A Volunteer English Teacher\'s Experience

Building Bridges – from the Diary of a Volunteer English Teacher
by Erzsebet Bekes

My Achuar student is quietly having his lunch. I don't sit and eat with him; deep in the jungle his mother would do the same: having served the food to the eldest son she would withdraw. In the morning we had English: we were practicing dialogues in a "customer complaint" situation. He might be applying for a part time job with the local telecommunications company which now intends to make a proud radio announcement saying that "Our customer care assistants speak English".

Olger came to live with me in Cuenca and is studying tourism. He belongs to the 6000-strong Achuar tribe whose communities live by the Ecuadorian side of the Pastaza River. In the past three years, I volunteered on three occasions with the Achuar to teach English both to the Achuar employees of an eco-hotel (called Kapawi Eco-Lodge) and at Tuna High School ("tuna" is the Achuar word for "waterfall") that is 15 minutes downriver from the hotel by motor boat. And by now our lives have inextricably intertwined.

Teaching English in the rain forest was not the first time I offered to volunteer. I taught undocumented Albanians and Syrian refugees in Crete and worked in Ethiopia for almost three years as an English Language Improvement Advisor sent out by the UK-based development agency, Voluntary Service Overseas.

I am Hungarian by birth and have been teaching English for more than forty years now. What have I learnt? Something that I am trying to pass on to my colleagues at the Catholic University of Cuenca, Ecuador where, beyond the normal teaching duties, I have been working on Continuous Professional Development, as well as the research and publishing programme of the Language Centre. The message is that whether we are native or non-native English speaker teachers, we are lifelong learners. That anything and everything can serve as teaching material and the "hemline" connecting the heart and the mind is one of the most powerful tools in any learning including the acquisition of a foreign or second language. The notion that emotionally charged information is imprinted in the brain more deeply than trivia has by now been borne out by neuroscience.

This is why I am often aiming for the 360 degree treatment. In Ethiopia, thanks to a co-volunteer, we had enough copies of Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner to start a Reading Club for English teachers. They read a chapter week by week, had a quiz on the content, made drawings that depicted the most tumultuous moments of Afghanistan's history and debated the issues brought up by the storyline including the extremely sensitive topic of male rape. In the second half of each session, we listened to Khaled Hosseini reading his own book on an audio CD. At the end of the semester, we watched the picture and argued about the merits of each genre: book vs. film adaptation.

Continuous Professional Development sounds like a mantra, but how do we put it into practice? At the Catholic University in Cuenca, we decided to make one step at a time. Staff members in the Language Centre are Ecuadorian whose first language is Spanish. After I was recruited, we had two options: either I learn to speak Spanish at a level that allows me to function in an academic environment, or staff switches to English when communicating with me or when I am present. Actually, both options are happening, but we decided to take it a step further: on Tuesdays and Thursdays staff members speak in English to each other as well.

We also agreed on turning the tables and taking the same exam that we set for our students for streaming. It was sobering to look at our results as well as discover some of the inconsistencies in the computer-based test. Over the past six months I have presented various other opportunities for CPD to my colleagues. There are about 5000 foreigners living permanently in Cuenca, most of them native speakers of (American or Canadian) English. Many of them are learning Spanish and are happy to offer informal conversation practice to anyone who is prepared to do the same in Spanish. Fabiano's Pizzeria is one of the places where such an "intercambio" (language exchange) takes place twice a week.

There are other opportunities to practice our English in Cuenca: there is a creative writing workshop (Writers in Transition – WIT) as well as an amateur theatre company that will present the documentary play entitled "Seven" in March both in English and Spanish. We have already arranged for the English language performance to be shown at the university in April.

My students have also been exposed to authentic language use. I invited speakers from the best known charities in Cuenca and we are in the process of setting up a club for students through which they will be able to practice their English in genuine language encounters. They will be distributing leaflets among foreigners who may be in need of visa or other services. The repetitive but authentic nature of the mini-dialogues that they might be involved in means that acquisition (and not just rote learning) may take place. As I'm writing this blog, some of my students are sitting in a minibus with several native speakers of English. They are on their way to an orphanage for disabled children and will spend a couple of hours speaking English with the foreign volunteers travelling with them.

I am working on creating opportunities for the inhabitants of distant worlds to get to know each other. When I worked in the jungle, I took tourists from the Lodge to meet my students at the high school. The visitors sat with the students and engaged with them on a one-on-one basis drawing maps, showing family photos, teaching the English words for colors and also learning how to say "thank you" in Achuar ("maketei").

Every now and then the issue of the hegemony of English as a global language is raised. I remember the day when I escorted two American tourists on a visit to an Achuar community. The head of the family that we visited asked us what brought us to the jungle. "I believe in education," I answered. "Your daughter is my student at the high school and your son is my boss at the Lodge. I would like to believe that helping them with their English will be useful whether they decide to stay deep in the Amazon or leave and make a life away from here."

One of the Achuar students, Olger decided that he wanted to leave. But not to make a life away from the jungle, but to return there and make life better for himself and his community by becoming the first Achuar guide who can speak not just Spanish but English, too. For six months now we have been learning the art of "peaceful coexistence". It hasn't been easy. Who could be further apart in age, gender and culture than a young Achuar male student and a sixty-odd-year-old Hungarian female English teacher?

But it is not the English language that connects us. It is the hemline.

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The "I am Achuar" Collaborative English Programme is looking for volunteers:
http://www.iamachuar.org/

Olger's education fund is run by the Condor Trust via BMyCharity:
http://www.bmycharity.com/olger


Erzsebet Bekes has been teaching English for more than 40 years. She worked for the Hungarian Section of the BBC World Service adapting and creating a wealth of language teaching audio materials. A passionate traveler and language learner/teacher, she volunteered in Ethiopia and, more recently, has worked with the indigenous Achuar in the Amazonian jungle. She now teaches at the Catholic University of Cuenca in Ecuador and is running her special project called "Educating Olger".


Olger Tentets during an Achuar cultural presentation



During class in the jungle





Olger is an excellent student and his English is improving




The team at the Language Centre, Catholic University, Cuenca, Ecuador