Iain will be writing to Somalilandpress.com 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 from a Non-Somali perspective.“English is really hard.”
My students tell me from time to time. They have never tried to learn Somali! The usual example I pull up when they complain about English is that common protagonist; the cat! As far as I know we only have one word for a cat in English. It doesn’t matter if the cat is my cat, your cat or if the cat is piloting a spaceship to the moon. In Somali things are a lot more complicated. Cat is bisad. Tani waa bisad means this is a cat. That isn’t so hard right? So what happens when the ownership of the cat changes? My cat is bisaddayda, your cat is bisaddaada, if it is his cat then we have to say bisaddiisa. Ah, I see a pattern here the suffix is the pronoun. Except there are eight possible ways to conjugate the bloody things! Chair is kursi. My chair is kursigayaga.
My favourite thing about Somali is that they have an extra pronoun which we don’t have but could sure do with. They have split the first person plural into two. There is an inclusive and an exclusive ‘we’. We are going to the cinema…but you are not! Bissadeyala. Our cat…not yours! The downside is that a simple slip of the tongue and you might accidentally invite someone home with you. The letter X is different too; it sounds like a soft h. Xabxab is watermelon. Hhab-hhab.
The other thing I question my students about is the letter C. The Somali language doesn’t like the letter C. It is like an unwanted relative coming round for a celebration; he’s there but nobody mentions him. Cashar is a word I need a lot, it means lesson, but it isn’t pronounced like it sounds in English. The C is some sort of strange exhale that sounds more like breath than an utterance and so the word sounds like ashar. Caano is milk. The best way to say it is to sound like you are turning down an offer sarcastically. “Ahh, no!” The verb to drink is Cab. Anigu waxaan cabbaa shah means I am drinking tea. To the untrained ear it sounds like someone is talking about a love of Swedish pop music from the 1970s.
There are two different verbs for the English ‘have’. Leh determines ownership and Hay is more temporary. It is interesting to see which nouns work alongside which verb. In practice with my excellent Somali teacher Abdihakim I made the mistake of saying Anigu waxaan leeyahay xabxab. I have a watermelon. “You can’t say that! The watermelon isn’t permanent. You can say Anigu waxaan leeyahay xaas.” I have a wife. Is that permanent? Car? Lesson? Camel? Adigu waxaad haysaa lacag. You have money. I think I would keep hold of money for longer than I would hang on to a wife – but that’s just me!
I am slowly starting to acquire more and more of the Somali language. I have wavered a few times as to whether to continue my lessons beyond the first month but with two hours a week I am starting to be able to communicate with people I meet in town, on the bus and when my students need a lift I have them in stitches with my Somali. A storekeeper down at the market writes me down some useful sentences whenever he thinks of them and passes them to me when I go food shopping every week.
My students and I are ploughing through the syllabus and my two Upper Intermediate classes are ready for their mid-terms three weeks early. So much of the textbook is irrelevant or culturally insensitive that I find myself skipping over bits and pieces and generating my own lessons from experience. It is a constant worry that I am teaching them to pass their mid-terms and not actually teaching them English. Then someone will brighten my day, prove me wrong and tell me that something was exorbitant – a word I inadvertently taught in the first lesson because of a mental block surrounding the word extortionate. They may well be the only fifty people in the country who have the word exorbitant in their active vocabulary.
My first year class has finally started. I have the entire intake of Medical students. The future Doctors of a country are in my care. The first thing I noticed when I started teaching them was that they are all incredibly bright. They were far too good to be doing a Pre-Intermediate course. I managed to persuade the powers that be that we should study Intermediate instead this semester. (I had tried to get them to go for Upper-Intermediate but that would mean they ran out of courses by second year.) They are all so young, some are seventeen, and they are very attentive and hardworking. This might leave them once they become more accustomed to tertiary education but for now I am taking advantage of their eagerness to improve their English.
I have started to enjoy the Somali, some may say African pastime, of sitting in the shade with a cup of tea and talking. With the enlarged schedule and a bizarre decrease in our petrol money I am spending more time at work although with some large gaps in my timetable. A cup of tea costs $0.12 and some biscuits cost $0.10. It doesn’t take long for some of my students to come and sit with me when I sit under a tree reading. Last week my Advanced Writing students came and talked to me for two hours before they went to pray and I went to meet them in class. The course is going really well and they have started their essays. This is the only advanced writing course in the whole University and I have spent this afternoon (my day off…) writing a list of problems with the syllabus which need to be ironed out. I didn’t imagine I would be writing syllabi when I came out here.
But I am. I’ve written a list of suggestions for improvements in areas which I see as weak spots for my students. We will introduce an element of assessed public speaking into the English course next year. I also want to lengthen their academic essay from 1000 words to 2500. 1000 words really isn’t enough (this blog is currently at 1060 and counting…) Then there is the problem of what to do with the students when they pass Advanced Writing. It would be very easy to congratulate them for their essays and send them back to their faculties to continue their major subjects. In the grand scheme of things a 1000 word essay isn’t that impressive. I’ve spent today trying to work out how we can push and develop the best of them further.
Advanced Writing 2! It is a sequel worthy of being a Hollywood Blockbuster. If the students don’t keep learning and leaving their comfort zone then they won’t develop as English speakers. They will have to produce for me a 5000 word essay on a completely different topic from AW1. They will then have to present it to two teachers and an independent assessor and answer questions on their essay and the research. In addition to this they will have to submit an assessed curriculum vitae and a lengthy funding proposal for a fictional NGO. I am trying to couple English acquisition with life skills and personal development. This still needs the green light from the powers but Inshallah I can start running this course next semester.
The other course I am starting next year, again Inshallah, has the lovable acronym of SAIL – Somaliland and International Law. I’ve written a detailed syllabus for it and will present it to the Law Faculty this week. Every Somalilander can write for pages about why their country should be internationally recognised but the sad story is that no one understands the international legal principles behind this. I’ve designed a crash course through the murky waters of international law with a specific emphasis on Somaliland and other states which are either seeking recognition or have recently achieved it (think South Sudan, Western Sahara, Kosovo and Trans-Dniester.) It even has a tiny bit of the Law of the Sea and some relevance to piracy. I don’t fancy moving full time into lecturing in Law but one course would be interesting to run.
The other thing I am developing at the same time is a brief teacher training course for both the existing teachers at the University and any teachers who are currently studying other courses at UOH. There are teachers who have been teaching English since before I was born and are still working here but I am teaming up with an Ethiopian colleague who has been teaching for twenty-four years and we will put together two one hour training programs to help both the new International teachers and the more experienced local teachers to widen their knowledge and outlook on the world of teaching. We figure that a young European teacher and an older African teacher can put together a course which teaches everyone a little something. I will report back on how that, and the after course dinner which we hope to bill the University for will turn out. I’d love to write more but I have to go and work out whose cat is in our backyard making a lot of noise. Bisaddiisa? Bisadooda? Bisadeena?
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