Paul Woods

Following a year as a volunteer English teacher in Nigeria, Paul Woods spent the next three years as an Education Officer in Brunei, then ten years working as a teacher trainer on DfID-funded projects in Tanzania and Sierra Leone. In 1987 he joined the British Council's overseas career service and worked for the British Council for the next 27 years in a variety of posts until his retirement, including The Philippines, Brazil, Mozambique, Nepal, Botswana, Argentina and Uruguay. From 2001 -5 he managed the Peacekeeping English Project in 34 countries mainly in the FSU and Eastern Europe. He is married to Fatmata and has two grown up children and a Labrador retriever named Luna. At the last count he had visited 117 different countries. Brunei and Tanzania were two countries in stark contrast, one oil-rich with a tiny population and an extremely high standard of living, the other aid-dependent and desperately poor. In "From Milo and Special Tea to Kalshnikovs and Kimpumu” he describes his experience of teaching English in the 1970s, moving from an expatriate life-style revolving around barbecues and banquets in Brunei, where colonial dependency was gradually giving way to Islamic fundamentalism, to a daily struggle for survival implementing education for self- reliance in Nyerere's Tanzania, first at a militarised teachers' college in Tabora and later developing self-reliance projects to rear pigs, breed rabbits and screen James Bond films in Tukuyu. “If You Have a Wife Bring Her With You; If Not Please Negotiate For One Quickly” describes the year he spent in a remote village in NE Nigeria, in what is now Boko Haram territory. In "A House for Fanta", he describes his unlikely meeting with Fanta, his future wife, at 3.00 a.m. in a BP petrol station in a remote provincial town in Sierra Leone, the trials and tribulations of managing a project to improve English teaching in Sierra Leonean primary schools, and the struggle to get compensation when their dream house by the sea in Guinea was confiscated by the President's wife.