Climb Every Mountain (or at least one anyway)

Hi All,
Thanks for all the messages and emails. Things are great here in Dessie, the rainy season now seems to be behind us and it is now warm during the day and cold at night it is about 22 degrees during the day and i don't know at night but once the sun goes behind the mountain it is very cold. Dessie is at 2600m above sea level so it is high up in the Valley between many Mountains. Yesterday we climbed the highest of these Mount Tossa, it was fabulous, the sun was shining and the views are spectacular. We were really close up to monkeys and a huge variety of hawks it was amazing, and when we got to the top of Tossa there are villages of people who live up in the mountains and farms and all and these people climb up and down the mountain everyday to go to school and to go to the market even though the mountain is so steep, we met many people some very old carrying huge loads of wood on their backs going up and down. Three little children joined us for the walk probably with nothing better to do and they were great singing songs for us and telling us the names of all the animals in amharic so we shared sweets and lemonade with them and I don't think they had probably ever had sweets or lemonade before so it made their day!! When we got back the best surpirse of all awaited - our landlord had got a boiler fitted so we could have hot showers - joy!! So I had my first proper hot shower in three weeks just when I had mentally adjusted to cold showers - However just after my shower they cut off the water in Dessie for maintenance on the pipes so Gill - the other volunteer is still waiting for a shower. This week we visited Schools in the Dessie area some of them are so badly off with hundereds of orphans and a great lack of resources but the good news is the teachers are really trying hard to make their own resources and teach good lessons. We will begin our training courses on monday week the first workshop is continuous assessment with 40 to 60 children in every class I can see the teachers difficulty in carrying out continuous assesment!!
At the moment we are making maths resources from locally available resources to put in the model classroom and advising on the model Kindergarten. We had a visit from another college during the week to see our cluster office and it was hilarious to see how competitive the colleges are with each other, however the staff at our college felt they came out best from the visit and so spirits are high!!
So today we are having some ethiopian friends for dinner going to cook bruschetta, spagetti bolegnese and fruit salad- which will all seem very exotic and european to Ethiopian people and also only invovles one pot as two of our stoves are broken though a man has just arrived to fix them, broken things don't get thrown out in Ethiopia a new stove would cost €4.80 so I wanted to just buy a new one but our housekeeper insisted in finding someone who will fix it for 60c. So we will see how he does at the fixing probably it will be better than a new stove as people here are very good at making and fixing - they have to be!
So take care and I look forward to all your messages,
Slán
Orla