I’d been looking for opportunities to teach art to young people since I earned my MFA in 2010. So when Rabbi Sybil Sheridan (co-leader of the 2017 Ethiopia group tour) asked me if I’d be willing to return to Gondar, to introduce its Jewish youngsters to some creative activities, I said “yes” in a heartbeat. Sybil is a London-based Reform rabbi, and co-founder (with Hila Bram) of Meketa, a British charity that supports the Jewish community in Gondar through nutrition, social services, and an After School Club that offers classes in English, Math, Ivrit (modern Hebrew) that supplement their official government schooling.

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After booking my air tickets and lodging, I started to wonder what I’d let myself in for.

This second trip would be significantly different from the previous one, when we’d traveled from monastery to monastery, museum to museum, monument to monument, viewing the country and its denizens through the windows of a tall tour bus. We’d had limited exposure to daily life at ground level—besides affecting encounters with the lame and the maimed in the grounds of St Mary of Zion, Axum (where the Ark of the Covenant is said to be stored), and the child peddlers who besieged us outside the former Jewish village of Wolleka).

This time I’d be going on my own, hoping to be met by a young man called Gech Tekeba, the head teacher of the After School Club whom I’d met briefly on the 2017 tour. With days to go before setting off on the 21-hour journey from Santa Fe, he still hadn’t responded to my introductory email. Don’t worry, says Rabbi Sybil, they take their time…the Internet’s erratic there. (As would prove to be the case, when the Internet was shut down across the entire country, for days at a time, to prevent cheating on the national high school exams.)

How would I get local currency, since Birr aren’t allowed in or out of the country? How would I stay in communication locally or abroad, since Ethiopia isn’t on my phone carrier’s international discount plan? (Answer: via WhatsApp) As a white female traveling solo, I am concerned about whether it’ll be safe to hire a Bajaj—the local equivalent of a Tuk-Tuk—to go places by myself, especially at night. I still didn’t know how many students I’d be teaching, how often, or for how long — though I’ve bought enough craft and art supplies to fill a 50 lb suitcase.

• • •

Two days before departure, on a Skype call to Sybil and Hila in England, I’m told there might be as many as 200 kids to teach (yikes!) in six classes a day, from 8 am till 5 pm—Grades 3 and 4 in the morning, then Grades 5 and 6 in the afternoon. This timeframe rotates to dovetail with their “official” school schedule, which shifts, week by week, from am to pm. Ethiopian children attend government school for half of each week day, so they can work with their families the other half of the day—or come to this Club where they take classes taught by Gech and three other regular (and devoted) teachers, Adena, Sabela and Eschetu.

I think back to the Design Camp for Teens that I’d run—with a fantastic support team of guest instructors and assistants—at the University of Minnesota Design Institute, each summer from 2002-2007. By comparison, this new venture seems frankly nuts. I’ll be teaching dozens of kids, by myself, in a foreign language of which I can speak exactly one word (Amaseugenalu = Thank You) and without the largesse of Target Corporation (which supported the DI’s Design Camp) to subsidize the program. I’ll be creating the curriculum on-the-fly, while teaching it, from whatever I can Rabbit-out-of-a-Hat from my supplies-stuffed suitcase.

Clearly, I’m going to be in over my head…

+ + +

I’ve now landed safely in Gondar, all three checked bags successfully retrieved. One is stuffed with Day Packs for Girls, cloth menstrual pads that will save them from skipping school when they have their periods; another is overloaded with an ancient laptop I’m conveying from a fellow 2017 tour group member to the teenager, Ermias, who showed us round the Gondar Jewish cemetery on that trip.

Each day, my trusty Bajaj driver, Gizat, picks me up at my hotel and drives me 15 minutes across the city to a new, impoverished neighborhood called Upturned Porridge Bowl (or so I’d been told by Meketa) after a local prominence.

Exiting the Bajaj, I’m mobbed by kids shouting Boker Tov! (Good Morning in Ivrit, modern Hebrew). I climb up over a mud moat — the street is gravel, being prepared for cobblestones to be set—and push through a corrugated metal doorway into the courtyard of a former residential compound, large enough for a dozen kids to dance in, holding hands and singing in a circle, which they will do frequently during break times.

There are three small classrooms—each a former family home—with mud floors, bright-colored plastic lawn chairs, and few low plastic-topped metal benches for desks, which the kids hunch over to do their work. Some daylight peers in when the metal shutters are open; there’s a single electric light bulb in one classroom, never switched on. No running water, just what can be brought in yellow plastic jerrycans. As for storage: textbooks lie in messy heaps on two shelves of a cabinet in the ‘staff room’ (the one real item of office furniture); below them are two lockable cabinets — the size of car glove-boxes — to store the art supplies I’ve brought with.

This dingy ‘staff room’—the fourth doorway off the courtyard—is actually where the guard takes extended naps on a makeshift bed made of tree trunks and woven plastic sheeting, when he isn’t walloping the kids with a piece of plastic piping — earning my loud rebukes in English, as if that will do anything to dissuade him.

So, what to do?

First: find out their names, and try to learn them.

On instinct, I’d purchased packets of “Hello My Name Is” sticky labels at Office Depot. I ask the children to write their names on them, in Amharic, English, and Ivrit. Then I pierce the labels’ corners with a retractable knife and create lanyards from a spool of white ribbon that happens to be in the cupboard. This exercise occupies the entire first day of six classes. Worke, Bamelak, Mastewal, Hymenot, Samuai, Abenu, Endeshaw, Setegn, Abebe, Eseye, Emoye, Ybeltl. Their names have unfamiliar sounds and rhythms (peals of laughter at my hapless attempts to pronounce them) and, to a foreigner, are of indeterminate gender. Of course, the name labels last about three days: the ribbons tear off the paper, despite my bandaging with sticky tape. While lessons are going on in the three classrooms, I find some tiny kids in the courtyard (too young to attend the actual classes) trading the sticky surrounding edges from the label sheets with each other…

And so I improvise. Show the children how to fold craft-paper accordions, then cut out random shapes from one edge and see what they get…(the Dollar Store scissors are working out fine). Then we make collages with the offcuts of colored paper. Toddlers, too young for the classes but hanging around the Club nonetheless, gather the discarded rims of the name labels and this colored-paper confetti, and barter them with other tiny ragamuffins in the courtyard. For another day’s project, I get the kids to draw themselves as a Superhero; we move on to make Superhero masks, and Superhero breastplates of their own initial, all fashioned out of craft paper (which is rapidly running out). We make bird sculptures out of aluminum foil — three rolls suffice for three classes, 30 kids. I catch kids stripping the serrated metal edges off the foil boxes, to keep for themselves — and intervene lest they turn them into lethal weapons…

I invent projects that can be done by kids for whom merely handling scissors is a challenge: they hold them like a baby bird’s open beak, nibbling tiny distances. I crouch down on the mud floor to show how widening the blades will lengthen each snip, or set the crux of the blades where they should begin to cut. Inevitably I haven’t brought enough of anything to last more than a day’s worth of classes.

Gech—by now my indispensable right-hand, translator from English to Amharic and back again—takes me to downtown to buy some plain paper drawing pads at the Gondar stationery store. At the Club, the children stand in line, thrilled to be given one of their own — on which to sketch and do their class exercises. They plead for single sheets of office paper outside class; one by one, they sidle into the staff room, seeing me crouched besides the storage cupboards, and beseech me for a “Parker” — once a well-known (vintage) British brand of fountain pen, it has apparently become the generic term for a writing implement.

I sketch ideas for class exercises over dinner at my hotel; wake in the middle of the night from vivid dreams of possible projects; eat breakfast still fretful that I still have no “lesson plan” firmly in place, or not enough supplies to repeat it six times that day times 70 kids. I ride the Bajaj with Plans A, B and C swirling in my head.

Then—with paper and scissors and glue sticks and craft paper— I live-demo projects I haven’t tried until that moment, at least not since I was a child myself. I draw in marker-pen on the white-boards, while Gech does instantaneous translation, sentence by sentence—the kids’ eyes visibly widen as he communicates my instructions. Frequently, I leave the classroom and cross the courtyard, ostensibly to collect more materials or tools, but really just to buy time, pause on the threshold of the staff room, and say out loud to myself: “I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING.”

And then I return — my apron pockets refilled with glitter glue, protractors, pencil sharpeners, oil pastels — and continue where I left off, moving round the benches, gesturing the kids to turn their chairs towards the available light so they aren’t working in their own shadows, and lavishing “konjo” (“great”) in Amharic — on whatever they’ve accomplished.

It’s amazing what can be conveyed using facial expressions, pointing, a hug, and what Gech calls my “enthusiasm.” But really it’s his kindness, always-upbeat mood, excellent English (spoken and written, with beautiful handwriting) and solicitous companionship that make the whole thing possible. And the support of the three other regular teachers at the Club.

I take individual and group photos during and after almost every class, trying not to ruin the lens with the flour glue we mixed to make papier-mâché balloons. The kids are amazing at arranging themselves into collective compositions, limbs and hands gesturing in dynamic group portraits.

I’m learning as much, if not more, than they are — about how to modify a class mid-stream if it doesn’t ‘take off’ with a particular group of students, how to improvise and abandon one direction when another seems more promising or within their range of potential, how to add an unplanned exercise. I notice that all their human figures have fish-sticks for fingers, so I press “pause” on the assignment to draw a family portrait, and get them to draw round each others’ hands on sheets of paper laid flat on the ground, so they can learn the real shape of a hand, its finger versus thumb positions.

A project catches light in one class; the next group struggles to accomplish half of what their peers have done in the previous 45 minutes; same Grade, different gender mix. By the end of each session, the floor is awash in the residue of whatever they’ve been working in — paper, cardboard, felt pen lids, aluminum foil.

When the floors and walls are mud and dust, why give a damn what else gets mingled with it? Dirt is a Western concept, I tell myself; get used to it. It’s a Sisyphean task to keep the classrooms tidy. Without being asked, one or two kids wield brooms—yielding clouds of dust but some semblance of tabula rasa to start the next day.

Please don’t ask me about the Club’s latrine (a hole in a concrete floor, in a corrugated metal ‘hut’ in the courtyard)—I manage to avoid using it for two weeks, till the inevitable stomach bug gives me no option.

At the end of each 13 hour day, I get back to my hotel room, and lie supine on its tiled floor for half an hour in silence, decompressing from the shouting, filth, energy, voices, shoving, grabbing, beseeching, smiling, and close-calls with scissors and retractable knives taken out of toddlers’ clutches at the last moment.

Two packs of National Geographic flash cards — one animal per letter of the English alphabet — become my mainstay for several classes: the kids copy and draw animals in preparation for a Noah’s Ark mural which I hope we’ll have time to paint together on the walls surrounding the courtyard, featuring indigenous Ethiopian species. Currently, these walls are adorned with large cartoon characters, crudely painted by volunteer Israeli firefighters who visited earlier in the spring— a well-meaning but culturally-opaque trio of animals.

“Who is this?” Gech asks me of one of the creatures, the first afternoon he takes me to the Club. I do my best to explain the origins of Winnie the Pooh…and the Lion from the Jungle Book (I think) and Mickey Mouse. So there is still a corner of the world that hasn’t yet been Disneyfied…