Alex Little

It’s now been nearly 2 weeks since I had an evening staying in at home, so tonight I’ll attempt to do so, though the chances of someone ringing to go out for drinks and dinner remain high!

I taught English for the first time on Saturday. It was never my best subject and the only grammar I know comes form learning foreign languages. This wasn’t strictly English teaching, more conversation practice for the students at the agricultural college in Wukro, so I didn’t feel too unqualified. The practices sessions have been running for the last couple of weeks by other VSO volunteers, but this is the first time I’ve been able to go. I had a group of 13 17-20 year olds, and it was their first time coming to the practice sessions too.

At first I had no idea about their current level of English, and they were very shy to speak at all. So I started to ask about their families, saying that I had one brother and he was 32. I’d messed up slightly here, as most Ethiopian families are quite large, the conversations were along the lines of “I have 4 brothers and 5 sisters, one brother is 15, one brother is 31…” and so on. Half the lesson was gone before I knew it!

Their vocabulary was really good, but they hadn’t had much practice in constructing sentences, so in the second half of the lesson I did past/present/future. Their responses to their plans for the future were most interesting. One girl was going to be killing cows in the afternoon, several of the other girls wanted to be mechanics or pilots. I didn’t quite get why so many wanted to be pilots, although it may be because almost all wanted to live in Europe or US.

So after a bit of a shaky start it all seemed to go well. Towards the end they were noticably more confident in speaking out loud, although I didn’t manage to get them to understand when I asked them to work in pairs, practicing their sentences to each other. I think this comes from the fact that it’s not the way they’ve ever been asked to work before.

I have now seen my first Christmas tree of the year – one of the supermarkets in town had a 2′ plastic tree with flashing lights and decorations, though still not quite enough to get me ‘into the spirit’! At the main outdoor market, I eventually managed to find all the ingredients for making gluhwein. Cloves were a little tricky to track down, only 2 stalls seemed to have any at all, and thn only about and eggcup full each.

Slightly disappointingly, there will be no turkey for us this year – well, there were 2 left at Wukro, but obviously if we take one or both of these, the chances of any turkeys in the future will be greatly reduced! So we’ll have to make do with a sheep or two for Christmas dinner. Numbers for dinner now stand at around 25, so not sure there’s any room for gatecrashers but we could probably squeeze them in if they bring their own plates and cutlery!