Opinions

Somaliland: Working in Somaliland Part 8

December 18, 2011   ·   2532818 Commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fsomalilandpress.com%2Fsomaliland-working-in-somaliland-part-8-25328Somaliland%3A+Working+in+Somaliland+Part+82011-12-18+23%3A10%3A28Mo+Guledhttp%3A%2F%2Fsomalilandpress.com%2F%3Fp%3D25328

Iain will be writing to Somalilandpress about his experience in Somaliland and will be offering tips to anyone who may want to visit the unrecognized republic along the way. Discover Somaliland with Iain.

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Sorry I haven’t written in a while. Things have been chaotic over the last few weeks with mid-term exams and student projects starting to take shape. Another of my projects, University of Hargeisa Men’s Volleyball Club, got off the ground too with the women’s equivalent due to start this week. With the museum work starting too I’ve barely had time to think!

Our museum project has got off the ground as well with the first pieces for the information boards being written although chronology went straight out of the window as we focused on the Adal Sultanate and Ahmad Ibn Ibrihim al-Ghazi. Maybe I’ll post a few online in future but for now I haven’t run out of things to talk about in Hargeisa. E-mail responses to our plea were very low but as this is an ongoing project which will probably stretch until July next year there’s plenty of time to get involved!

Volleyball isn’t a particularly popular sport out here. It isn’t even a popular sport in my country. Then I found out a couple of my students used to play it so we decided to trial a session. Our only problem, we had no court. However, the University of Hargeisa does have a rather fine Basketball court, the width of which is almost equivalent to the length of a standard volleyball court. In the end we were only 1 metre short on each side which doesn’t make too much of a difference. The second problem was posts. The basketball net provided us with one but the second one required some ingenuity with a three metre long piece of wood, a milk can and a pile of rocks. It wavered in the wind and fell down several times during the game.

“Teacher, I can fix it.” One of the students told me as he whistled harshly. A young boy whose parents work at the University appeared and the students told him to stand there and hold the pole upright for us. He stood there for ninety minutes in the sunlight as we played. I resolved to fix this problem and with some rope and two enormous rocks we had created a perfect volleyball net. I am curious to see how many girls are going to turn up for the women’s club on Tuesday but hopefully they are interested in playing. My role, unfortunately, will be limited to putting up the net and ten minutes of coaching before I leave them in the care of a female teacher and sit the game out.

I put my students through their mid-terms and I noticed a remarkable trend in the marks. Those who attended all of my classes and did their homework were getting excellent marks. Those who turned up to the exam but barely registered an interest in class did pretty badly. What a wonderful statistic, I thought, to show to the students next week! Except that the students who don’t show up won’t actually be there to notice the significance of not being there.

Even my students who achieved, what I felt to be, particularly good grades were disappointed in their grades. To me 70% is a remarkable achievement but I come from a system which aggressively forces you to improve at every opportunity and penalises you for being late, not taking in what you are being taught and any attempt at cheating. I think some of my students were getting 70% for the first time in their lives and not because it was a zenith. I can’t speak for the education system in the whole country but I have a feeling that I am the harshest grader that these students have ever come across.

As we sat down to talk about it I hope they understood that it was for their benefit. I want my students to be judged by East African, European, Western standards. If a student is given a full page to write a written response to a question they should fill the page. If they address the question but don’t punctuate or bother to write Somaliland (“sland” appears with alarming regularity…) they shouldn’t expect to do well. This grade nadir may feel like gravity dragging them out of a window and towards a painful death but if they aren’t challenged they will not improve. Certainly a lot of students don’t care for English or if they do they just want to practice, they don’t want to be challenged and have draconian rules placed before them but we are running a proper University and the students who get good marks on my courses can be seriously proud and compare themselves to their European and Asian counterparts.

I have an interesting first year class at the moment. (I can’t stand the American University terms so I don’t use them.) We are together for six hours a week and they would all pass the exam if they took it tomorrow. It leaves us with a lot of free time which I have to somehow fill creatively. Initially I was supposed to take them through the pre-intermediate syllabus but after meeting them for the first time I realised they were almost all at least upper-intermediate and begged to be able to give them that course, and we settled on intermediate. Now whilst they could all pass intermediate some would get 100% and others would struggle at around the 50 mark. That is a big divide to have in one class and it is an interesting professional challenge to try to overcome.

Our classes are split into two two-hour and two one-hour slots. We are ploughing through the course so fast that only one two hour slot needs to be assigned to that and even then we will probably move too quickly. I took a look through their homework and quiz grades and there are about ten students who would be the strongest in any other class but in this brood of Somaliland’s finest they are slightly behind.

I don’t want to term the class “remedial” so I called it a catch-up class where the students will have an intense hour a week in a smaller group and will, I have no doubt, make great strides. I am amused by how scared they are of being named in this class (which they will be on Tuesday this week) because most of them are so desperate for EXTRA class and always want to buy me tea in exchange for fifteen minutes of talking. But to be in the special class is stigma they don’t want.

The main weakness which can be addressed in a group of 45+ is writing. I chant my Somaliland mantra over and over again: paragraph, punctuate and perfect your capitalisation. If I can just get this into the head of fifty students I’d feel like I achieved something here. Some students are great at it but most forget to look at these things in the excitement of a quiz or the last minute rush of writing a piece of homework. As painful as it will be for me to have to grade the results we will be spending two hours a week doing some writing practice.

Then there are the girls. Their grades read 10, 10, 9, 10. I even had to invent the grade of 11/10 last week for three students who, after I trialled some advanced writing work we are creating for next semester, managed to complete it perfectly. The girls in this class are all of such a high standard it is overwhelming but only one of them ever speaks without being forced. I needed to find a way to get the girls to talk and I found that way this week when I invited students to stay behind and talk to me and only one guy did, the rest were girls. One day a week we have a quiz for the first thirty minutes of class, after that the guys are released and the girls have to speak English with me and each other. With six hours a week, we aren’t just going to get through the book. Every student is going to come out of my course much better at English than when they started it, as long as they turn up and are prepared to work for it.

The exam period gave us a bit of free time once we had ploughed through our marking so I gave my students a more casual lesson early this week. “Anyone who wants to stay and talk about their grade can. Anyway who wants two hours of conversation practice can stay, otherwise you can leave.” Three out of forty-seven students stayed in my first class. Five out of twenty in my second. It was nice to spend time speaking to young, educated Somalis instead of speaking at them which seems to happen more often than not as a teacher. I gave the students free reign to talk to me about anything they wanted, I said I would answer any question they asked and this always leads to the same question.

“Would you like to marry a Somali woman?” I understand that I’m not allowed. “No, you’re not a Muslim so you are not allowed.” Well how come that German guy everyone talks about was allowed to marry? I think he has ruined it for all foreign men. “Yes, teacher, but if you become a Muslim I think lots of girls will want to marry you.” Thanks. “Teacher, have you read the Qur’an?” No, but it is funny you should ask that.
I have a copy of the Qur’an on my desk. It’s in English of course and I brought it out from the U.K with my other piles of books. I set myself the challenge of reading 52 books in 2011 and am currently up to 54. Upon reaching my target I started to think about what I might try to do in 2012 which will most likely be spent entirely in Somaliland. My idea was that as it 2012 and there are 12 months in a year I would pick 12 challenges and that they should all have a Somali theme to them. So far I have, disappointingly been able to only find three challenges:
Read the Qur’an.

Drink camel milk. (Easy, I know but it is still something that I haven’t done.)
Climb Shimbris. (I don’t have a map to hand to remember the name but this is the anglicised name of Somaliland’s highest mountain which sits above Erigavo.)
I’m going to need some help thinking of the next nine and so, once more, I am appealing to the readers of Somalilandpress to help me out with this. There are only two things I am going to discount outright. I will not try Qat and I will not try to marry a Somali woman. I’m game for everything else, let me know what you think and I’ll pick the best and rise to the challenge.

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By Mo Guled

Tags: Education Links, Hargeisa, Iain, museum, Somaliland