In Ethiopia, "Harry Potter" Contest Creates Euphoria

The JDC Jewish Service Corps (JSC) is a unique one-year volunteer opportunity for active, enthusiastic, knowledgeable Jews to serve, and take part in the life of a Jewish community overseas.

JDC Jewish Service Corps Volunteer , Eli Kamara, shares that "Monday was probably my best day in Ethiopia ever":

It all began in February. I was contacted via email from Altrusa Dallas Foundation. It is an international organization with clubs in 17 different countries and consists of women. Their international focus is literacy and "strives to be builders of women." They were looking for a potential project to do in Ethiopia with us, the JDC. After explaining to them about our different scholarship projects (nursing, elementary school, architecture, women's university education) they decided that they could help with our women's university education project. For this scholarship project, we are sending many women for their university education at Unity University in Addis Ababa, a private college. We just enrolled 15 new students, who are in a preparatory class before university. I am tutoring the students, primarily in English but also in Math and Science, to help prepare them for the university classes. My English class is focused around Harry Potter. We do vocabulary, group discussions, and communication exercises using Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone (which was hand carried to Ethiopia by Jeff Engler and Rob Meyerhoff- Thanks guys!). Even though Harry Potter is at a low reading level, some of the students were struggling with the book. I remembered from my elementary years the frustration of not knowing a word and having to look it up in the dictionary – it was necessary, but totally killed the flow of my reading. I wanted to get something to prevent this from happening with my students. I wanted to get them a Franklin electronic Pagemark Dictionary (of which I have my own as well – they are amazing).

Anyways, after much discussion, Altrusa agreed to purchase 15 dictionaries for our students. They arrived in NYC in April, were hand carried to Israel in early May, and hand carried to Ethiopia this past Monday. I met the JDC rep (who was coming to Ethiopia on other business) in the airport at 6AM to pick up the dictionaries. I was so excited.

I was thinking about the best way to distribute the dictionaries. Even though I had enough for each student, I decided that a round of Harry Potter Jeopardy would be fun. The students were divided into teams, and I told them that the winning team would get one of these (and showed them the dictionary). Their interest was immediately peaked. Then one of them asked "will we each get one?" When I affirmatively replied, they were ecstatic. Game on.

Team Arseel and team Rafiki battled it out over questions about the names, places, vocabulary, wizard culture, and famous wizards and witches found in chapters 1-6 of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. A 100 point question was "The platform to get on the Hogwarts Express" (9 and 3/4) while a 500 point question "He worked on Alchemy with Albus Dumbledore." (Nicholas Flamel) It was so much fun, and a very close match. In the end, it came down to one question "The school Dudley will go to." (Smeltings) Rafiki won the game, and the dictionaries. I distributed the dictionaries and took pictures. They were all so happy and smiling. The other team, Arseel, looked so sad. After playing this game for 5 minutes, I looked in the bag and said "Oh, what do I have here???" with a smile and pulled out the rest of the dictionaries.

I will never forget the way they screamed. The atmosphere in the classroom was euphoric. Both teams were laughing - some crying because they were laughing so hard. In the true Ethiopian way, the winning team was ecstatic that their classmates would get dictionaries too. I was on such a natural high from the pure excitement and joviality in the air. It was amazing. I truly feel honored to have been given the opportunity to have had such an experience.

May 2007