Working with others

Working with other people can be difficult. Working with people that are from a completely different culture than my own is proving to be even more challenging. I never liked group work in school and I’m not enjoying it now, but seeing as how I have a real job and I’d like to keep it, I don’t have much of a choice so I’m learning. I’m finally getting into a comfortable routine at my school and thinking of projects for the upcoming semester. I go to my school in the morning for about 3 hours. At lunch I walk home and then go back in the afternoon for a few more hours. I have my model classroom/office and with the director getting it painted last week I have started putting teaching materials on the wall with the purpose of showing teachers how they can use classrooms to their advantage when teaching.

Just when I thought I was getting the hang of things however, problems arose. Twice this week I found myself having to take a step back, take a deep breath and relax. On two separate occasions involving different projects I met with teachers and found that we had completely opposing ideas. The education system in Ethiopia is completely different than in America. I’m not saying that the education system in America is the best. I know we have many issues that need to be worked on. But education here, the way teachers go about teaching and the way they approach their students is very new to me. I have to remind myself that things that seem very normal to me are often not the norm here. And of course this goes the other way around. Many common practices in Ethiopia are completely foreign to me. Trying to explain my point of view is difficult because the education culture that I know and understand and the Ethiopian education culture are completely different. Explaining my thoughts to my teachers is even more difficult because of the language barrier. When I’m explaining something and I can tell that my fellow teachers do not understand I get frustrated and that’s when I have to tell myself to breathe and take a step back. Half the time I know my teachers and the administrative staff have no idea what I’m saying and what’s worse, instead of telling me they don’t understand I’ve found that at times they just don’t listen and pretend that they are by nodding their heads.

I have to find different approaches in reaching out to my teachers when I want to introduce new ideas and show them a different way to do things, because I am still new here. And not only am I new, but I am also a foreigner making me even more of an outsider. I don’t want to start off on the wrong foot so I can’t just tell them directly that I think they need to change something or tell them why something they have been doing for a long time is not working because that’s just going to make working with them in the future even more difficult. So I’m learning to be creative and patient when I talk to colleagues. At times it gets hard, as this last week has proven.