Filed: February 15, 2006
Salaam Alaikum! Kya hal hai? For those of you who don't know me I just graduated this fall and I'm currently teaching English in Pakistan. January 11th I got on a plane, headed to the Emirates for a week, and then touched down here in Lahore on the 17th. This was only two days after the U.S. bombed Pakistan trying to take out Mr. Zawahiri. On January 15 th, no joke, I had 11 frantic e-mails from my mother who was worrying about me going on to Pakistan with the "large and chaotic" riots she had witnessed on CNN. Needless to say, people here in Lahore knew and cared less about the bombings and the riots than my mother, and in a city of 8 million a 10,000 person riot compares to a pathetic showing at a cricket match.
Originally I was assigned with an NGO to work up north, in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, but after some changes with my assignment and general lack of details regarding what I'd be doing, where I'd be staying and details like that, I decided to just stay on in Lahore and teach English. Within two days of being in the country, I had offers at the Australian Cultural Centre and the Lahore College for Women. The women's college has recently been accredited as a university, and so they are now going by "Lahore College for Women, University" which sounds quite funny to me but apparently quite prestigious to everyone here. We call it LCWU for short, which I prefer since it avoids calling the school both college and university in the same name! Despite the naming blunder, it's one of the best girls' universities in the country. All the women working there told me that they'd dreamed since childhood of having the opportunity to go there. I'll be teaching the Listening & Speaking module for the M.A. TESOL program, and it's funny how I was offered the position on an afternoon where I went in with a friend just to greet some of the faculty and staff.
The Australian Cultural Centre just opened within the last year, so they're still developing their programs and base of students. It's really exciting because I get to help with developing curriculum and creating and promoting new courses. We're also making a LOT of connections with people all over Pakistan. At an educational exposition last week, I got to the meet the Minister of Education from the Punjab. Ministers are famous here and treated like celebrities. Their pictures are in the papers all the time and they're always on TV. Because we had some connection with somebody else important, our staff (three teachers) got to greet him at the gate as he pulled up in his luxury car. We then met him and escorted him all around the expo, surrounded by his bodyguards and the media. It was so funny!
Aside from greeting ministers and parading around expositions, work at the Cultural Centre includes teaching some Turkish professors along with kids and adults of all ages and abilities, IELTS prep (like TOEFL), accent reduction courses and teacher training in Pakistan and India. I've instantly become the resident "linguistics expert" (I think only because no one else can read IPA) and I'm focusing my energy on creating accent reduction courses specifically for Pakistani English speakers. Call centers are a growing industry here and we've got this one American businessman who wants to use us for all his potential employees, provided we can give training in Australian, British and American pronunciation and show measurements of our participants' improvement during the course. People WILL be able to pronounce alveolar stops and interdental fricatives! Next time you call a 1-800 number and you think you're talking to someone in the U.S., it might be one of my star students here in Lahore. Let's hope so.
A teacher from a nearby village comes in every Saturday for 5 hours of intensive IELTS training. He sat down this week and asked our boss if there was any way he could get some training in linguistics as he's realized that the literature focus of his teaching degree has not satisfied his desire to be a better language teacher and understand language more. I had a great chat with him, after which he decided to sell his motorcycle to have private lessons in linguistics!
Now, as of Feb 15th, there actually ARE some fairly serious riots going on in Lahore in response to the Danish cartoonist. Just this week we've had a general strike, two people shot dead by security guards, over 500 cars wrecked by vandals, and many buildings burned in the city center. As I'm writing this, my boss is talking to different sources and trying to decide whether it's safe to hold my Conversational English class in the city tonight or if there's too much ruckus to risk it. Unfortunately, even if I'm wearing full shalwar kameez and sunglasses people still know I'm a foreigner, so I may need to invest in a burka if this keeps up!
You can read more about my travels, my work, and my life here in Pakistan on my blog:
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Xuda hafiz! (may God protect you)