Constituency

The plan was to focus on four groups in our English Camp: Pastors, church office workers, University and high school students, and the general public.  I imagined I'd be teaching a lot of business English, helping people to edit papers and modify accents-- things you do with advanced English learners.

We never imagined that our major constituency would be young women who were now mothers of small children. Most of the women who came to camp of necessity brought their children.  All had been excellent students of English and felt they were forgetting the language because they had no opportunity to practice.

In the Czech Republic, women have paid maternity leave.  Employers are required to rehire them if they want to return to work within (I believe) a year of giving birth.  But the government pays women a stipend for staying home with their children until the children are three. Who wouldn't take the stipend.

Thing is... it's a trap.  Employers are not supposed to discriminate against young mothers, but they do.  Once a woman is out of the workforce, it's hard for her to return, even if she has excellent education.

The women we worked with believed that English was their ticket of return to the workforce.  With only 12 million speakers of Czech, the international language is essential to tourism, commerce, and the service industries.  It's hard to get a job in the Czech without English.  Even a job in a restaurant or department store.

The women we worked with viewed English as a form of cultural capital essential for their success.