Episode: 43 — "English Changed My Life" · Full Episode #43
Date: Season 5
Language: Arabic
Mohammed Al-Buwaydi (محمد البويدي) is a self-taught English translator from Libya who secured a position at the British Embassy in Libya from a pool of approximately 800 applicants. He is also the creator of the YouTube channel "Uqda" (عقدة, meaning "The Knot"), through which he has delivered over forty free lectures across Libya on topics including CV writing, interview skills, and professional development.
Mohammed taught himself English as a child, aged eight or nine, by playing PlayStation games. The specific game he cited was Pro Evolution Soccer (PES), from which he learned the English word "exhibition" — a term used in the game's menu for friendly matches. He described this not as an anecdote but as the foundational moment of his English acquisition. There was no English tutor, no language institute, no family connection to the anglophone world. There was a console, a football game, and a boy who paid attention to the menu screens.
The story illustrates a broader pattern in Libya and similar contexts: in the absence of institutional language education, children in the early 2000s assembled functional English from video games, satellite television, and the internet. Mohammed's fluency was built entirely from these informal sources.
See: PlayStation as English Teacher
Mohammed applied for a translator position at the British Embassy in Libya and was selected from roughly 800 applicants. He had no formal translation degree. His qualification was the fluency he had built from childhood — self-taught, game-by-game, screen-by-screen — refined through years of practice. The selection was competitive and formal. That he emerged from it without institutional credentials speaks both to his ability and to the limits of Libya's educational infrastructure.
Mohammed created a YouTube channel called Uqda, which translates as "The Knot." The premise: young Libyans face a knot of interconnected problems — poor education, no career guidance, no interview training, no exposure to professional norms. Uqda set out to untangle this. Mohammed delivered over forty free lectures in cities across Libya, covering practical skills that the formal education system had failed to provide: how to write a CV, how to prepare for an interview, how to present yourself professionally.
The channel and lectures were entirely voluntary. Mohammed did not monetise the project. He saw it as an intervention in a system that was failing an entire generation.
See: Uqda — The Knot
Mohammed described visiting the University of Tripoli and discovering that the computer science department was still teaching Fortran in 2021. Fortran — a language developed in the 1950s, last widely used in scientific computing — was being presented to students as current curriculum. The detail is small but diagnostic: it captures the stagnation of Libyan higher education, frozen in place by decades of underinvestment and isolation.
"The University of Tripoli is still teaching Fortran in 2021." (EP 43)