[March 4, 2010] I’m glad to confirm that for the next 8 months I’ll be shooting a very neat project at the local university in Sulaimaniyah, Iraq. This project is funded by USAID and is carried out by an international NGO. For you to understand how important this project is to local education, I’ll have to tell you a little bit about the Kurdish people and their background here in Iraq.
The Kurds have been living in this area for thousands of years, but until this day, they have never had their own country or nation, at least as we understand that word. During the early 1900’s, the British army dominated the Middle East. Once the Brits decided to leave the area, they also made the decision to divide it into the countries that we know as Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria. The bad thing was, the British decided the borders without taking the Kurds into account. The result? The 40-million-or-so Kurds ended up as the world’s largest people group without their own country. This decision had far-reaching side effects, like many different conflicts between the Kurds and these 4 new countries during the last 50-60 years. This decision also resulted in conflicts that caused persecution to the Kurds, their culture, and their language.
In 2003, when I got here, it was impossible to bring books written in Kurdish language into Iraq. They couldn’t pass through the immigration control of the neighboring countries. This lack of materials, plus all sorts of limitations within Iraq, made it impossible to teach in Kurdish at the local universities. Kurds were forced to adopt other languages if they wanted to grow as professionals. Today, most of the major career classes are taught in either English or Arabic at the local universities.
The problem, you see, is that neither the professors nor the students have an adequate level of English so as to take advantage of the materials and books that they have, because they’re all written in English.
Last year, for first time, the NGO that I work for was able to send some American teachers to help with English acquisition for the first year students at Sulaimaniyah University. The intention behind this project was to improve students’ English so that materials and books wouldn’t be such an obstacle in preparing for their careers.
For 6 months, these teachers taught 1000 students, but were also able to train some of the faculty and professors in two two-week programs. This was very helpful to them, but there was just not enough time to show significant results. Now, these American teachers will be teaching exclusively to the professors for the next 8 months. USAID believes that improving the English of the professors will also help to improve the education for the entire local university, and that’s our hope as well.
I will leave you with a couple of shots from last year’s program, and I will be posting new ones once the project starts.