Teaching English
21/8/2004

Picture a school room in a fairly open concrete block. Bare walls, a blackboard (sometimes with chalk) and old wooden school chairs and tables that scrape noisily on the concrete floor. The rooms echo terribly and noise from adjacent classrooms bounces freely between them.

40 students and one Aussie. No teacher in sight for a full 90 minutes. My Tetun was little more than “hello, how are you” and their English was not much better, but I was expected to hold the attention of the class and hopefully teach them something.

I used up all my Tetun in about three seconds flat. “From now on,” I said in English, “this class is going to be in English.”

Several worried looks came to me across the classroom. What the hell was I going to talk about for 90 minutes? I had an idea. Teach them to ask questions.

The first questions asked were my age, marital status and if I had a boyfriend - so language is no barrier to curiosity. Several of the students also leapt on the advice that they should practice their English whenever they had the chance and turned up at Rama’s front porch a few days later, wanting to talk.

The thing that particularly struck me about the Timorese I met was a thirst for knowledge of all kinds, and particularly the determination and desire to learn languages.

Language in East Timor is plentiful and contentious. Everyone speaks their local lingua and almost everyone understands the “national language” Tetun, which is being developed using local languages, Portugese and Bahasa Indonesian. Being under Indonesian influence for so long, most people speak Bahasa. School is still mostly taught in Bahasa because Tetun is too simple a language. But Primary School is now being taught in Portugese and all Timor’s legislation is being written in Portugese. A language favoured by the politicians who grew up under Portugese rule.

Finally, there’s English. Among the international community, English is probably most widely used because it is the most widely understood. And the Timorese want to learn English because they believe it will be important for education and trade.

I taught English to Rama’s colleagues at the community centre and also, unexpectedly, to a few classes in the Senior High School.

A local teacher we became friends with, Alberto, thought it would be a great idea to have the Aussies in to speak to his classes. Rama and I thought this would be a kind of show-and-tell. We’d perform for five or ten minutes and retreat while Alberto continued the rest of his class.

This was obviously not what he had in mind.