The Time I Trained CIA Secret Agents

Last night I dreamt that I worked for the CIA on covert operations. After a few adventures of the spying-running kind, the ELL teacher I worked with during my real-life internship and I were appointed to train secret agents who spoke some of the CIA's target languages. That meant that in my dream I was training a lot of the immigrant students whom I taught in real life because they speak Cantonese (okay, so maybe that's not really a language the CIA is desperate for since it's the most common Chinese language in the United States) and Somali. The classroom was also populated by a bunch of random made-up Cantonese and Somali speakers.
Anyway, apparently the CIA had been so desperate for Somali speakers that they had not only recruited the conscientious Somali students I really taught and a few random people, but they had also recruited this kid who had some serious behavioral problems. I asked the CIA director why he would trust this kid with state secrets and missions and stuff when the kid couldn't even sit at his computer in the training room for more than fifteen seconds, and the director just shrugged and said, "He speaks Somali, right?"

The kid was being really disruptive, shouting out while I was talking, "Do I get to kill somebody?" and "I don't like this. You're telling me what to do all the time." I was once talking about a secret mission with a projected map, and the kid jumped up and pointed to a completely different place on the map—"I have family there. They're my family." All my other trainees would just roll their eyes and keep analyzing data on their computers.

Eventually things got so bad with this kid that he decided to leave the CIA. The other trainees and I were glad he was gone, but at the same time I was thinking, Is it okay that we taught this kid all our secret CIA tactics and codes and stuff and then he just leaves? What if he joins Boko Haram? (In real life I realize that Boko Haram has nothing to do with Somalia, and if my subconscious brain wanted to be more accurate I would be worried about Al-Shabaab, but I think I listened to a report about Boko Haram on NPR Saturday, so it was fresher in my mind.) Again, I brought my concerns to my CIA director, but he was pretty blasé about the whole thing.

Boko Haram = No Fun

My trainees and I had a few weeks of blissful uninterrupted training, and then the kid came back because he didn't like Boko Haram either. Of course, he had been too distracted to collect any useful information about Boko Haram during his time with them, which was on one hand disappointing and on the other heartening because it meant he probably hadn't had anything useful to tell Boko Haram about the CIA either. We resigned ourselves to a few more weeks of irritating interruptions.

One of the other Somali students called me over to his computer and asked in a sincere, low voice, "Is the CIA really just trying to kill Musilms?" and then I woke up.