Many of you will remember that we did a small pilot this spring where a half-dozen English language “mentors” from our club met online with college-age English language learners in Ethiopia. The goal is to help them improve their English (which is a high priority in their country to advance their education and gain employment after university). Our Global Traveler mentors also had the rewarding opportunity to learn about Ethiopian culture and practices. A win-win all around.
You can read more about the background of our English Express program here.
We learned a lot from our pilot, including the often significant challenges of internet connectivity in Ethiopia. Now we’re ready to launch a larger scale program when school resumes in Ethiopia in October. We will run phase one of English Express during the months of October, November, December, and January.
Because of the challenges with internet connectivity, we’ve decided to schedule the mentor meetings at a specific time when the students will be at school, available, and able to connect. The meetings will be on Saturday at 8:30 am central US time (which means late afternoon for the students in Ethiopia). We will not meet on US or Ethiopian holidays (e.g. Thanksgiving and Christmas). We’ll publish a complete schedule of dates when the program starts.
We’re asking people who are interested in being a mentor to fill out a simple application. Ethiopian participants will also fill out an application. Our coordinators (Debbie Kornhauser for Global Travelers and Tom Crain in Ethiopia) will do their best to pair mentors with students who have similar interests to make conversation a little easier. We will also try to pair two mentors with a student so you can back each other up if one of you is unavailable.
You don’t need to be a teacher to participate. This is much more about conversation and connection than about teaching grammar. We’ll provide you some basic training and some materials to discuss. This is a golden opportunity for these students to talk to a “real English speaker.” They will be enthusiastic, delighted, patient, and maybe a bit shy at first. Our pilot participants really loved the opportunity.
We’ve heard from some of our associate members that their own home clubs might like to get involved with English Express. Tom Crain, our “man on the ground” in Ethiopia thinks that many, many students will jump at the chance to participate. We will give our Global Travelers a first shot at filling the mentor spots and then potentially open up to a few other Rotarians.
We’re very excited about this program and hope that it will become an ongoing opportunity for our members to serve these aspiring students on the other side of the world from wherever you might be.