Into Ethiopia

The longest pole in the preparation tent is the authentication of one’s degree, if one is to teach in Ethiopia. This involves one’s university, the county government in which the university exists, the state government, US federal government, and the Ethiopian embassy in Washington DC. Figure on at least a month to get it all done. Expect to pay around $700US in postal and processing fees. You can spend less on postal fees but then you should multiply the total end-to-end time by three. We were pressed by a deadline so I took the more-expensive but shorter route. There are companies who specialize in getting all this done in a timely way but they cost even more. Figure on $1000US if you go that way. My hope is that we will eventually be reimbursed for these unexpected expenses. Managed to find out what course the University of Gondar, where I am assigned, wants me to teach. The course description sounds like a mix of Distributed Computing and Distributed Systems. Computing takes ...

Whenever I know a project is about to start, I work hard on preparation. If I am going to teach courses, the first thing I want to know is what courses I am to teach. It takes three hours of preparation for every hour of lecture when one starts teaching a new course. Another point in my style is to put a lot of effort up front in a project and be coasting by the time the project ends. (In this case, when the courses start.) Whenever a project team coasts at the beginning and tries to put in exponential effort at the end, the result is incompleteness and poor quality. In the case of this particular assignment, I do not yet know what courses I am to teach, nor even to which department I will be assigned. With less than two months to go before departure, I am concerned. Still, there are things I can do. From what I have been reading, the Internet in Ethiopia is expensive and of poor quality. Such is the case in many developing nations.   The work in Zimbabwe led to a process...

A sense of calling to help raise the next generation of professionals is stronger now than ever. After the Fulbright assignments in Zimbabwe ( http://intozimbabwe.blogspot.com , https://www.cies.org/article/industry-meets-academia ) and Surinam were over, I kept an eye out for additional opportunities. What I found so far is that opportunities to teach in my field of computer engineering are difficult to discover, whereas opportunities in various liberal arts are relatively plentiful. Still, I have worked with foundations that are preparing course material for use in developing nations ( http://trinityeducationglobal.org , https://www.saylor.org ). Now comes an opportunity from the US Embassy to teach in Ethiopia. Ethiopians are undergoing a significant and positive evolution and the United States is lending a hand. They opened up a fair number of opportunities to teach in one of two colleges. I chose the University of Gondar since their orientation is more toward practical appli...