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Published: July 20th 2009
Alems'hai & Jael
The big, er, zero one birthdayThe last 3 days in Ethiopia before travelling back to Europe for Sara's sister's wedding were pretty horrendous. In fact the final week in Assosa was, well, challenging...
Sara, Lesley and I had been asked - as native English speakers - to prepare and deliver an oral and written exam for the 100-odd applicants from Beneshangul-Gunmuz who had applied to become a University Lecturer. The Federal Ministry of Education were taking on the batch of new lecturers for 2009-10 and although there is no university in this region, people living here can apply to work at a University in another region.
The criteria for successful application was a mixture of average grade score when the applicant attended University, the endorsement of his current employer (I say "his" because there were no women amongst the 100 applicants!) and an assessment of their ability in English language.
Typically any recruitment for a government job does not (rather strangely) include any interview. People are selected by CV, experience and sometimes a quiz or test. Although many other factors influence whether you actually get the job - including party membership and ethnic background.
My old boss came
in one day and said he was off to Addis for a new job. He had applied by CV, been accepted and told to report for duty in 10 days time! Not even a sniff of an interview.
Your CV and accompanying certificates are key - which probably explains people's obsession with mine when I first arrived ("are your qualifications genuine?", "we have never had people with those qualifications working here before").
Anyhow, Sara and Lesley had been told on the Monday of the week before we travelled home to England, that they had 3 days to prepare a 15 minute oral exam and a 3 hour written exam for all the applicants. We would each share the job of the verbal exams, invigilation and paper marking.
On the Friday and Saturday we would do the oral exams, then Monday morning was reserved for the written exam, Monday afternoon for the mop-up verbal exams and then we flew to Addis on Tuesday.
Once in Addis we would Birthday spread
Special veggie feast ahoy! have 57 exam papers to mark in the 2 days before the Friday when we flew to England!!!
Talk about doing things at the last minute...though that is the way things often work here ("Can you just prepare this proposal? -
For when? - Oh, tomorrow morning...!!
Towers of Babel The oral exams were divided into 15 minutes sessions, where each of us, with a Regional Education Bureau buddy in tandem (to avoid accusations of impartiality), interviewed an applicant and scored their verbal English skills.
We had prepared some questions to be asked to the applicants, though we had to change these after lunch and again overnight, as word got round what the questions were and people were preparing mini-speeches knowing what to expect.
This caught a few applicants out. When they came in they hadn't prepared for a change in questions and so they just reeled off a mini-speech as though we had asked them one of the questions we had been asking earlier in the day!
You may ask why University Lecturers need to have written and verbal English skills?
Well, from some very early age - could be about 11
Some young guests...
in their Sunday best - lessons are supposed to be delivered to all students in English!
The logic being that most text books are in English, English is one of the global languages and a workforce with English skills is far more marketable in economic terms (think of Indian and South African call centres etc).
It also provides a common language among the 90 or so that are spoken across Ethiopia as a whole.
It's a great idea but unfortunately - and everyone knows this - the reality differs from the theory. The teachers themselves have very poor English skills, so the kids can't possibly learn in English. The same applies at University level. These applicants were supposed to be delivering lectures and preparing texts and exams in English.
As a result of teaching in English many kids can't understand a word of what is being taught, so understandably, the teachers revert to Amharic so the kids can actually learn something.
I don't know what the answer is but my opinion would lean towards getting kids educated in whatever language they understand first; and teach them decent English skills separately.
So tell me, why do you want to Proud Dad Matt
Reading a congratulatory telegram be a University Lecturer?
Now this would be a pretty standard question in an interview in the UK. OK, it's a bit cliched, but it gives the applicant an opportunity to explain what their motivations are.
For most of the people I interviewed it seemed that it was a 'hobby' or a 'dream' of theirs. A few actually said they wanted to help their country develop and progress by teaching the next generation of graduates (good lads!).
Apparently a couple in Lesley and Sara's batch openly admitted it was the money.
I asked Debebe, my counterpart, and he explained that this year the government had doubled lecturer's salary from about 2-3,000 birr/month to 5-6,000 birr/month ($200 to $400).
They are also only contracted to do 15 hours of lectures in a week, but would get overtime for doing extra hours.
And there was the chance to teach privately and earn extra money.
Plus the very long summer breaks - May to September.
And you only need to do it for a few years before you have enough civil service qualification time to go on to do a government-sponsored Masters or Doctorate -
Who's turn is it to make the coffee?
Must be yours - I made the popcorn ;) ideally abroad.
Hmm. OK. Sounds like nice work if you can get it. No wonder we had 100 applicants to assess.
Quality, not quantity So how did it go?
Well.
It's hard to be too judgemental when these people are trying to speak your language, but given very many struggled their way through the verbal exam, I would not expect much success at lecturing students.
Some were very articulate.
Some seemed very enthusiastic - money not withstanding - and had plans to further women's education, to improve and challenge themselves and to help move Ethiopia forward.
Clearly all of them spoke better English than I spoke Amharic, though I guess they had been learning English at school from an early age. In theory anyway.
Luckily for the majority, 65%!o(MISSING)f applicants had to pass, so even though the quality of English may not have been high, only the really bad would fail to be selected as lecturers.
But then the English exams were only 1/3 of the criteria and maybe they had good grade scores and had been 'recommended' by their employers.
It was difficult at times not to
h4ppY b1RThd4Y 2U
What is it about kids and mobile phones?? feel that I was affecting the future of some poor applicant, his family and his kids by my marking; which added an element of pressure to the whole process.
Random Encounters Fortunately some light relief was provided by the final section of the written exam.
Applicants were asked to write a page of fiction about a meeting with someone famous.
Now for some odd reason, quite a few wrote essays on a workshop they had attended where the Federal Minister of This-and-That had given a speech. Some also had been lucky enough to attend some function where the President of Ethiopia, Mr Meles, had been present.
This seemed a bit curious until Lesley pointed out (after the event) that it was the word "meeting" that had confused people. It had been taken literally to mean some kind of formal work-related meeting, rather than just an encounter between person A and person B!
But some of the applicants got the gist and we had a few good ones.
Sara shamed me when I admitted it but I quite enjoyed the three or four that involved beautiful strange women (it was pop-goddess Beyonce in at
least one encounter) eyeing up the author across a crowded room, before coming over to buy the lucky man a drink and offer him her telephone number! Scored points for imagination in my book 😉
One even advanced to a hotel room, though luckily the budding Jackie Collins ran out of steam (or time) before nature could take it's course...
I also later recalled that Danielle Steel is one of the most popular ferengi authors in Ethiopia - our friend Matthewos, an avid reader, hankers after her books as reading material. Agatha Cristie and The Diary of Anne Frank are also big over here, though I can't recall any whodunits amongst my examinees fantasies...)
We had a few meetings with Barak Obama.
The runner Haille Gebre-Selassie featured - including one author who went off into the forest to 'play' with Haille for an afternoon; until a hyena appeared and they ran for it, with your man Haille having a clear advantage over his new found friend there...reminds me of that gag - how does it go? You don't need to be able to run faster than a lion to survive; just able to run faster than
your mate 😊
The guy who met Cesc Fabregas - the Arsenal midfielder - scored extra points with me - though I had to revise my score for the sake of fairness. Manchester United's (well, Real Madrid's, ho-ho-ho) Ronaldo appeared - quite remarkably - like a modern day Mr Ben at the high school in Assosa a couple of times.
The best in terms of originality, interest and style was a guy who met the author Paul Cohelio in the Lime Tree Cafe in Addis Ababa on Bole Road. It was so realistic I thought he was recalling an actual meeting with the guy!
It was even more curious and coincidental as Sara was trying to memorize a passage of The Alchemist to read at her sister Ondine's wedding.
A couple of punters even mixed up their fantasies.
One guy was torn between the beautiful strange woman he met on a flight to Addis to hear Mr Meles speak at a meeting. The meeting was delayed by 3 days by which time his heroine had vanished. Oh well. You snooze, you lose.
Pleasing everyone all of the time Of course there were a
few complaints.
The main one was that the exam favoured those applicants who were English teachers.
Well knock me down with an ostrich feather, this was a test of applicant's English skills and quite understandably someone who teaches English for a living would be expected to do better!
No doubt had the exam been on physics, the English teachers might complain it favours those physics teachers amongst the applicants...doh!
There was a little groundswell of opinon from one quarter about the "unfairness", though I suspect this was down to (a) the favoured applicants from that particular quarter being tested on their ability, rather than ethnic group, CV, party membership and friendship with that quarter plus (b) the favoured applicants had not done very well.
The thought that we might have to revise the exam/redo it/change marks etc got me quite angry considering the work we had all put in, but fortunately sense prevailed and apart from some adjustment of the vocabulary marks that Lesley was forced to make, the final results stood (Sara and Lesley had already had to re-write the exam once as one of the officials had taken the paper home one night
Where there is cake
There is also a VSO Volunteer which could ultimately lead to accusations that the paper had been passed on secretly to certain candidates. Cheating is a massive and common problem here).
Cleared for take-off In between English exam chaos we managed to pack up our bags and put the house in storage before heading off to Addis from the recently (thank heavens) re-opened Assosa airport.
As predicted by Rose (now left for another, better job in Darfur, Sudan!) the ex-head of the local UNHCR - the two week closure had stretched out to four, but the planes were now enjoying the new tarmac experience, leading us to speculate that it will be only a matter of time before the first Boeing Dreamliner glides into Beneshangul-Gumuz International.
Not just yet though.
The usual little Fokker 50 buzzed in and out after a two hour delay and some shenanighans at check-in.
Although there is now a metal detector at the airport, we saw it - still in it's B&Q cardboard box - it was still a case of opening every bag and explaining the contents.
I ran into problems with my half-gutted Panasonic Toughbook laptop - the screen of which I
The hat fits
oops! Mind those balloons... had removed to replace a damaged screen on my replacement laptop. Now all electrical items have to be turned on, er, how do you turn on a laptop with no screen?
After much to-ing and fro-ing and deference to the head honcho, I convinced them the empty laptop chasis was not dangerous.
Next up. The bottle of arakey - the local gin brew - which I was taking back to my hairdresser buddies back in the UK (yes, yes, I go there for the chat these days - they don't even bother asking me what haircut I want anymore 😊
Now nobody could understand WHY a ferengi would take a bottle of local gin brew in an empty tomato ketchup bottle back to the UK? Surely there are better drinks to be had in the UK than Ethiopian grog? I shrugged and handed it over.
After 15 minutes the head man came out and returned it to me. It had been passed around, opened, sniffed, tasted and discussed, and I was allowed to take it with me - but in the hold bags only, of course.
Sara was temporarily relieved to see that the usual
Abu
My little buddy from football boob-squeezing lady was not on duty but her replacement was equally curious about the women things she had - particularly the mooncup. How do you explain a mooncup with gestures and a sprinkling of Amharic??
Gents - dont worry, you can live your life completely oblivious to what a mooncup is - so just to get you up to speed, its a little plastic thingy that is used, er, um...oh hell, just go ahead and Google it yourself!
Birthday Interlude We interrupt this blog to bring you pictures of our friend Matthewos's daughter Jael's first birthday party!
Birthdays are big in Ethiopia but only for kids. Adults have often forgotten what day they were born and many don't even know which year!
As you are no doubt suffering from birthday picture withdrawal symptoms you can get a quick fix with these. Should tide you over until my third and final 40th birthday party in Bristol (crikey, I'll be 41 soon!).
Matthewos is the coach of the football club I help out with and he also has the thankless task of teaching us Amharic.
The birthday party was held in Matthewos and his wife
The Happy Family
Plus two well fed Ferengi! Alems'hai's house, which is part of a compound containing other 1 or 2 room dwellings. Traditionally everyone in the compound - as well as friends and family - will be invited.
(Christian Ethiopian names are often taken from the emotions of the parents at the arrival of the new baby. Alems'hai means 'the world is full of sunshine' which I think is beautiful. And I haven't even started on the arakey...)
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Firew
non-member comment
First let me take the chance to thank you for the goods work you (Al and Sara) have been doing there. I have been reading your posts from time to time. This post reminds me of the days when I was in high school, where at one point I decided to read 40 pages of some(any) English book a day until I moves up a level in my vocabulary power. I would prefer Sidney Sheldion like many other Ethiopians but everybody wants Sidney Sheldion's Book (I usually have to borrow books from some teacher or sth - the library condition is better left untouched). So I have to read Agatha Christie's "And then there were none". Oh, how I hated that book :-) The system were you would teach students in their own language and treat English only as one subject proved disastrous in Ethiopian case. Because the only way you will learn English is through the school and if we do it as a subject only, the level would drop (had dropped when tried- u might argue where would it go from the current level but it did) . In many European countries English as a subject only works and most people speak good English. The reason being they have the luxury of watching TV in English and have to interact with some foreigner in English (not necessarily Native speaker). But Ethiopia is different from most other countries. Because of our history, the level of integration to the rest of the world is very limited (even compared to other African countries). By history, I talking about the bad image (famine, etc- ), our stubbornness to change things - eg. our confusing calender (I will definitely get some stick for this from fellow Ethiopians :-) ), socialist era etc. The lack of interaction with native speakers of English in real life or through tv is the main problem. The only Tv channel we have is the boring ETV. Thanks for technology, now there are satellite dishes everywhere and there is marked difference already. The younger generation are much better. I have heard Ethiopian Telecommunication Co. (ETC) is going to charge an annual fee for using satellite dishes (ETC is shameless!!!!). The only way to learn a language (esp. when it comes to speaking skill) undoubtedly is through interaction. I bet the self appointed tourist guides in Bahir Dar (a tourist town in Northern Ethiopia) might speak better English than most people who went through the formal system. Excuse my blabbering, I will stop now. I wish all the best ! Firew P.S. I still feel ashamed about your friend that got stabbed. I hope he has recovered from it.