Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Thursday, September 10, 2009

The word has come in from Poland, and it is good.

Henry adores his host home in Warsaw and writes me when I probe for details that he’s leading “a normal schoolboy life.” I like the sound of that, except that nothing is “normal” about the life he’s leading. He’s an American in a foreign country, albeit one with which he is familiar and identified, a country where Americans are (still) adored — especially 12-year-old schoolboys with twinkles in their eyes. But he’s not living in his own home; his pets, friends and parents are thousands of miles away; and he’s immersed in a language he has yet to master.

Still, Henry is enjoying the daily routine of going to school with his host brothers, Bart in his own class, and Wiktor, an impressionable first grader. Henry’s lapping up the amazing hot lunches at the Canadian School, which always start with a delicious soup — “zupa” in Polish — and end with homemade dessert. He is apparently thriving on all the individual attention his private school is bestowing upon him. There’s tutoring in Polish (“things are coming back to me,” he reported in one email) and his young, energetic teacher, Annie Levasseur, a native of Canada, is reaching out to be sure that he doesn’t lose any ground on his studies back home. I’m not at all concerned with Henry’s reading in English (the boy loves nothing more than curling up with a book which he inhales in no time), but I mentioned that he could use help with mathematics. So, voila, next thing I hear, a British teacher of mathematics has been dispatched to work with him.

The first day of Henry’s school, pani Levasseur emailed me photos showing a cozy, sunny, yellow-walled class room with all the boys, dressed in button-down, broad cloth shirts (thank goodness we thought to pack one!), sitting at one table, and all the girls at another. The air of formality in the school pleases me. This is a place where learning is sacred, and rules are enforced. In America, I’ve seen more than enough schoolchildren in tattered bluejeans and in-your-face T-shirts and had my fill of rude, foul-mouthed language. It is already apparent that this sort of thing would never fly at the Canadian School of Warsaw.

Yesterday, Henry emailed (for the first time after 12 days) that he missed me. How many days was it until I arrived in Warsaw, he wanted to know? Today, the count is down to 23. As his mother — far away across the pond — my hope is that his “normal schoolboy life” will extend at least until my arrival at Chopin Airport and, even better, deep into our stay in the mythical land of the White Eagle.