WEAI Undergraduate Training Grant Report: Vanuatu 2011

By Amin Ghadimi

When I say that it was my privilege to spend three months interning at the Rowhani School in Luganville, Vanuatu, on a Weatherhead Undergraduate Training Grant, I don't think it adequately conveys how lucky I feel to have had such a singularly exciting and educative opportunity. For I certainly learned a whole lot playing the role of "Mr. Amin."

For one thing, I learned what "Vanuatu" is; a joint French-British condominium known as the New Hebrides until independence in 1980, it stretches happily along a fault line between Fiji and New Caledonia in the South Pacific. There are about 250,000 Ni-Vanuatu who live throughout the archipelago today and claim theirs to be the happiest country in the world.

I also learned Bislama, the national lingua franca and a form of pidgin English. I learned that kill means hit; swim means bathe; good night means good evening; "solwora" means salt water, which actually means ocean; and yumi means you and me, which actually means we, exclusively as opposed to inclusively (that's mifala).

I learned, acting as the school librarian, that books have the power to transcend culture and nationality and bring joy to children. I learned that to be able to read is a fundamental human want and need, and that there are few sights as heartbreaking as that of child who opens a book to read but can only look at the pictures. And I learned how a small book drive or book donation can transform the lives of scores of children.

I learned, acting as a staff resource person, that third graders can't easily be convinced that "goodly," while a legitimate English word, is not the adverbial form of "good," no matter how much they insist that it is. I learned how access to computers and the Internet can revolutionize pedagogy. And I learned that government-mandated curricula are only useful insofar as teachers have the resources to bring them alive—that it is the teacher and not the text who transforms the lives of her students.

I learned, acting as a Year 9 and 10 mathematics teacher, that negative numbers aren't easy to explain to someone unfamiliar with credits and debits or temperatures below zero.

I learned that some students refuse to believe that 3x plus 4y is not equal to 7xy. And I learned that teaching is really about people and life, even when it seems to be just about factorization and linear equations.

There are, of course, some things I didn't learn. I didn't learn how to warm up to the chill of daily cold showers. I didn't learn how kindergarteners could distinguish between so many different plant species with just one glance. And I didn't learn how to cook flying fox, though to be fair, I never really asked either.

But what I did learn will make me return to Columbia for my senior year as a different student and a different person. I learned from 250 students with so few material resources and so much appreciation of them just what it means to come to school every day with joy and excitement, what it means to have a thirst of knowledge, and what it means to learn, and to love to learn.

And throughout the process, I was afforded another evidence of just how dedicated the Weatherhead East Asian Institute is to the education of its students. Vanuatu is on the fringes of the definition of East Asia, but Weatherhead nevertheless found in my internship opportunity a worthy undergraduate experience, and it sent me to Vanuatu. For that, I am infinitely grateful.

Amin Ghadimi is a Senior EALAC major at Columbia College.

Posted 9/12/2011