Into Ethiopia

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...