on the subject of work ...

I work in the English Curriculum department. There are three Eitreans there, Solomon who’s in charge, Serebe and Mengesha. At the moment there’s Bethan, another vol who’s worked there for a year and leaves in six weeks. The Eritrean education curriculum is in the process of being completely overhauled, for all subjects, not just English, it’s a massive undertaking and part of the government’s commitment to making education a priority. English grades one to four, six and seven have been written although still in the process of passing through quality control and piloting. We’re working on grade five (age 9/10) at the moment, quite a slow process as other jobs (giving feedback on exams, course books) keep coming along to interrupt the process. In one sense I’m not sure about the sustainability of the job (sustainability is one of the VSO keystones, volunteers are not in a placement just to do a job, they are there to involve and help/teach Eritrean colleagues to such an extent that eventually they can move aside and are not needed any more.) But then I am helping to produce teaching resources which hopefully will benefit thousands of children over the next ten years, and these children will be the next generation of adults working for their country so …
Anyway my job mainly involves working with Word (in an often very frustrating and therefore vocal way), writing stories and trying to make the teaching exercise enjoyable and communicative. We write the Teachers Guides as well. These are very important here. We try to include as much help as we can for the teachers in terms of communicative methodology. At the moment elementary and junior school teachers may only have had less than a year of teacher training (if that) and often quite a low level of English. There are moves to improve this, the teacher training course at the training college has been rewritten, there are two volunteers working with the trainers at the teacher training college, and there are attempts to bring in a higher qualification with a longer training. The problem is that there is a huge shortage of teachers (there are two shifts at a lot of schools – morning and afternoon to accommodate all the children) and the temptation is to churn out the teachers as quickly as possible. It’s therefore important to include as much good teaching practice as possible in the teachers guides, even if only one in a hundred take it on board.

VSO is only allowed to work in the education sector in Eritrea. Phil is working with IT training within the Ministry of Education, there’s another Dutch volunteer, Saskia who’s working on setting up an educational database covering all the schools and there are two volunteers, Donnard and Fiona who work on the English language radio station. All the other vols here are working more directly with teachers and students. Some are teachers and the rest are Methodology Trainers working across a group of schools. These intrepid people are all working and living in villages and small towns across Eritrea, doing a great job, leading quite hard lives under very basic conditions. We Asmarinos are actually living a very comfortable life in comparison. We see other vols regularly as they come into Asmara either on work or relaxation at the weekend. There’s actually a café (Modka) close to the VSO office and the Ministry of Education where volunteers tend to meet up (over a capuccino and chocolate doughnut!) so it’s certainly not all work and no play I can assure you.

C