Teaching

One of my hopes for this year was that it would help me figure out how I felt about teaching as a possible future profession. It has not. In some ways I really enjoy teaching. I like being in class. I like the game of trying to keep the kids attention, make them laugh, challenge them, keep them engaged. I’m crazy about the students. I find it so rewarding when I know I’ve planned a lesson well and it actually turns out well in class.

But my time at the school here has also shown me down-sides of teaching. Most of those difficulties are practical: it is such a challenge to come up with new and creative ways to teach, and I only have to prepare two or three short lessons for a day. Lesson planning is always difficult and tedious. I don’t have good ways to evaluate how much the students are actually learning. I know I am not reaching all the students and I don’t know how to find or help the students that aren’t learning without boring or excluding the ones who are.

Teaching is stressful. I’ve relaxed into it a little bit, but at the beginning I felt like I was constantly preparing for a performance that I was never going to be ready for, but was going to happen anyway. For hundreds of practical reasons, teaching is hard and I am not sure I am cut out for it.

But, now as I get closer to the end of my time here, I’ve also realized a non-practical, or even impractical, reason why I might not be cut out for teaching. I have a great impulse (or more like a great need) to know to as many small details and as much of the big picture as I possibly can. It’s what makes me love history. And (negatively) it’s what makes me love to hear gossip. I want to know why things are the way they are. I want to know how they will turn out. I want to know what makes people who they are. And I don’t want to have to ask (which may be what makes me more inclined towards history than journalism). I like to see people in different circumstances and see how they vary. I like to see how choices impact people’s lives. I like to see if I can piece together stories.

I like to see if how I think things are going to turn out is actually how they are going to turn out. That causes a problem for me with teaching. I have fallen in love with my students. My little interactions with them make and break my days. Even when I get so frustrated, fed-up, or angry in class, I am almost always excited to see students run over to me during the break afterwards. We don’t speak the same language; I don’t even
know all of their names, but I am head-over-heels, crazy in love with my students.

Here’s the problem: I don’t get to know the end of their stories. Even if I were to stay or come back to Ethiopia, the chances that I’d get to know how their lives will turn out would be slim to none. Once this year is over, I will have no way to see them again, no way to reconnect. Perhaps also connected with my love of history is a constant fear of anything being lost for ever; any avenue being permanently closed, any item being
irretrievable. And now these beautiful children, these students whom I am so enamored of, are going to disappear, not from the world, but from my life. They are going to go on living their simple or heart-breaking or amazing lives, but I’m never going to get to know anything about them. They are going to have great stories, but I’m not going to hear them. How do teachers deal with that? I don’t know if I could do that year after year.

Blog_Post_3-_Nazret_1

Here is the start of a blog post that I began sometime in November 2011:




I’ve been asked it more times and in more ways then I can possibly repeat here:



“How do you like Nazret?”

“What do you think of Adama?”

“Nazret endate-no?” (How is Nazret?)



Of course there is only one response. As the director of my school said one time, when some one asks you “Dehna-nish?” (are you fine?), the only response, whether you’re sick, unhappy, or who knows what, the only response is “Dehna-nyn” (I’m fine). So, of course, when some one asks me how I’m liking my new home, the only real response is “Areef-no” (It’s awesome), “It’s very nice,” “I like it.” It is just what you say.



But what do I really think of Nazret? It is much easier to give the automatic response than to actually think about and explain how I am adjusting to all the changes, challenges, and differences I’ve been experiencing during the month since I moved away from Addis Ababa to my assignment.



My assignment is in a city of about 250,000 people, arguably the second largest city in Ethiopia. The city, the capital of the Oromia region, is officially called Adama, which is the name in the Oromifia language, but under previous governments it was known as Nazret, named after the biblical Nazareth, and most people I’m around still call it that. Nazret feels to me extremely different from Addis Ababa. It is brighter, sunnier, flatter, cleaner, and more open. It feels a little bit more how I anticipated Africa would be; it is hot and incredibly dusty. Every day I come home with my feet caked in dust and everything in my room is covered with a thin coating of dust. There are more flowers than in Addis and even the buildings tend to be painted in brighter colors. It has a more relaxed, laid-back feel than Addis, and I think is really more my kind of city.



But, that is not to say that it easy to live here. There are not nearly as many foreigners here as in Addis Ababa, so I get even more comments and attention than I was used to there, though, to be fair, it is a different type of attention. There is still a type of people want money or something or who just want to point out that I’m a “fereng,” but there seem to be a lot more people who just feel it necessary to say something to me. I guess because I am more of an oddity. I also think a lot of the difference comes from the fact that often I am in town alone here, and that happened only rarely in Addis. I guess I didn’t realize how much sharing almost all my activities with Ben protected me from a whole genre of comments and hassles. Being in town as a single white young woman is a challenge. There seem to be some expectations of and limitations on women in this culture, but I am having a hard time really getting an understanding of what those are here, and how I ought to relate to them. Having that uncertainty makes me feel even more like I have to be on my guard, which is not a feeling that I really want to have when I am trying to be open to a new culture.



I am also feeling even more the limitations of being a “fereng.” I know travel the same routes most days. I stand out so much that it feels like every interaction I have on the street will be remembered, which makes it feel like even the smallest exchange I have on the street will affect my days in the future. I am sure that is an overreaction and not really true, but the feeling still changes how I react to things on a daily basis. For example, Ethiopian culture does not look down on begging when there is a real need. Ethiopians often give to elderly or disabled beggars. But, because I am white and stand out so much, I feel like I can’t give without marking myself for the future. My host brothers have even told me, “don’t give any money, or you will never be left alone.” At the very least, I feel like my actions are constantly being judged against expectations and stereotypes of white people. Everyone from my host family to people on the street compares my actions with the other “ferenges” with whom they have had contact. It is a very strange situation to feel like you’re always representing a huge and extremely diverse population about which you really only know your own experience. I guess that is maybe what it feels like to be a minority. I’ve only experienced that in small ways before, like being a Mennonite in Tennessee or from the South in Minnesota, never anything as big and obvious as race. When I fist moved down to Nazret I read the book Pigs in Heaven, by Barbara Kingsolver. In it I found this quote, “Since her arrival in Oklahoma, she had felt color as a kind of noticeable heat rising off her skin, something like a light bulb mistakenly left on and burning in a roomful of people who might disapprove” (page 318). That is a little bit what it’s like to be white here. Only it is not a light bulb. It is a huge megawatt searchlight that has previously been used to illuminate money or success or cultural insensitivity or any number of things that I don’t necessarily want associate with myself, whether they really apply. It is really an experience like no other.



Being white also really affected my experience as I began teaching. The first couple days the kids all ran over to me as I entered the school yard. It is quite an overwhelming experience to have about 180 surrounding you and yelling to you.



And that is when I was called away from my writing to eat dinner and never returned to finish the post.

Blog_Post_3_Real-_Sum_Up

Once again I have no excuse. I must once again apologize for not posting. I could try all the same justifications, and all the same reasons why they are not valid would apply. Please know that it is not because I don’t want to share my time here with all of you wonderful people who (through a wide range of types of invaluable support) have made my time here possible. I want to be able to communicate to all of you the blessings, difficulties, differences, similarities, funny stories, challenging moments, and ease of things here—all the little moments and details that make up my experience here. Unfortunately, that is impossible. Every time I have tried it has gotten a bit out of hand. I think a few of you that have emailed me with questions may have been a bit overwhelmed by the bulk of my (also very delayed) responses. It is then just that much more difficult for me to express myself on this blog that is so undefined in audience and scope. I tend to feel like in order to tell you anything I have to tell you everything, and that is, of course, an insurmountable task. So, more than seven month into my time here and only two blog posts in, here is what I’ve decided to do: I’m going to give you all a brief summary of what my life is like and then throw out an array of excerpts from emails and previous blog attempts. Once I get these things up I’ll try to post more frequent and less effusive posts. If you have questions you’d like answered or things you’d like to see a blog post about, let me know and I’ll try to accommodate.




Just so that you have some framework here are some of the basics:





I am living in Nazret, Ethiopia. I work at a nursery and kindergarten school run by a local NGO teaching English to each of their six classes, which average about 35 students. My work days go from 8:30am-3:30pm, but are filled with breaks, so that my actual time in class is only about two and a half or three hours. Tuesdays and Thursdays I spend half an hour of my lunch break at a small private (and affluent) nursery and kindergarten school. I really enjoy my fellow teachers, but language difficulties and different schedules have made it difficult for me to get to know them well.



My host family is wonderful. Living in the compound (a central house and more rooms outside) when I arrived were: two adult brothers (Eskinder and Danny), their nephew (Yonaton, who is about my age), and a female cousin who does the cooking and cleaning around the house (Melesech). Two more sisters live nearby: one lives just up the road with her family (Rahel) and one lives about an hour away (Roman, who is called Benju), but comes home nearly every weekend and on holidays. Since I’ve been here, one of the brothers (Eskinder) moved to a new job about four hours from here, and, just two weeks ago, Dagem, a sixteen-year-old female student, who was an acquaintance of the family and needed a place to stay, moved in. Several other members of the family live in North America (one brother, one sister, and the mother of the family in the USA, and one brother in Canada).



MCC arranged that for breakfast and dinner I eat what the family cooks, and I prepare lunch for myself. That has worked out well to give me some variety in my food, but also community with the family. I usually spend my evenings at home watching TV, reading, or preparing my lessons, but I also sometimes go to cafes or other places around Nazret with one of the family. On weekends I hang around the house with the family, go out around Nazret, or go to Addis Ababa and spend time with the other MCCers. When I am in Nazret on Sundays I attend the local Meserete Kristos Church (a member of the Mennonite World Conference) which is translated for me by a wonderful church elder who worked with the early Mennonites here and studied in America. I generally have found it difficult to find ways of getting to know people, particularly people with whom it is easy to communicate, in Nazret, but I have made a few friends outside my host family.





So, those are the basics of my life here. As I reread it, it didn’t really seem to reveal much of my experience or do justice to the wonderful people I have gotten to know or the fascinating face in which I live. Hopefully, though, it gives you some sense of how I spend my days, and a bit of a framework for understanding my other (hopefully forthcoming) posts. I will try to do better.