How I Get to School
From Thailand to Ethiopia to Korea...
By Seth Leighton
Bangkok, Thailand (2005-2006)
Praphamontree II Primary School
My alarm goes off at 5:30 a.m. I take a quick shower and put on my teacher’s uniform, which consists of a pair of baby blue pants and matching shirt with the school logo. The overall effect is startlingly pajama-like. I then grab a can of iced coffee and head down the stairs from my one-room apartment to the parking lot, where my trusty 150-cc Suzuki Smash (yes, its real name) motorbike awaits.
I’m up early to try and beat the notorious Bangkok traffic, and it looks like I’ve just made it—the line to the traffic light is only a few hundred meters long. I maneuver my bike around the stopped cars and trucks, occasionally pushing a side mirror down, until I reach the mass of fellow nimble bikers at the front. Bangkok traffic really is unlike anywhere else, as the number of cars surpasses both New York and Tokyo and there’s the added challenge of motorbikes on all sides.
I pull into the school at 6:30, already feeling the beginnings of the Thai heat. Parents are dropping off their children, and I spend some time opening doors and helping kids with backpacks. This school, like many in Thailand, uses its foreign staffers, or farang, as advertisements for prospective students, and opening car doors is part of my general duties.
My first class of the day is with an extraordinary group of 20 sixth-graders. When you don’t speak their language fluently, it can be a real challenge to control and teach younger children. Thanks to a year with a host family, I’m fortunate enough to have a decent level of Thai, but I have seen many colleagues driven crazy by chattering students. This class, however, is respectful and eager to learn, and I’m always excited to have them to start off my day. After a warm-up exercise to increase my students’ energy and focus, we launch into a lesson about modals of obligation (should, must, etc). They work happily, and when I give them their in-class assignment, most finish just ahead of time and get started on their homework. I pack up for my next class, thankful as always for the air-conditioning.
Gondar, Ethiopia (2007-2008)
University of Gondar
My alarm goes off at 5:35 a.m., and I scramble out of bed. Unlike Thailand, there’s no traffic getting me up this early. Instead, I have to boil water for coffee before 6:00, at which time the power is cut for the day. Ethiopia is dependent on hydroelectric power, and in the middle of the dry season, rolling blackouts come at least twice a week.
I get my coffee made, checking to make sure that the water has boiled for a solid 10 minutes (my weeklong typhoid bout in October taught me a few things). I take a cold-water shower from a bucket and then get dressed in the same button-down shirt and pants I wore two days before. Ethiopia is a place, unsurprisingly enough, where people simply don’t have things, and I quickly came to realize that my colleagues and students were wearing the same clothes day after day simply because they had nothing else. The climate is cool enough, and part of me appreciates the juxtaposition with Western concerns of fashion and having the “latest thing” to wear. Here in northern Ethiopia, the suitcase of clothes I brought puts me into an obscenely wealthy class.
As I step outside my house, I breathe in the fresh air and look out at the sun rising over the hills. Some of my neighbors are already up and preparing for the six-mile hike into town, where they will sell some of their crops, buy some basic materials, load up their mules, and trek back before the sun is fully overhead. I usually end up doing the same walk on Saturdays when the minibus-taxis are full, and again compare this situation with America’s famed “love affair with the automobile.”
I cross the only paved road and walk through the field leading to the university’s main campus. In the rainy season, this field becomes a virtual swamp, and I’m lucky to get through with only a couple inches of mud on my shoes. I’m wary of snakes, ever since the day when a colleague told me of the three-meter-long brown snake he had just seen in the bushes. I set out to see for myself but was dissuaded by an old Ethiopian proverb; “a snake always bites twice; once for the passerby, and once for the friend who comes to look.”
After making it through the field unscathed, I walk through the university, much of which is under construction. Women do the brunt of the heavy labor in Ethiopia, and every day I see ladies carrying loads of rock from the end of the paved road to the foundations of new buildings while their husbands sit in cafés, sipping coffee and bemoaning the lack of employment.
I make it up the final hill and head to the English department, greeting a few students along the way. We walk together to the classroom buildings, which are five years old and already crumbling. Sixty-eight students cram into a room with 60 chairs, with latecomers sitting on the floor. There is a dusty chalkboard, no erasers, and a whiteboard scribbled with permanent marker. I’m lecturing today on the use of dialogues to develop characters, using O. Henry’s short stories as a course text. I was able to get 50 copies from a U.S. Embassy donation, far more than the five or six the students usually get by on. There is a wide range of ability in the classroom, but all students are similar in their eagerness, occasionally bordering on desperation, to improve their lives.
Seoul, Korea (2008-2009)
Korean Development Institute
My alarm goes off at 6 a.m., and I hit snooze a few times before getting out of bed. My major reason for getting out early in Seoul is to beat the subway crowds, which sometimes require passengers to be prodded, pushed, and crammed in by metro employees before the doors to the trains can be shut. I still take my time for two reasons: First, I am living with my girlfriend after a year apart while I was in Africa, and she makes a truly sumptuous breakfast. Second, given that Koreans work, on average, more hours per week than any other nationality, I can pretty much count on a full train any time of day.
I take the stairs down for a bit of exercise (it’s 18 floors, but I still miss Ethiopia). I put on my iPod and walk down the street to the subway. My fellow commuters are the usual mix of students and corporate types, along with a variety that I believe is unique to Seoul: the retiree-hiker. A sprawling city of over 12 million people, Seoul has many outstanding mountain trails accessible by subway, and the health-crazy Koreans are avid hikers, particularly in their “golden years.” I enjoy seeing their good spirits and excellent health, and I am reminded of the gentleman who took me on my own one-day hike, a man who seemed to be happiest when he realized he had more than 50 years on me.
I arrive at the Korean Development Institute, a graduate school for MPP and MBA-ers from all over the world. It’s government-funded and very high tech. For the first time in my teaching career, I’ve got my own office, which is slowly but surely filling up with my teaching materials.
I head into the classroom 30 minutes early and set up the LCD projector, PowerPoint slides, and class handouts. After Ethiopia, it is an embarrassment of riches to be able to print without limitations on paper. The 14 students in my thesis writing workshop are in their late twenties and early thirties, and their theses cover a wide range of important topics, from enhancing budgetary transparency in Kenya to exploring non-extractive industries in Kazakhstan. These students have better English skills and more complex needs than those in Thailand and Ethiopia, but the eagerness is the same. I’m excited by the challenge of more responsibility that comes with higher-level instruction and happy that I’ve been able to get this far in my teaching career.
All roads lead to Rome…
The places I’ve been and the experiences I’ve had as an English teacher abroad have given me the confidence to dream big when it comes to my future career. I couldn’t imagine a better path for the past six years. The fun of teaching children in Thailand took away my nervousness at standing in front of a crowd, while the hardships I witnessed in Ethiopia gave me a deep appreciation for the luck I have had in my own life. My current position in Korea allows me to make full use of the skills I’ve developed during my short career. With more training and experience come better job opportunities in more diverse and exciting places, but the dedication of the students remains an important constantwherever I teach.
Seth Leighton graduated with a B.A. in Psychology from Harvard in 2003. He has been traveling and teaching English overseas ever since, with a one year hiatus to earn a master’s degree in Education from Harvard in 2007. He is currently serving as a guest lecturer at the KDI School of Public Policy and Management in Seoul, Korea.