What should I talk about in an English presentation for my mid-term report? 100 questions after going to and returning from Ethiopia!? No.062

Well, January marks exactly one year since I arrived in Ethiopia.
I will be giving my mid-term presentation in Addis Ababa with my fellow volunteers.

I had been preparing for the presentation for quite a while.
Since I had been visiting junior high schools, I was used to giving school introduction presentations in Japanese. However, this was my first time presenting my activities in English, so I thought about it a lot.

I don't write a script when I give a presentation.
I decide what I want to talk about at each point in the PowerPoint. But instead of reading or memorizing a script word-for-word to avoid mistakes, I speak on the spot. I rehearsed by myself many times and adjusted it so that it would fit exactly within the allotted time.

I wanted to convey the significance of art education in a way that anyone could understand as much as possible. Before teaching art, I had to start by making people aware of the existence of art.

Currently, most people in Ethiopia know nothing about art.
A very small number of people who are studying art know about it, but those who can teach art are truly just a handful.
I represented this with a three-tiered pyramid with a wide base:
people who don't know art on the bottom tier,
people who know art in the middle,
and people who can teach art in the small triangle at the top.
I wanted to start with that diagram, and end with a diagram where the structure is the same, but the top is a little larger, the middle has increased, and the base at the bottom has become a little smaller.

The venue for the mid-term report was Addis Ababa. It was held at a hotel, hosted by the JICA office, and attended not only by volunteers but also by the heads of our respective host organizations and our counterparts.

Since it was a special occasion, I wore an Ethiopian dress and had my hair braided for the presentation. My fellow volunteers were also dressed up in Ethiopian formal wear. Most of them presented in English, but two of my colleagues did theirs in Amharic. The presentations by my fellow volunteers were wonderful.

The summary of my presentation is as follows.

First, in the three-tiered pyramid with the wide base, art is barely known in Ethiopia.

However, Ethiopia's population is growing. As the population grows, people must be able to feed themselves. Since there is a limit to agriculture alone, the country must transition to manufacturing.

To transition to manufacturing, people must understand good design and beauty. For Ethiopia to develop, it is essential to know good design and beauty—in other words, art.

Art can be done with ingenuity even if there is a shortage of materials and tools. I showed examples of my practice at Abiy Addi College of Teacher Education, and explained that as the number of people who know art and can teach art increases, the bottom tier of the pyramid will decrease, and the middle and top parts will increase.

If that happens, the country will be able to develop.

If you want to know about art, please call me.

I will come if you do.

Later, Yonatan, who heard my presentation, said,

“The presentation was very good.
But you are doing even more than that.”

I was happy he said that.
The college president also came.

Besides that, I was very busy preparing a test version of a manual, exhibiting works, and holding workshops for other Japanese volunteers.

My presentation was well-received.
Requests for me to hold workshops
started coming in one after another.
Because of that, from this point on,
I will have more activities outside of my assigned area.

I am the only art expert
in all of Ethiopia.

If I was told that art was necessary,
I would go anywhere and do anything.