A Month at HMA

Jeff Snyder, Northwestern University Professor of Engineering, reflects on his month at HMA. Jeff is married to EEI Board member Sossina Haile.

As a Northwestern University professor of Engineering I travel to many international conferences and visit research institutes and universities throughout the world, usually only for a few days. Many times to Germany, Japan and China, but also Turkey, India and Saudi Arabia. With such travel in disarray because of the pandemic, I decided to spend a month of my sabbatical at HMA.

Entering HMA is like visiting a new country. Not only are the architecture and grounds stunningly different from the surrounding region and town, like you would see at the IITs of India, but the culture and lifestyle represent a completely new vision of what Ethiopia can be.

HMA really is a community. I was welcomed immediately into the Longclaw Gojo, a living group like the houses in Harry Potter. With every breakfast, lunch and dinner I learned more about the students and teachers, sharing their interests, goals, concerns and stress points as well as their backgrounds. I feel I know them better than the students in my own classes and the faculty at Northwestern.

HMA students are from different towns, different backgrounds, different religions. Yet they have similar tastes. Everyone likes injera and shiro (maybe it needs more bebere) and finds the mushrooms and bell peppers a little weird (enday, the 'farenji qaria' (bell peppers) taste like nothing!). They all have similar stories about traditional magic potions, holidays, weddings and rituals that they knew I would find interesting. They all know about the USA and Europe like they have been there, though they never have. Many had never even been to Addis before HMA. I was happy to have an audience excited to hear about my travels. Some students like Turkish dramas and are even learning Turkish, some are into Japanese anime. Many had never seen a Lego before but are passionate about building, creating and painting.

I really loved the sustainability-design studio. It is not just a workshop where students learn woodworking or building with cardboard and can paint but a center that incorporates classroom projects, art and broader design principles. The best part was the use of recycled (really repurposed) materials. Wood from used shipping pallets, cardboard from old boxes, tin cans, plastic from bottles. It is a great opportunity to incorporate modern design concepts including how will the project be used, observed and appreciated by the passive community as well as active participants - throughout its life-cycle.

I was fully impressed by how the students took sustainability efforts to heart. They may have had privileges of tools, supplies, and teachers at HMA compared to other schools, but they didn't act like 'privileged' children. No one balked at the daily chore of sorting cardboard, filling plastic bottles with used plastic wrapping ('bio-bricks') or collecting food waste and tearing up paper for the compost. The minimal food waste competition was amazing: student food waste (they didn't want to be responsible for teacher or staff waste) was meticulously collected and weighed. The winning gojo (congratulations Walias with zero-waste!) won only applause.

I had loads of fun playing frisbee and hiking with the students. Everyone was comfortable outdoors, better at managing the traffic and exposure than I. But most had not done much hiking before HMA - or swimming. Maybe when they were very young, but that ended as soon as school started in earnest. I got to witness the intense excitement, absolute terror and sheer joy of climbing rocks and splashing in a pond that I had not seen since my own kids were in elementary school.

It is hard for me to say I did much there, I mostly observed the school in motion. My contribution was knowing that a key bit of knowledge exists and is findable on the internet. How to set up a regulation volleyball net, soccer goal, UV water purifier or weather station. What a compost should smell like and what the problem is when it is nasty rotten. How to communicate with Italian technicians and salespeople when the official installer has left you with a not-working, complicated, electronic oven. What in a modern keyboard is hardware and what is software so that a student can finish his invention of an Amharic keyboard. How a septic system is supposed to work. Almost immediately everyone seemed to understand as if all I needed to do was open the book to the right page. At home they call me “SuperFarenji", when I finish a job. At HMA, the students and staff get it done so quickly I had to fix my own luggage and coffee pot in the design lab to get that self-satisfaction.

I did get a chance to observe, and learn, about the HMA teaching style. The students arrive all being good studiers - a community perhaps more like a magnet school or elite university in the USA rather than a typical private school which has to meet each student's skills and challenges. Indeed the students had maturity, independence and study skills that rival Northwestern undergrads. They memorized geography and geometry equations I never learned even as a math major, and easily applied them to problems they would find on the national exam. They could use more practice applying their knowledge to solve problems that are interdisciplinary, without a single right answer or open-ended, which is a primary focus for HMA. I learned quite a bit about how to run a class that repeatedly engages students to ask more than simply answer questions or to empathize with a problem first to understand its true nature from the point of view of the questioner. I should use such strategies in my undergraduate courses. Almost all the students seem to have quickly learned group discussion, debate and oral presentation skills in English which can be a hurdle for students with a traditional education background (even my own).

Perhaps my most significant contribution was arranging a webinar with Loza Tadesse and Iwnetim Abate for the WayFinder class. Both are Stanford PhD and starting at MIT as assistant professors. Both are from Ethiopia (Loza from Addis Abeba and Iwnetim from Debre Birhan). They described their determined and complicated journey to the USA and answered questions from HMA students about applying and preparing for college as well as life in America. Most striking to me was how they emphasized that the skills they lacked the most are precisely the ones focused on at HMA: creative problem solving, collaboration and working in teams, developing a passion, public speaking and fluency in English.

So many memorable moments from just one month: robotics and tinkering club, 6am running and discussions, sustainability design (or was it debate?) class, the Celebration of Learning, physics demonstrations and circuit labs.

I left with greater appreciation for how many roles Tesfaye plays for the school, and how he, Kari, and the teachers have invented an entirely new way of learning and living. I have never been so aware of what happens to our trash and waste water and the impact it makes to our environment and society. Seeing how quickly bright young students can learn and adapt to new situations and watching their thrill of exploration and excitement for new experiences has reinvigorated my interest in teaching and finding my own way to making the world a better place.