In the beginning of January we arrived in Soddo once again to help out at the school with our knowledge. My and Maarja’s assignment was to hold the music lessons. There isn’t a respective lesson on the curriculum, but musical education is provided for in the esthetics lesson. It also covers arts and movement which isn’t the same as our physical education though, but the kids are just rather out in the courtyard, playing and feeling free.
Our suggestion to sing with the kids was well recieved by the school’s staff. Even more so because the esthetics lesson teacher didn’t have any musical training and so they were simply not doing that. The campus where we were giving the lessons at was for 1st to 4th graders. Since English isn’t an official language in Ethiopia, logically the kids don’t understand too much of it. Teaching simple children’s songs in English, we soon decided to quit the 1st and the 2nd grade because keeping order and imposing ourselves due to the language barrier was difficult. We took comfort in observing that it was often quite the ruckus there in other lessons as well – kids are kids! Its worth to mention that the sizes of classes is sometimes twice as big as with what we are used to.
We taught them songs like “He’s got the whole world”, “Twinkle, twinkle”, “If you’re happy and you know it”, “This little light of mine”. Before the lessons we would use the services of Spotify and download various examples of the songs and played them to the kids in the lessons. Maarja was singing and I accompanied her on the melodica, we wrote the words on the blackboard and asked the kids to write them down. Every time when teaching a new song we asked our friend, the school manager Temesegen, to come and translate the song so it served the purpose of teaching English as well.
Since Ethiopian music is sometimes quite strange to us I believe the feeling might be mutual. Anyways, their style of music is mostly monophonic and presentation holds a lot of twirls and quartertones (my subjective judgement). One day Markus also visited our lesson and decided that it is a right time to teach the kids polyphony. We asked some of the best students to come up to the class and eventually we managed to get them singing triad in three voices 🙂
And so our time passed in Soddo, we also held a parent teacher meeting and managed to give a performance to the parents with the kids. I belive it was a very exciting and pleasant experience! Besides giving lessons we also visited the childrens families homes, to understand in which conditions they are living in. It can not be compared to our standards obviously and we have to comperhend the local context as good as we can. For example, if the home has electricity, it is more than most of the households have.
I hope we we were able to contibute to the diversification of the local school life and making it more exciting and who knows, maybe one day we’ll meet again in Soddo 😀
Lauri Lehtsaar
