother and his friends were roughhousing near me and he accidentally punched me in the stomach. It knocked the wind out of me, which if you’ve never experienced is pretty scary. You don’t know what’s happening, you just know you can’t breathe. I freaked out and he started crying. It was funny because we scared each other!
PGN: What did you want to be when you grew up? MC: When I was in eighth grade I wanted to be a lawyer, because I love to argue. Then I wanted to be an environmental scientist because I like nature, I enjoy being outside. Then in college, I kind of fell into teaching.
PGN: So, nature girl, what do you like to do outdoors? MC: I like hiking and camping, biking, just being outdoors for any reason. Swimming in the ocean, running. And I love to garden!
PGN: Favorite camping adventure? MC: I was with the youth group from my church and we did a three-day hike of the Long Trail, which runs across the Green Mountains. We packed up everything in our backpacks and started out. We got poured on and then the sun would come out and you’d be dry and hot. At night, we’d have to hoist our food up into the trees so the animals wouldn’t eat it. It was a fun adventure!
PGN: Who was your favorite teacher? MC: He was my history teacher and also our track coach. He taught history and stressed that there was more to the world than our little corner of Vermont. He made the lessons global and allowed space for different kinds of discussions. As I said, Vermont was pretty homogeneous, so it helped to have a teacher who encouraged us to see things from different perspectives. He was also an amazing coach. He treated everyone like they were the best runners on the team. It was fun rather than super-competitive.
PGN: When did you know you were gay? MC: I went to an all-girls’ school when we lived in Philly, so I didn’t really have to think about boys. But when we moved to Vermont and I went to a mixed-gender school, I saw that the girls were all boy crazy and I just wasn’t feeling it. I was just entering middle school and found myself having crushes on girls and being more interested in girls’ bodies. It was just at the time we started taking health class and learning about puberty, so I figured it was just a hormonal thing and I’d grow out of it. [Laughs.] So from middle school to high school, I kept waiting for the phase to pass but it never did!
PGN: That’s good to hear! MC: The other thing was that though I’d heard the word “gay,” I never associated it with women. It was the late ’80s and AIDS was in the news, so I associated gay with white men. Because I’d never seen it in my environment, I never thought that a girl could be gay or even [that] a black person [could be], so it didn’t even cross my mind that I was “gay.”
PGN: What brought you back to Philly? MC: I came back for college. I went to Swarthmore, which is a very liberal school. That’s where I began to come out. They had a gay student union and a yearly queer symposium. I had some gay friends who invited me to some of the workshops and, as I heard people’s stories, it was as if I was hearing people tell my story. I started realizing, whoa, that’s me, that’s who I am. I came out to myself and friends first, and to my family about a semester later.
PGN: How did they react? MC: My dad was like, “It doesn’t matter to me, I’ll always love you.” He actually had two women he worked with who’d had a commitment ceremony and he was cool with it. My mom was not so cool about it. She kept saying things like, “It’s just a phase. It’s my fault for moving us to Vermont! I shouldn’t have let you go to that liberal college! You’re just experimenting. You just haven’t found the right guy …” Stuff like that. She was not pleased at all. Then she went into the “whatever” mode where she wouldn’t believe me. She just decided in was my teenage rebellion. That hurt me, but she slowly came around and now she’s OK.
PGN: Was she religious? MC: Yeah, she grew up as a Seventh Day Adventist and went to an intense church. We didn’t grow up that way but we did go to church every Sunday and I believe in God. As an adult, I tried out several churches but there was a conflict because though I liked the communal aspect, many of them were not accepting of homosexuality. I went to some welcoming churches but they were too out there for me, too free-format. I like more structure. Unfortunately the ones with more structure seemed to be the ones that were less tolerant. I was at one mega-church that I really liked but had to leave because of the issue. They had a weird thing where they welcomed gay people to come but mainly so they could pray for you and your sins. [Laughs.] I was like, “This is crazy,” and had to find something else.
PGN: That “love the sinner, hate the sin” syndrome. MC: Yeah, yeah! And I don’t believe in that: I know I’m fine just as I am. I love the creator and the creator loves me. And I need to be in an environment that allows that. I come from a Christian tradition, so that’s where I’m most comfortable, but I can commune with God under a tree. I don’t need to be in a church to do it.
PGN: Tell me about teaching. MC: I’ve been doing it for 11 years now. I taught third grade for many years and, last year, I taught kindergarten. I want to have my own school someday, so next year I’m going to take an administrative position at my school. I’ll get to work with the lower- and middle-school directors and get to do projects like working with the diversity workshops and school assistants as well as administrative work. PGN: Are you out at the school? MC: I am, I am. Totally. My school is so cool. I work at the Friends Select School and it’s awesome. We have a lot of openly gay people at the school — teachers, administrators, students. Being gay is a non-issue there and that’s what I wanted. I was not going to be in the closet. I wanted to be in a place where I could be open to talk about my partner and not have to change pronouns and all that nonsense. I’m getting too old for that!
PGN: And how old are you, missy? MC: [Laughs.] I just turned 33 last week! PGN: And you’ve traveled quite a bit … MC: I love to travel. When I was in college, I did a study abroad in Namibia and visited South Africa while I was there. I’d heard that teaching was a great way to explore other places, so in 2008, I literally went to Google and found a website with a listing of International Independent schools and applied for work in the Sudan. It was at an amazing school in Khartoum with students from all over the world. I interviewed with them on Skype and got the job. I packed up and was gone for two years.
PGN: What was the scariest thing about being abroad? MC: I guess it was a little scary at first because I didn’t know Arabic. It was nerve-wracking not to be able to communicate. But I wasn’t by myself: There were other teachers in the apartment building where I lived, so if I needed to go to the market or catch a cab, I’d go with one of them. Living on my own in a new place is exciting for me, so there wasn’t anything really scary about it. And honestly, before I left for the Sudan, I was living in Germantown, where you would routinely hear sirens and fights and car crashes, but even though Khartoum has about 6 or 7 million people it was amazingly quiet and peaceful, especially at night. I was like, “This is great! I can sleep until morning!” It was also super-safe. They have harsh consequences for crime so it’s almost nonexistent. As a woman traveling on my own, I felt very safe.
PGN: Greece was like that outside of Athens. I was told by women that they could walk down a dark alley at 4 in the morning and not think anything of it. MC: True. Now I wasn’t out there. That was another issue, though some of my colleagues knew. But it was one of the things totally against Shari’ah law, so it would not have been a smart move to be too open. It’s not the kind of place where I’d want to settle down, but it was great to spend some time in a different culture.
PGN: And what were you teaching? MC: Third grade. And it was cool because I had kids from everywhere! And a lot of them had parents from different countries or families that moved a lot, so they all spoke multiple languages. They had amazing world experiences and, to them, different was normal. They were used to having classmates that wore different clothing or ate different foods, had different customs and religions and yet they all got along. It was beautiful. It made me realize that we can all get along on this planet. It was a nursery-through-12 school and it was like being at the UN. People have the perception that people with varied philosophies can’t get along, but that’s not true; I was able to witness it firsthand. These kids played together and stayed together and loved each other. It gave you hope for humanity.
PGN: Did you meet many gay people in your travels? MC: In Khartoum itself, there were some gay people at the school, other teachers and even the head of the school. We’d spoken about it in my interview, but I didn’t meet any open Sudanese people. A lot of things were very underground because of Shari’ah law, and I wasn’t connected to them. In Namibia, I met people in the gay community and even went to a gay party. I met gay people in South Africa as well, but it’s different there. In South Africa, at least on paper, gay people are more protected. They even have legalized gay marriage. But, in the Sudan, it’s really interesting because they are much more affectionate with each other. Men hold hands when they walk together or lock pinkies and women also hold hands, but men and women who are together do not. The men and women keep mostly segregated. Coming from America, it looked so gay seeing all these guys walking around holding hands! It’s fascinating to see how they view male/female interactions differently and touch differently. I always wondered is it easier to be gay there because you can walk holding your lover’s hand in public? But I never got to break into the gay underground there to ask.
PGN: Tell me about one kid that stuck out. MC: A kid named Chol, he was our only scholarship student. He was an orphan from South Sudan who had been adopted by a Spanish family working there. They literally found him living under a tree. His mother had passed away in childbirth and he was raising himself. He had some extended family, but they had stopped taking care of him long ago. The Spanish family that took him in brought him to our school and I got to teach him. This kid was so amazing, his spirit was so strong and his desire to learn was unstoppable. When he came, he didn’t know anything, he spoke a local language but didn’t even know Arabic, but he learned Arabic and Spanish and English. He loved learning, ate it up and was grateful for everything he had. And he had this bubbly personality that was delightful to be around. He was the mediator and always wanted to make sure everyone got along. If ever there was a problem, he’d get upset and would talk to both people and try to work it out. And he loved soccer! He could play with joy for hours on end. It could be scorching hot out and he’d come back pouring sweat with a big grin on his face. I’ll never forget his story, where he came from and how much he accomplished.
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