Path from student to teacher

Growing up in Ethiopia, China not only seemed far away but also surreal. Now, if you want to know how many Ethiopians visit the country, try queuing for a visa at the Chinese embassy in Addis Ababa. Chinese restaurants and supermarkets are expanding and you can hear quite a few Chinese nationals interacting with Ethiopians in Amharic, the official language of the country.

For me, however, learning Chinese was accidental. I was finishing my master's degree at Yale University in the United States (where I never took a class related to China). The job market was terrible, and I decided to look for alternative career paths.

I attended a session on teaching in China and a few months later, the Yale-China Association offered me a job at Xiangya Medical School in Changsha, Hunan province. The association paid for my first Mandarin lessons, held in Beijing.

When I arrived in Changsha, I immediately recruited an undergraduate student as my tutor. My new tutor was only 21 years old but her English was very good and she could explain concepts that were too complicated for me to understand in Mandarin.

After my teaching mission in Changsha was completed, I headed to Beijing to take Chinese classes at the Beijing Language and Culture University. After a year of Chinese at the university and a brief stint at a PR firm in Beijing, I headed back to Ethiopia. Since I began living abroad, the relationship between my country and China had only grown more intimate.

In 2012, China had financed and built the African Union Headquarters in Addis Ababa. The railroad that connects Addis Ababa to Djibouti was already underway and financed through loans from China. And my neighborhood was a burgeoning Chinatown. I was excited to know that my proficiency in Chinese would become very handy in Ethiopia.

In Addis Ababa, I did consulting work for institutions that wanted to enter the Chinese market. I also met with executives of Chinese companies operating in Ethiopia. Impressed with my Mandarin, many would offer me opportunities to work in their companies. They wanted someone bilingual who could help them bridge the language barrier. They really needed someone like me.

Unfortunately, there are not a lot of Ethiopians who speak Chinese. But the demand for them is growing. The Confucius Institute at Addis Ababa University is now offering a bachelor's degree in Mandarin and even sends its top students to study in China. The students from this program are quickly recruited by Chinese companies, and word on the street is that their entry-level salary is at least double that of their classmates.

Aside from this program and a few other private offerings, however, there are no readily available self-study materials to learn Mandarin in Ethiopia. So I began designing this course, as a side-gig. It took months of writing, directing Chinese voice actors, audio recording and editing.

In February 2016, I decided to announce what I was working on. I appeared on an Ethiopian talk show. The course included an audio component and a book. I offered two chapters for free on the website of the course, www.chineseforethiopia.com. Within hours of the show airing, hundreds of people logged on. And I began receiving several emails a day from students, journalists, engineers and business people who expressed deep interest in learning Chinese.

Although international media outlets are warning that China is slowing down, most people in Ethiopia feel like the influence of the Asian giant is far from diminished. Parents want their children to speak Mandarin, young people are increasingly seeing it as a way to be more competitive and merchants want to strengthen their relationships with their Chinese counterparts.

For China Daily