"I Am A Student."

I’m sure there was more than one language school in Addis Abeba, but the one that we (and every foreigner we knew) attended was operated by SIM, the same mission organization that hosted us at their guest house during our first weeks in the country.

Fun fact #1: back in the olden days, circa 1893, SIM stood for “Sudan Interior Mission.” Sudan was on the global radar at the time because British colonialism had recently come into dramatic conflict with the notorious Muhammad Ahmad (aka The Mahdi) and his jihad against the Turks and Egyptians who governed the Sudan at the behest of their colonialist cronies. SIM was established by two Canadians and an American who “had a vision to evangelize the 60 million unreached people of sub-Saharan Africa” (according to their website; the American and one of the Canadians died of dysentery in 1894). By the 1980s SIM had joined up with missions organizations on other continents, so SIM stood for “Society of International Ministries,” and that was how we knew the organization. Nowadays, apparently, SIM doesn’t stand for anything but their slogan is “Serving In Missions.” So.

Fun fact #2: when we were first planning to go overseas, we met with some people who were recruiting us to work at SIM's Rift Valley Academy in Kenya, a boarding school for missionary kids from all over Africa. But I digress.

My point is that SIM had been in Ethiopia for a while, and had turned a lot of non-Amharic speakers into Amharic speakers via their language school, so they knew what they were doing. I mentioned last time that we spent the first week learning the fidel, the collection of characters that are used to write Amharic words. We also spent that time getting to know the instructors and our fellow students. Our cohort, which started classes at the beginning of June, had only four students: the two of us, our friend and co-worker Joy, and a woman named Yvonne who worked for SIM as a nurse instructor. There was also a senior class, students who had started language school in January – I am sorry to say that I honestly have no recollection of who was in that class – they would have been long-term missionaries who were in Addis to learn Amharic before being settled out in the countryside.

In my defense, part of the reason we didn’t know the senior students well was that we had very limited interaction with them even within the school environment. Each day started with the whole school, maybe 25 students and staff in total, together for a short devotional led by one of the language tutors. Then the seniors had a grammar lesson while the juniors met with the language tutors for about an hour; there was a communal tea time; then the juniors had a grammar lesson while the seniors met with tutors.

The language tutors were young, engaging, extremely patient native Amharic speakers who conversed with us, coached us, and encouraged our language development every day. I can’t quite recall how we were matched up – there were more tutors than there were junior students – but we usually had a different tutor from day to day, and even though our skills were lacking we learned a ton about Ethiopian culture from our daily interaction with them.

Here’s a photo of the junior class and most of the tutors from the summer of 1995. Back row is Zemenay, Gennet, Joy, Mulat, Almaz, and Sara, the tutor who was in charge of the school for that summer session. Front row is J, myself, Solomon, Yosef, Yvonne, and the housekeeper.

I cannot imagine how many times these lovely people had to help a student learn to spell her name or count to ten or say, “I am a student” but they were so gracious and good-humored toward us. Amharic is a difficult language to learn and we never got very good at it, but we have very fond memories of our time in language school.