Lanterns

Each year, while at the seaside, doing our nocturnal walks on the beach, we encounter at least one herd of young people – highschoolers, it seems, in their summer camp offered by the City of Bucharest – trying to light up and raise dozens or even hundreds of Chinese lanterns to the skies.

It may be that the lanterns are of poor quality or the kids have no idea how to do it – or even better, it may be too windy for the lanterns to really raise up to the skies, but somehow this ordeal I am forced to witness every year, by my enthousiast and optimistic kid, who loves to run from one group of people to the next and then alongside with the lantern being taken by the currents. Each time, trustful and then disappointed, a vicious cycle that made me cringe over his sweet soul waiting for a lantern to finally take it to the skies.

It was the sort of odd day when the wind blew from the shore towards the water and out of the blue, in the evening, changed course. So the air was coming from the huge waves, making a swirl and then dropping cold on the sand. And, accordingly, the lanterns were raising for a couple of feet, then were dragged by the cold currents on the sand. Should they changed post or even postponned the fun for another nights...

And so I watch them and wonder how is they don’t see that, some evenings, you just cannot do that. Just like two nights ago, when out of the hundreds lanterns, literally, only two got up, the rest of them being gathered dutifully by either a teacher or some environmentalist among them. Hundreds of broken lanterns, stuffing the trash bins on the beach.

But it is not the lanterns that make me still watch them and photograph them while trying this losing game. It’s the friendship and collaboration, it’s their interactions that I listen to, their coming to terms to each other way of doing it, their determination or humor, their way of seeing and doing and talking... I am interested in these as a mother, as well as a researcher having to do with children and teenagers – and not least, as a lecturer that fails to see, each and every year, what is the ‚problem’ with her students’ lack of literacies. Because they – my undergraduate students - display many forms of illiteracies, they come to the university unprepared to use critical thinking, to think with the help of abstract notions, to understand theories and theoretical models. And, helas, to even express themselves at a higher level than the hic et nunc level...

And I look to these kids on the beach with hope, because they are us, they are the future and in these and other interactions lies the way our future would look like. They are the ‚active and worthy’ students, these emblems are written on the sign outside their hotel: Tabăra elevilor activi şi merituoşi, Primăria Municipiului Bucureşti. Some of these highschool students that were elected refused the opportunity of going to the seaside, free of charge, on the expense of the City Hall, since the expense is that of the citizens indeed.

And I love this kind of gestures, that, on the whole, make me doubt and fear the future less...