The classroom doesn't have desks or computers, bulletin boards or brightly colored posters. A stacked washer-dryer unit sits along one of the off-white walls. A lone blackboard is attached to the cinder blocks at the front.

"Welcome to ESL class," Laurel Macon writes on the board in neat, elementary school teacher print.

She taught in Battle Creek Public Schools for 30 years, mostly third and fourth graders, but she's retired now. She and another retired teacher, Janet Chichester, volunteer once a week teaching English as a second language to immigrant detainees being held by U.S. Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Calhoun County jail.

The students are women who have been incarcerated by ICE because they are accused of being in the United States illegally.

Each woman is waiting for a court date. They're separated from their families and have no idea what their future might hold.

But the class is a bright spot of laughter and learning. Macon and Chichester call it a place of hope.

Macon had 14 students in her class on Monday, ranging in age from their twenties to their fifties.

A majority of the women speak Spanish. Many of them speak more than one language. One woman, who has been detained for over a year, speaks Albanian, English, and has been teaching herself Spanish. One student is a native Mandarin speaker. Another speaks Tigrinya , one of three official languages in her home country of Eritrea in east Africa.

"It really is their lifeline," Macon said about the class. "They need to know what the guards are saying."

The Calhoun County Ice Detention Facility currently houses 129 immigrant detainees, though that number fluctuates. The county has a contract with the federal government to house immigration detainees.

Twelve languages and more than a dozen countries have been represented in Macon and Chichester's class. They give each woman a dictionary to help translate words from her native language into English. Macon said she's bought almost 200 out of her own pocket.

"The women love the dictionaries. It helps them with their homework, and it helps them learn the language," she said. "Some have really made some growth."

The pair bring in all their own materials for class, including worksheets, paper and pencils. The women get to keep most of the materials, except for the pencils, which are passed out and collected every class.

Macon has been teaching at the detention center for about five months. Chichester started teaching there in the fall of 2017. They said that the only thing they can plan on is that class will be different every week.

"If things are the same a couple of weeks in a row, I think, 'Oh, well, next week will be like this.' Well, it's never like that." Chichester said. "Every now and then I can find out if there's a new group of women, but usually, you just show up and you find out."

Chichester worked as a preschool special education teacher during her career, and said the process of figuring out how to teach English as a second language was daunting, especially because class at the detention center is so different from week to week.

"I couldn't find anything that really worked because people that come into the jail come in, and they might be there for three months or four months, and then they leave," she said. "And their English may be nothing, to rudimentary, to just...a really, really wide range."

Prior to volunteering at the detention center, Chichester and her husband spent five years working at a Methodist mission in Guatemala. It was there that she learned Spanish. When she got back, she felt lost and was looking for something meaningful to do.

"When I was in Guatemala, I lived among people who had very different opportunities than I did, who lived at a much more basic level that I did," she said. "What this allows me to do is to be present with other people who haven't had the same privileges in life that I have."

Each class starts with three questions, which are written on a piece of poster paper and hung on the board: "What is your name?" "Where are you from?" "How long have you been here?"

One of the students stood to introduce herself to the rest of the class.

"I am from El Salvador and Michigan," she said. " I have been here for six months."

She was not the only woman who said she was from Michigan. Though they are from countries around the world, for some, the United States is an important part of their identity.

Each lesson has a theme. This week, the women worked on question words.

"How old is George's grandmother?" Macon read from one of the many worksheets she brought in for the lesson.

"My mother is 69," the woman from El Salvador and Michigan said to Macon.

Macon smiled and replied, "She's only a year younger than me. You could be my little girl."

Macon and Chichester have bonded with many of their students, and Macon said that it can be hard when someone doesn't show up to class for a few weeks because they don't know what happened.

"It's so difficult because I think about them, and I wonder, where are they? How are they doing?" Macon said.

The women who leave have either been deported, are out on bond or have been transferred, according to Captain Holly Thomas, the community corrections manager for Calhoun County.

"A lot of it depends on their criminal history," she said.

Sometimes it's possible for Macon and Chichester to stay in touch after a student leaves. Macon still exchanges WhatsApp messages with one woman who was deported.

"This woman wanted to come here and go into the medical field and work with elderly people, and she was extremely bright," Macon said. "Her English was excellent. She was even picking up on Spanish, and she just reminded me of a young woman who should be, you know, home from her college on the weekend...but now she's back in her home country, and she tells me that there's... no job, no educational choices for her, and no one to practice English with."

Chichester said that although it can be emotionally challenging, teaching English to the detainees is more often a joy and a privilege.

"It also really recharges you, when you're in a place where you see people who are in the midst of such hardship and still have this great spirit. This spirit of hope, and they have faith," she said.

At the end of most sessions, the class plays a game called "Papa Caliente," which means "hot potato" in Spanish. Chichester bought a toy potato that plays music, and the group passes it around in a circle while they answer and ask a question in English. When the music stops, the person with the toy has to go to the middle of the circle to dance, sing or answer a question.

"One time... one of the women decided she would sing. And so she started singing in Spanish 'The Spirit of the Lord Is In This Place,' and pretty soon — I tear up just thinking about it — everybody was standing in a circle singing," Chichester said. "Singing that — the spirit of the Lord — and I think in a large measure that's true...It was real for them. They felt God there, in the midst of their trials, and they shared it."

"That will be with me forever," she said.

Sometimes, the women share their sadness and worry in class.

"We were working on 'sometimes,' 'never' and 'always,' so like, 'What do you sometimes do? What do you never do? What do you always do?" Macon said. "An older woman... she said 'I sometimes cry because I don't know where my son is, and I'm so worried about him.' So even though we're just teaching a language, when you really hear where their hearts are, it really — I don't know. Sometimes I think, 'Is this a dream, is this really the country that I live in, that we've got women that are under lock and key, and they don't know where their families are?' So, that's the reality of it."

For all of the solemn moments, there are instances of laughter and fun.

During a matching activity on Monday, where the students had to match a question word to a phrase, one group formed the question, "Who has laundry that needs to be done?"

"It's me," said one of the women making her classmates laugh. "I have laundry."

The women help and support one another during their English lessons, leaning over to point out correct answers on a worksheet and cheering for classmates after they give the right answer to a question. Those who have more English fluency help translate for those who are just starting to learn the language.

"They help each other struggle," Chichester said.

But Chichester said she doesn't forget she's in a jail.

"Maybe there are times when you get really involved in the class, but everybody in front of you is wearing an orange uniform, and in order to get into the room you go through a series of locked doors," she said. "I get really involved in what I'm doing, but I don't think that I ever forget that I'm in a jail. Never."

Contact Elena Durnbaugh at (269) 243- 5938 or edurnbaugh@battlecreekenquirer.com. Follow her on Twitter @ElenaDurnbaugh.