Building Sustainable Relationships through Interlinguistic and Intercultural Communication

Building Sustainable Relationships through Interlinguistic and Intercultural Communication

Associate Professor Yoko Hasebe sees education as a prime opportunity to communicate (and to learn to communicate) in such a way as to produce a message of one’s own. She has thus developed projects for interlinguistic and intercultural communication in settings ranging from kindergartens to universities in Japan, the USA, and Congo. Her Research Group is currently involved in four projects: the Sister City Exchange project with New York, the Young Americans project, the Democratic Republic of the Congo Elementary School project, and the Kuchinoerabu Island Revitalization project. We talked with Associate Professor Hasebe about the Congo project, which is now at a major turning point, and about other aspects of her work.

HASEBE, Yoko

Associate Professor
Faculty of Environment and Information Studies

Creating a School Is Something I Had Long Dreamed of Doing

Because it is at a turning point, the project I’m most committed to at this time is setting up and running an elementary school in the African nation of Congo. This has involved creating both the hardware and the software from scratch: the buildings, the curriculum, the teaching materials, the teacher training. The project originated with Simon Bedelo, a visiting lecturer in English at SFC who is from Congo himself. He has a very good knowledge of Japan; among other things, his wife is Japanese and their son goes to school here. Mr. Bedelo talked about wanting to build a first-rate school in Congo, one that would incorporate Japanese elements while being attuned to local conditions. I had a particular interest in fostering communication in schools myself, being both an English teacher and a researcher in interlinguistic and intercultural communication, and I had long dreamed of creating a school together with my undergraduate students. And here was Mr. Bedelo inviting me to take part in just such a project. When he first showed me photos of a completely bare plot of land and said “I want to build a school here,” I was thrilled to have the chance to work on education right from square one. I also saw it as a unique opportunity for our students to think about education in their own country.
Being able to take on both hard- and software aspects at the same time was another great attraction, and I immediately called on Associate Professor Hironori Matsubara of the Faculty of Policy Management to join us and take charge of the architectural design, and thus our project team was born.

Persistent Problems

One thing that led to my involvement was Mr. Bedelo’s describing how Japan’s official development aid to Congo is not being deployed effectively at all. For example, when an ODA team goes to Congo to build a school, local people come to observe the work in progress, but unfortunately we send only a construction team. As soon as the building is finished, the team goes home, and so do the Congolese. In other words, the educational equipment never get used. It seems the local people are impressed by what they’ve seen but have no idea how to put it all to use. Also, Mr. Bedelo believes that Congo needs to free itself from an overreliance on assistance. What is needed is a way of building schools in which the Congolese people themselves become involved, take ownership and take the initiative. For that reason, when we established our elementary school, ACADEX (which stands for “academic excellence”), Mr. Bedelo himself provided the initial funds, without relying on aid. Congo has a higher rate of school attendance than you might think, at 70 percent. And yet the literacy rate is low, because very few people have attended school consistently from the first through the sixth grade. Many people in Congo are not aware of the importance of steady educational advancement; they don’t think of education as something that can serve as the basis for planning their own futures and enriching their lives.

From Three Pupils to 108

As a former Belgian colony, even now, fifty years after independence, Congo still uses textbooks published in Belgium, and the curriculum hasn’t changed in fifty years. As a result, Congolese children know a lot about the plants and animals familiar to Belgian children, but very little about those of their own country. Even though each region has its own fauna and flora, when children see a native plant that isn’t in their textbooks, it’s just “leaves” to them. In effect, they are learning things that are of no practical value. We saw the need for a curriculum that would enable them to learn about their own country; also, we saw the need to teach that there are some things that can only be obtained through a kind of self-sacrifice. In the case of Congo which is the world’s poorest nation, paying tuition consistently from the first grade on is a form of self-sacrifice. Communicating this proved to be far from easy, however. For example, when we first advertised for students, we had about 150 applications; perhaps parents thought that tuition fees would be waived because of the Japanese involvement. As soon as they realized it was not, the numbers fell sharply. The cost was 20 dollars per trimester. Considering that Congo’s best private elementary school charges 100 dollars per month, this was certainly not unaffordable. Yet we started with only three pupils.
The teachers have one-year contracts, renewed annually, and their salaries are paid on a fixed date each month. In Japan this would be taken for granted, but in Congo contracts are often not respected. Thus, the teachers have settled in and the staff has grown because we have managed to build trust. They know that at ACADEX they can feel secure. But there were problems at first. In Congo, in what is known as Kumu society, tribal tradition requires a community leader such as a headmaster to pay the expenses on occasions like funerals and weddings, but ACADEX did not permit this. Of course, we pay special allowances at the start of term and certain other times, but we ruled out any further payments for personal expenses. Instead, the teachers’ contracts stipulated that their monthly salary would be paid without fail on the given date. The break with tradition was not well received initially, and some teachers left. However, they then found that at other schools their salary was likely to fall into arrears and they could not be sure of keeping the bills paid from one month to the next. And so they finally understood Mr. Bedelo’s insistence on doing things the Japanese way and they came back to us. The same holds for the pupils: if their tuition isn’t paid, they are temporarily suspended. This Japanese attitude to paying strictly on time was quite foreign at first, but the school’s enrollment has now reached 108 and both the staff and the parents are coming to understand our basic approach to stable school management at a deeper level. I feel that our ideas and our commitment have had a gradual cumulative effect over these four years and have come to be understood at last.

Building Relationships Is the Key

We have settled into a rhythm of spending a period of time in Congo each year. The people of Kimbondo, in Kinshasa, where ACADEX is located, have been supportive, getting things ready for us and facilitating our research. We have a good relationship now, but at first we had no common language and we simply couldn’t communicate. To move beyond this, we began by observing the people we interacted with—actually, it worked both ways, as they were observing us too. At first, we each made contacts in some area of personal interest like soccer or photography. We used these sports and hobbies to try to learn each other’s values, and much of that first year was spent playing games and helping with the housework. As the Japanese students began to pick up the local language, Lingala, we saw a lot of smiles. Also, we have never stayed at hotels. We found our way into the community by staying at Mr. Bedelo’s house or in homestays with local hosts. This has born fruit in a growing circle of friends and acquaintances and in our being treated like members of the local community. Building relationships really is the key; otherwise there can be no mutual understanding, and I doubt that there is any genuine benefit from ODA in the absence of relationships.

A New Challenge in Japan

The Congo project is not just about creating a school. The objective is to make the school (that is, education) a starting point for revitalizing the community. For example, we open the classrooms to the public for movie screenings and other events. Until now the church has filled that role, but we think it could well be filled by schools. The school is the ideal place to learn about society as it is a microcosm of society itself.
We have gained a wealth of experience that will help realize that ideal, and this year an opportunity has arisen to make use of it here in Japan. The location is Kuchinoerabu, an island about 40 minutes by ferry from Yakushima, with a population of about 150 living on a more or less self-sufficient basis. Kuchinoerabu is taking part in a rural homestay program, in which city children with health problems or psychological issues live with foster parents on the island. We are now envisioning how we can contribute to revitalizing the island, taking education as the starting point. We plan to build ties between the islanders and city dwellers by emphasizing the locality’s attractions from an educational viewpoint, but it remains to be seen whether the islanders will agree with this project and accept us. I expect our students will come to appreciate how hard relationship-building can be; the obstacles to understanding that exist even when all parties are Japanese may come as a surprise. However, as the plan has many points in common with the Congo project, I hope we can bring the benefit of our experiences there to Kuchinoerabu. Lastly, I should mention that the Congo project is closely linked to several other programs of ours here in the Hasebe Lab, such as the Kuchinoerabu Island project, the Young Americans project, and the New York project, in terms of their core theme: “relationship-building and the sustainability of new relationships.”

(13 January 2012)

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