In Addis Ababa as Teachers

Our Life in Addis Ababa

For the past four weeks we have been living in Addis Ababa and working as volunteers, teaching English at a high school that’s about a 25 minute walk from our home. 

Saying “our home” sounds a bit strange, but while we are here, that’s how we have come to feel, for the time being, about the house in which we are living and the surrounding neighborhood in which we spend most of our time.  

We have been living in the home of a middle-aged woman, Tenagne, and her 81 year old mother. They are gracious hosts and their home, probably a middle class house by Ethiopian standards, is clean and comfortable. Tenagne cooks all of our meals for us, a variety of Ethiopian dishes and more western cuisine, and we often have long conversations with her over dinner about world affairs, life in Ethiopia, and many other topics.

Our neighborhood is a mixture of very nice looking homes, largely hidden behind high walls and gates topped with rings of barbed wire; small, simple houses, often connected to a tiny store in front of the house and frequently constructed, in part, with corrugated metal; a few 2 to 5 story apartment buildings, with no elevator and very small, basic apartment units; and a few 5 to 12 story office buildings. A number of other office buildings are under construction, but the work on many of them has ceased due to a lack of money to complete the project.

The scaffolding, constructed of thin wooden poles, that's used on all building projects looks very unsafe. 

There also are a number of tiny stores, not much bigger than a large, walk-in closet, which sell just a few items and look and feel like they fit perfectly in an underdeveloped country, which Ethiopia is; and, there a number of small, outdoor “third world looking” cafes, where we frequently enjoy sitting in the late afternoon and having a cold beverage or a cup of coffee.

The "cafe" in this photo, with the yellow awning, is one where we often stop for something cold to drink on our way home from school. 

There is only one asphalt road in our neighborhood, which is a major artery.  All the other streets are dirt or cobblestone and, except along the asphalt road, there are no sidewalks. Vendors pushing carts of bananas on the street are a frequent sight.

The streets are shared by people, cars, cattle, donkeys and goats. On most streets, the people outnumber the livestock, but on one corner, a few blocks from our house, the goats frequently outnumber the people.  

Walking home from school one day down this cobblestone road, we had to pause and let the goats pass.

Another afternoon, just a couple of blocks from our house, we paused to let the donkeys pass.

There often are 40 or more goats nibbling weeds in the dirt, which people stop by to check out, purchase and drag home for their family’s dinner. One of our favorite outdoor cafes, where the waitress has gotten to know us and we enjoy stopping for a beer, is right next to the spot where the goats are being sold. It’s quite a sight to watch people choose one and then lead it back to their home for supper. 

As we walk to school each morning wearing our backpacks and carrying our lunch, we pass lots of people on their way to work and hundreds of students walking to various schools in the neighborhood, each child wearing the uniform of his or her school.  We suspect that at first the children and adults viewed us curiously, as one rarely sees a white person in our neighborhood, but after the first few days, as we became a daily part of each other’s life, it feels as if they just take us in stride. Many of the little kids, however, do seem to still get excited when they see us, often practicing the few words of English that they know. Sadly, we also pass many beggars on the street, both adults and children. The amount of dire poverty that we see here on a daily basis is very upsetting.  

The school where we’ve been teaching is a private school and the teachers and administrators have been exceedingly warm in welcoming us. The school is a 5 story building with no elevator. There are six sections of each grade, 9 through 12.

English is the language of instruction at the school, so the students’ comprehension of English by 9th and 10th  grade is quite good. (Nancy is teaching 9th grade and David 10th grade.) Most of the students need a lot of help, however, to improve how they speak and write in English. Often their pronunciation is not very good when they speak and their grammar, sentence structure, spelling, punctuation, etc. is really quite bad when they write. 

The school administrators have repeatedly told us how pleased they are to have native English speakers such as us work with the students, as their regular English teachers are Ethiopians, for whom English is their second language. The teachers themselves do not have the best command of English or the best arsenal of teaching techniques. They routinely step aside to let us teach the class, when we are scheduled to teach it, and they frequently sit in the back of the classroom to watch us. 

Working at Hillside Secondary School for the past four weeks has been a wonderful experience. The students have been a lot of fun to work with (despite the few who are noisy in class, as are teen-agers all over the world) and we believe that we’ve taught many of them how to speak and write English a bit better. There are about 35 students in each classroom. This is a classof 10th grade students.

All of the teachers and administrators that we’ve gotten to know and many of the students have expressed deep regret that we are here to teach for only four weeks, and as we complete these four weeks of volunteer teaching at Hillside, we too have very mixed feelings about leaving.   


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