Professor Reese Brings Book Club to El Salvador
At the start of this year, I got the honor of starting a book club at The Institute. Students read the same book and every week we gathered to discuss, share, commiserate, and argue. The shared experience of the book gave a platform to discuss important issues about life and make connections with the Bible. Book Club quickly became my favorite part of the week.
As this year's summer immersion trip to El Salvador approached, I saw an opportunity. This immersion trip was special because the three people that were involved had a good level of Spanish. During Immersion Trips, one of the objectives is to increase language proficiency. We usually facilitate some kind of language exchange between students and natives: The students get the opportunity to teach English, and the Salvadorans help the students with their Spanish. Often the lessons have to be fairly basic, but this time around, we could do something more advanced for the students’ language learning. So, keeping in mind our slogan “what we do here is what we do there,” I started a book club. The immersion students would get to develop their language proficiency through reading and discussion, and everyone would get to experience the magic of a book club.
The book I chose was La Colina de Watership (English: Watership Down) by Richard Adams. It’s a story about rabbits, but more importantly, it's a story about community, leadership, and resilience during change. In our first meeting, we discussed the connections the book has with the story of the Exodus, and how the difficulty of stepping outside what is comfortable. It was a wonderful discussion and everyone participated. At the end, one student expressed her excitement for the time, how it allowed her to hear the perspective of other students and discuss biblical themes in a different way.
Stories have a wonderful ability to spark deep discussion. The poet Rumi likened stories to heated bathwater. People can’t sit directly in the fire; they need the intermediary of the water to carry the heat. In the same way, it can be difficult to talk about certain topics directly, but stories can provide a medium for getting at them. For example, we talked about how easy it can be, when starting something new, to bring in the old ways of doing things. The Bible uses the metaphor of leaven to get at this idea, and Watership Down also helps explore this theme. It’s a theme that might feel to abstract, but the medium of the story makes it something that can be discussed in a more concrete way.
A book club is also a venue for getting to know each other more deeply. People share what’s in their heart through how they read the story, what characters they are drawn to and what themes they notice. Differences of opinion about a plot point can reveal differences in personality and perspective. We also relate ourselves to characters, and it becomes natural to find parts of ourselves in the characters we read. This all provides a wonderful opportunity to talk about ourselves and share ourselves with others.
Every immersion trip is different because God’s people are all different. The immersion students this year had language proficiency and a book enthusiast as a leader. The result: book club. I know I’m biased, but it doesn’t get much better than an international book club that combines so many great things: literature, dialogue, language learning, honest conversations, and the development of relationships.
