Ian Michael Gallagher expected to feel like an outsider. In his mind, he was about to enter one of those sappy television commercials where a somber white dude encourages you to spend the price of a cup of coffee per day to help a child in need.
Until he realized he was only being typecast by himself.
Gallagher spent eight weeks this summer in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as part of a scholarship program through the University of North Carolina, where he is entering his sophomore year. The Concord native knew he’d be working with school children and was conscious of the fact that he could come off as little more than the affluent kid swinging by to fulfill a collegiate requirement, if he let himself.
So he didn’t.
“I had a lot of reservations going over there. I was worried about feeling like an intruder, like the stereotypical white western college student going off to help the little kids in Africa. But that’s what it looks like on the outside. I had to kind of get over myself,” Gallagher said. “It was good to get there and get grounded and just learn to appreciate the intimate kind of human interactions I could have.”
Interactions like those he had with one student, who despite being 16 was only in the fifth grade. He got a late start because, without a family to live with, he had to clean shoes on the streets to save enough money to enroll himself in school. Or his interactions with a child from a family that was proud to have found a place of its own to live – at a landfill.
Gallagher spent the summer working with Berhan Yehun, an organization that helps children from vulnerable living situations stay in school. The students attend a government school during the day but visit Berhan Yehun at lunch and after school, practicing their English, getting tutored in any number of areas and generally receiving help they don’t get elsewhere.
“They do a whole list of things – tutoring services after school, lunch services, pay for their fees and uniforms and books, provide medical supplies and hygienic checkups and things,” Gallagher said of the program. “And they are also focusing on whole family kind of help, through trainings with parents to help them generate income. It was cool to be there because it’s a pretty new organization and it’s expanding constantly. It was fun for me to come in and kind of help out a little bit, but really mostly just learn what was going on.”
Gallagher’s role was split between direct service work with the children and some organizational work for the group, like helping to develop plans for a community shower project that would improve access to sanitation for low-income families.
His work with the students involved teaching some of the English lessons and also teaching music, which was something they hadn’t experienced much beforehand. They were able to get a keyboard, Gallagher said, and he learned the national anthem and taught it to the children over several weeks. One student took to it well enough that he was able to play the anthem himself by the time Gallagher’s visit ended.
The program is relatively new, with 38 students enrolled when Gallagher visited. The children ranged from third through seventh grade, with one ninth-grader included. And despite the conditions outside of school, they continued to surprise Gallagher with their verve for learning.
“There was something special about how excited they were just to kind of be there together and coming to school,” Gallagher said. “I stood to gain a lot from them, just to appreciate how excited they could be to come and see me every day and do these things. But on the other side, with a lot of basic living condition kind of things they lack, I was trying to take that appreciation for enjoying the life they had back (home), where we usually take that stuff for granted. That was pretty rewarding.”
Gallagher said he was worried about the language barrier before arriving, but found it to be a blessing in disguise. Although he was able to impart some English wisdom to the students, he may have learned just as much Amharic – the main language spoken in Ethiopia – from them. And they were certainly willing instructors.
“I would say, actually, that the language barrier might have even made it easier for me, put me in a position of just knowing nothing and having everything to learn, and it completely opened me up to everybody I met,” Gallagher said. “I think I learned about as much Amharic as the sixth-graders learned English. They started trying to teach me everything they know, started yelling all the numbers at me and asking what time it was all the time.”
For the students, learning English is critical because it can give them a better chance at landing a job, Gallagher said. That’s precisely why Berhan Yehun, which means “let there be light” in Amharic, is so active. That assistance goes beyond the classroom in many instances, Gallagher said; his supervisor was giving the 16-year-old boy in fifth grade 50 birr, or roughly $3, per month out of his own paycheck to help pay for “a little roof and a wall to sleep against,” Gallagher said.
Gallagher commuted about an hour a day through congested traffic on minibuses to get to work, traversing Ethiopia’s largest city (population of more than 3 million). He said parts of it looked like “a legit urban center,” with tons of skyscrapers going up, though the scaffolding was most often made of sticks and nails and people could be seen slowing traffic by herding donkeys and goats down the street.
One of the more lingering memories for Gallagher was the pride his students felt in their surroundings, no matter how humble. He said that energy was infectious, and though he said he would be anxious to explore more of Africa at some point, he “really couldn’t imagine not going back” to Addis Ababa when he has the chance.
“There are people living in much more poverty there, but they are still getting by, and they’re not necessarily unhappy on a day-to-day basis. A lot of them were very happy,” Gallagher said. “They were still living unstable lives and would like to get themselves out of those situations, but I think it’s pretty easy to think somebody that is not getting enough food on a day-to-day basis is just miserable all day, and that is just really not what I found. The key thing in the area I was is a kind of sense of community that all these kids and families had. That was pretty uplifting, to see how they were all coming together to improve each other’s lives.”
