24 Hours at HMA

Kelley Murphy is a member of the EEI Board of Directors. 

I recently visited HMA with my wife Sandra and daughter Scarlett (11) as part of a longer trip through Africa. For years I have been aware of the HMA project and vision, and this brief visit left me with several powerful impressions.  

The familiarity of the elite boarding school atmosphere

I was struck by the utter familiarity of the campus and its activities. Serious scholars with intense focus in the classrooms. Energetic, engaged teachers. Joyful camaraderie at meals and in residential quarters. I suppose it should not be a surprise that the conventional core ingredients of HMA—highly selective admissions, an attractive residential campus, talented faculty—should yield such a familiar scene. But to see it at HMA, the first school of its kind in Ethiopia, on what I knew to be a field of barley just a few years ago, was for me a captivating encounter with an extraordinary "ordinary."

Hey, all that is in their second language!

I love the old line about Ginger Rogers—that she did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards, in high heels.  

Likewise I was taken by the scenes of HMA students tackling advanced mathematics, political science, and geography in English, that is, in what I knew was everyone's second language. I found this to be a marvel, and marvelous.

A core challenge at HMA is to elevate students' command of English to international standards.  Curriculum design, campus norms, faculty composition all play a role in managing to this goal, which is just one of several performance objectives in play at this ambitious new school.

With this understanding I was primed to see and be impressed by the quality of teaching and interactions in the classroom.  

Critical Mass and the Promise of Scale

HMA currently enrolls 116 students. To my eye, this constitutes critical mass for educational and community operations. By this I mean everything works—and feels right. Full classrooms. Plenty of students and noise during class changes. Lots of groups at meals. Substantial energy in residential quarters.

At the same time the campus shows the promise of expansion and scale. At both ends of the academic/dorm axis, construction continues on to complete the last elements of the core campus. On one end arises the last set of classrooms and labs; on the other end, additional dorms near completion. When finished HMA will have facilities for 400 students—more than 3 times the population I observed on this visit. HMA operating at that scale, I'm sure, will be a wonderful sight to see, and I look forward to a return visit then.

I was delighted to address the HMA community during my visit. I outlined a very concise (I hope) history of American continental expansion 1750-1850, solely to provide another context for two words with special meaning at HMA—"pioneer" and "frontier." As I told the assembly, all the students, teachers, and leaders at HMA today are Pioneers and HMA is the Frontier of Ethiopian education, and that I was honored to be among them.