AMIDEAST

To say that the Yemeni public school system is the worst on the planet is a gross understatement. Children start school when they're seven, continue for a few years, then give up and drop out. It isn't uncommon for them to stop before high school.
A few years ago Yemen had to make a financial decision to either fund education programs or anti- terror/militarism. Of course they chose the latter. A typical scenario that plays out is the government promises tribes to build a school or well or clinic and then just doesn't. So the tribes arm themselves, kidnap some foreigner, and ransom them to build their own school or paved road or cell tower. So the government now is just buying the tribes' munitions instead of making good on their promises, and the tribes spend the money to build a school or satellite or bridge. I hear there are huge munitions depots in the north just crammed with weapons that the government isn't doing anything with. The good news is that the education is improving, or at least becoming more wide-spread and institutionalized. The bad news is that tribalism is still proving to be the better system and more autonomous, which isn't really such a bad thing unless you're the US and are hell bent on prosthelytizing democracy by which you're more easily able to maintain an iron curtain. I mean without the US's financial influence to root out "evil" there wouldn't have been funding for tribes' infrastructure, educational and otherwise.
AMIDEAST, where I teach, is an American based non-profit started in the early fifties with schools all over in the Middle East and Northern Africa. They've had a presence in Yemen since the fifties but didn't get an actual school until the eighties. Now there are three, the original in the capital Sana'a, where I teach in Aden, and a small satellite at Al-Mukallah in the Hadramawt region. As a teacher here, it's bittersweet. The resources available to us are meager, but the best in the region; the students, view the school as nothing short of phenomenal. Most of the students at AMIDEAST are on scholarship from various programs like ACCESS or YES and must do well in public school to keep their scholarship. Our students are supposed to be at least sixteen, but I have one who is fourteen, so the rules are slippery. AMIDEAST teaches only English, but offers test preparations to get into English speaking universities and to do foreign exchange at the high school level. So all of our students come out of this shoddy public system. For lower levels, the students essentially have to learn two things. Obviously, the students learn the English language, but they also learn how to be real students, how to think for themselves, form opinions and use their own creativity. So it's tricky to teach here because we use a different approach from what the students know, that is, we use what the rest of the educational world uses. But, once started, the two lessons work in tandem to reinforce each other. The students are motivated because they're either afraid of losing their scholarship or because they shell out for the classes from their own pockets, but they're also encouraged to learn once they stop using the backwards epistemology they know from Yemeni public schools and find that learning English is easier than anything else they've studied. The upper level classes are a breeze.
I should add that after talking to a number of current and past AMIDEAST students, I have a lot of hope for the country and its infrastructure. The people are inspired to help their home enter the twenty-first century, they think about the global future, and what that holds for Yemen. But, I'm only getting a small demographic that distorts the Yemeni population as a whole. The majority of people here are grossly undereducated and just don't have a concept of how bleak their own future is, much that of their country, especially within a global context. Leaving the the insular AMIDEAST bubble can be severely depressing.