By mashod93
As I am getting to know the students at the Oromo Center more, I am becoming more and more aware of their everyday lives (what they do and why). This considered when I think about what kind of vocab I should teach first in order for the conversations to be relevant to what they are doing. At first, everyone was new and there were never a guaranteed number of students that would show up each class, which made it hard to recognize any sort of pattern in each individual's lifestyle. I noticed they all play soccer every day at around the same time (timeliness is not hugely valued here culturally) and usually with the same people. It used to bother me that I did not know what each student did with his or her day and it bothered me that no one was conversational enough to explain what their lives were like to me. And that was the issue exactly. No one could communicate with me. And more importantly, they couldn't communicate with other refugees, even some from their own country.
When I had thought about why English was important for these refugees to learn, I thought more along the lines of it being such a universal language and how language makes people automatically more marketable for jobs and everyone having the right to an education. I am learning that in this case, it is truly the smaller things that matter.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is a UN agency that - at the request of the UN - protects and supports refugees in resettlement and integration into a third country. This agency is a great way for refugee centers to receive funding or connections to other refugee centers in order to build a community. Communication with the UNHCR is mandatory in order for refugee centers to get the proper funding and tools necessary to effectively progress through the education system in that country and/or enter into training and employment in that country. This huge flaw is only one of the main reasons that English is so vital. There is also the great need for refugees from varying countries to communicate with each other. The main population of refugees in Egypt is made up mostly of Sudanese and Ethiopian men and women, meaning they have no language in common. Learning a common language would enable them to communicate with each other hopefully effectively enough that they could fight for the basic rights that stateless people in Egypt (and everywhere else) deserve as humans.