Miftah is a teacher in Comoros, and an educator in every sense of the word.
He has used the SolarSPELL digital library for a little over a year as a supplemental resource and uses it in a wide variety of ways to teach English. In his community, Miftah has opened an English language club and teaches classes to students from many regions around the world with varying levels of education, and has been teaching English for eight years. He teaches night classes in the city of Moroni at his English Club, where he trains around 50 adults between the ages of 25 and 35. Additionally, he spent three years investing time in teaching Peace Corps Trainees his local language of Shikomori.
He has told the SolarSPELL team that the new resources he is able to incorporate into his lesson plans from the SolarSPELL library have made him feel more prepared to be an effective teacher, and also created some on his own that will be added to our collection.
“There are many resources that help me and the students, because I can have the students listen.” Miftah said. “I can download the content and play the audio for the students. Even though there is no internet and no data, we can still have listening exercises, because we have the conversations [from the SolarSPELL]. It’s very helpful.”
Miftah has not only provided English language learning resources from the SolarSPELL to his students and community entrepreneurs, he has also shared other content like agricultural resources with his brother, who is a local farmer.
In his community, there is no brick and mortar library, so Miftah mentioned that the SolarSPELL serves as their library.
Jared, a Research Assistant for SolarSPELL. has traveled to the field with the SolarSPELL team to assist with training and interviews While he was in Comoros, Jared got the chance to meet Miftah.
He says, “This guy was so intelligent, he was so good at all of the languages spoken there: Arabic, French, Comorian, on top of his English skills. The guy’s a superstar. He does a lot of work with the Peace Corps, but what he does with the SolarSPELL is amazing. There’s an American Center where he does SolarSPELL teaching and he goes into his village a couple nights a week with people in his community that dropped out or are too old for school and uses the SolarSPELL to teach them. If you go into his classroom you would see a broken concrete hut with a dangling broken light bulb, and he’s in there a couple nights a week, just trying to help the people in his village get a little better educated. That really stood out for me.”
Miftah works to empower the community through learning, and the SolarSPELL digital library provides resources so that he can serve his community in a more efficient way. We are grateful for Miftah and his belief in the SolarSPELL initiative to bring localized education to underserved areas around the world, like Comoros. He is truly a SolarSPELL champion.
