Our Bahasa Basudara Social Media team member Ellia Wamesse not only speaks fluent English, he’s also well-versed in German. Here’s his story.

"I have been working as a freelancer in several fields since 2016  My first two freelance experiences were as a private German teacher and a local tour guide. Since that time, I’ve been teaching German at different levels from High Schoolers to University Students. With Bahasa Basudara, I did a German language conversational class for university students and we mainly discussed topics like hobbies, occupation (skills and careers), daily life, family, parties, relationship, living in the city & countryside, memories, hopes and expectations.

I would normally set up a game session before the course starts, it could be a question about the students’ latest activities or a session where they present a joke in German to the rest of the class. After a quick “warming up” session, we would begin with the theme of the day. I would prepare prompt questions to start the conversation, followed by a round of questions and answers and finally a discussion of the topic.

I also invited a good friend of mine from Berlin, Hartmut, to join me as a co-host on this course. He was enthusiastic about this idea and really helped me to moderate this course. We were moderating this class as if we were to moderate a talk show with several guests. Super exciting!

I also tried to come up with interesting ways to make the students speak more by asking them to imagine if they were to live abroad and they had to cook something for a party with friends, what type of delicacy of their hometowns they would like to cook and how to cook it. It was a successful experiment!

I also invited Moluccan people to join us and tell the class about their experiences of living and working in Germany. Just to give the students an insight into life as a Moluccan in Germany and then did a Q&A session with them. They were so excited to be invited and to be given a chance to share their knowledge and experiences.

In total there were 13 meetings, out of the 8 students I had from the start, 4 loyal students made it to the end of the course."