By mashod93
Teaching at the Oromo center the past couple of weeks has posed some challenges for my fellow volunteer and I. We have been having a hard time dealing not only with the language barrier of the people of the Oromo region and us but also with the cultural differences. As we learned in our first week through our inter-cultural learning course, the western and eastern worlds hold very different values. Being from the west and leading a more monochronic lifestyle (very linear, valuing timeliness and order) than in the east, timeliness is something I am used to being able to depend on. The refugees at the Oromo center come from a very collectivist culture and lead a more polychronic lifestyle, which makes timeliness not a priority for them. While I try to respect our cultural differences and allow for everyday interferences in our schedule for the center, lateness is very frustrating when I already can only afford six hours a week. They are motivated students, but without work or families to keep them busy, I can imagine it is hard to pass up social time with friends. Being on time and making class a greater priority than football practice everyday is something the students and I are trying to work on.
This aside, the language classes themselves have been great and very rewarding. We have been working in the present tense so far: present continuous and present progressive. The greatest challenge in teaching with a huge language barrier is using terms to explain the actual lesson. For example, the term ‘present progressive’ proved to be very difficult to explain to a group with an extremely limited vocabulary and that has clearly never played charades before. We have established what the differences between verbs, nouns and adjectives are – although that is something we must review again each time we piece a sentence together. Besides memorizing the meanings to these words, pronunciation is the second greatest challenge. Many phonemes in English simply do not exist in many other languages, especially Semitic languages like those in Ethiopia. We often have to review P, B, V and F because those sound very similar to the students. These are all things that I was expecting and even hoping to have because the simple solution to these is REPETITION. The students’ vocabulary is getting much better with everyday practice and I am hopeful that we will soon start learning the past tense.
I think the biggest lesson I can take away from this teaching experience is importance of the principle of pragmatism. Having smaller or more feasible goals is really the only way to yield results. In the case of teaching at a refugee center: having simple, five minute exercises or plans that can easily be repeated, teaching useful vocabulary that is relevant to the students’ lives in order to help make them conversational and repeating everything will help to make for a successful volunteer experience. Being realistic also means not expecting everyone to do the homework let alone do it perfectly, but always encouraging this. It is especially challenging at the Oromo center because there is no concrete schedule guaranteeing that anyone will show up (at least 5 students always do) or that those who do show up are even near each other in level of proficiency. We get a very wide range of students each class varying from one conversation student to mostly illiterate students with very little spoke vocabulary. This creates difficulties as far as planning out lesson plans the week before and I find that we tend to wander when there is a more diverse group. Each class brings all the students closer in experience with the language, which helps.