Another face, another reason to feel ashamed.

Spent the morning teaching a room full of refugees from across Sub Saharan Africa how to count, say the days of the week and greet a friend in English. Just about recovered from the first day teaching yesterday, when it transpired - in the tiny room with no windows and one eye-wateringly unpleasant strip light rammed with 18 young students crammed so tight you have to climb onto the desk in front to get out   - that the youngest is fifteen, a third are seventeen or not much more, and one of the them got here, from Congo, looking after her teenage brother, across 8 countries to get to Morocco, by bus, car and foot, when she was 22  - and  pregnant.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

I thought, I don't know I'm born. I thought, I have no idea what level of privilege I have.  I. Have. No. Idea.

So we worked, me and the other guy from the UK, Steven,  in the tiny space, to grapple with digits and words and pronounciation, with levels from barely-able-to-say-my-name to those able to articulate full paragraphs. Seventeen year old boys straining to listen and work it out and repeat...

I never went to a French language lesson full of boys my son's age, but I bet my ass it wasn't like this.

And then at the end, one student asks if he can have a word. He waits til the tiny corridor is a bit cleared of everyone, then asks quietly, do I know of any organisations in England where they need people who can speak two languages? Can I help him make contact so he can find a job?

And I have to say - ashamed of where I come from for the eighth time this week - that I'm so sorry, so really sorry, but it's almost impossible to get into my country. I can come to Africa. I can come when I want and leave when I want.  But it's almost impossible for an African to get into my country.  That his skills are fantastic, but he is better to try and use them here, and I can help him contact organisations and people here who can help him use his languages in good and interesting work, and then maybe one day, he can get to the country he wants to.  His disappointment shines in his eyes and I hate what I am saying and myself for saying it and I find myself talking too much and trying to grasp him by the shoulder in some bizarre effort at human connection and humility,  trying to acknowledge, pointlessly, the utterly random, cruel  chance that put me in a white body in the north and him in a black body in the south, and the life-bending consequences of that.

The thing that I can do now is teach him English as brilliantly and fast and usefully as I can while I am here and try not to feel that it's such a bloody tiny effort in the face of his absolutely reasonable and absolutely impossible hope to have the same right to go somewhere as me.

I'm so unutterably sick of being ashamed of my country I can't even find a word for this feeling of disgustshameoutrage.