teaching English as a foreign language (efl) to ethiopian children of kindergarten age (2-6 years) and managing the kindergarten section of the school. planning effective lessons to facilitate the teaching of the language; designing teaching aids and teaching life skills; researching effective efl methods and the causes of failure in the learning of english, specifically among the target group, with a view to improving delivery methods; and organising and participating in cultural activities.

this is a description of my activities as a kg teacher in addis abeba ethiopia, copied and pasted from my resume (you can click on the resume link on my page to read more). pretty interesting, yeah? i think so. ooooo and how i loved that job. it was fun to hear the babies learning to speak english. they were just coming into their own grasp of the mother tongue, which was for most of them amarinya but could also be tigrinya and orominya and, for that matter, any one of the other seventy-odd languages that are spoken there. they constantly ran up to me blurting out things in their language not knowing or perhaps even caring that i hadn't yet quite gotten a hold on it.

they learnt fast and were very disciplined. even at the higher levels. it didn't feel like a lot of work to me even though at one point the director of the school came down on me hard because he thought they were not learning to speak english fast enough. maybe i wasn't working hard enough lol. but the children were having fun; they were playing with the language and in the language and the parents always impressed upon me how happy they were that their children were speaking english. or maybe what sounded like it to their untrained ears. only the mother tongue was ever spoken at home and that reminded me of the situation back home with most jamaican children and creole.

most preschoolers came to the kg without ever having heard one word of spoken english which was supposed to be the language of instruction. but it was the best time for them to come, and i repeat, they learnt fast. for sure. i had the daughter of haile gebre selassie the great ethiopian long distance runner in my kg class. parent teacher conferences were fun with him though it was mostly the mother who came.

i remember dagmawi, an overfed overgrown little boy in kg who also had a slight learning challenge. then there was aysanew, bright bubbly little one who caught on to everything super quick. i used to think he resembled the grandmother on the foska oats box in jamaica. and selam (peace) with her sister fikir (love) who was in the higher grade kg2. they both were the live representations of their souls and their names. and i remember dawit an extremely intelligent boy who always had his chin in hand whenever he was deep in thought or at work.

and melat i could never forget melat who had the broadest most amazingly bright smile you ever saw. then there was leroy the son of the director who was a beautiful metissage of ethiopian african american with ethiopian russian. that mix created a handsome sweet little boy who is sure to ravage the ladies' hearts later in life. that's what was especially touching for me with regards to ethiopian children: to me they represented the world, the future of the world in all its shapes colours sizes and races and all the possible mixes of the races.

it was only there you could go and see people with features like the austrailian aborigines but also ethiopian sudanese who were always a smooth cool evenly toned rich black, black in all its beauty, and then people with practically white arab type features. and all the blends in between. i guess that by now you can tell my perspective on the future and survival of our world home: oneness.

these are the beautiful pleasant warm children of ethiopia with their hearts of gold. they will always remain very close to my heart and in my thoughts. and always ever my children in ethiopia.

more peace. more love.

sekhetq