Holidays and Funerals

Well this week we were training in Kombolcha on Monday and Tuesday. Kombolcha is a town where the model of clustering in Education is working exactly as it was planned to work. The supervisors are really on top of things and motivate the teachers and work really well with the directors. The teachers all plan together in departments and use their own money to make resources for their teaching and the woreda education officials which are like from the town council are really supportive so it is a pleasure the work there and the teachers are really appreciative of the training.
On Wednesday we had to cancel the training due to a holiday so we went to college which should have been open and there were no teachers to be seen just loads of students so we were sitting around for a while but there was no electricity either so it was difficult to do any work. We remembered that today was the day that the man from the funding agency which funds the college was coming for a visit so we thought everyone must be at a meeting with him and forgot to tell us, but then we see a man wandering around with a folder under his arm so we ask him is he ok and it turns out he is the man from the agency and he can’t find anyone either anyway to cut a long story short it turns out the Dean of the college’s brother has died which was tragic he was killed in a bus accident near Dessie, (travelling by bus is very scary as there are many accidents) and everyone absolutely everyone had gone to the funeral as we had been in Kombolcha no one had told us about the funeral and obviously no one had thought to tell the funding man either.
So we didn’t know where the funeral was but we found a student who knew and asked him to accompany us to the funeral to show us the way. The funeral was very long and I am sure the man from the funding agency found it a great use of his time, after the funeral there as a another ceremony back in the house but we thought the funding man may have had enough of the funeral so we took him to see Kombolcha schools where he was absolutely amazed at how great they were. He also informed us that his agency would give 1000 birr for each of the 45 schools we are working with so they could make resources and we were to also organise experience sharing between the two towns and his agency will organise a National Conference of Teacher Training Colleges to see the great work going on here …. So despite the fact that almost no one from the college gave the funding man the time of day they have ended us smelling of roses, but the good thing is that the teachers on the ground will actually benefit so it was a good week and already the plans are underway for two experience sharing visits this week and a field trip for one of the Dessie Schools to Kombolcha so it finally feels like our work may be getting somewhere even though it was complete chance that we were the only people around to meet the funding man!

There was a big holiday here on Thursday and we went into Dessie to see, each church in Dessie sang and danced up the main street and into Piazza, it was really good and really colourful. The dances and songs were arranged by St. Jared in 560 something BC and haven’t changed at all since then except now they use loud speakers. The town was really crowded but the police were very calm and handled everything well including letting all the foreigners stand on the inside of the police cordon actually they allowed us to sit on the big round about in the middle we felt a bit conspicuous but then some Chinese people and Indian people were let inside too so we didn’t feel as strange but we got a good view and a seat so we weren’t complaining. In Addis Ababa the celebrations got a bit too rowdy and the police shot two people but in Dessie it was fine.

Today we sorted out about 1000 books which had been donated from schools in America and we gave them to six schools there are about another 2000 books to sort next week, the schools were so happy and the teachers gave up their free time to sort the books so these schools some of which had no books before now have an instant library they were praising God to a height and kept thanking us, we had to explain many times that we weren’t from America and we hadn’t sent the books!

It is raining today, it had looked like it would rain for about two weeks now and finally it has and in an instant Dessie has turned to mud it will rain on and off between now and April but at least it is a little warmer now than it was before. In the south of Ethiopia there is a severe drought which is causing a famine and here we have rain and plenty of food it is odd but I suppose even here it would only take one or two seasons of no rain to cause a famine too. Here no one is talking of the famine in the South of the country only I have seen it on BBC world news and CNN.

I had a very funny incident in a restaurant this week, I had drank three beers in the evening which totally shocked the waiter and I decided to use the toilet so in I went, the toilet in this restaurant is a lot better than others but is still a very smelly hole in the ground with no running water. I think the man in front of me really should have closed the door but I presumed he just didn’t care and then when it was my chance to use the toilet I realised there actually was no door, the door was totally gone disappeared so I didn’t know what to do but as I really needed to use the toilet I decided to ask the man would he just keep an eye out that no one came along, which he obligingly did although he was a little shocked and for the rest of the evening him and his friends kept winking and smiling over at me across the restaurant so he is probably some kind of legend now for having been so intimate with a white woman!

Anyway that is all the news I think, I hope you are all keeping well, Ciao,
Orla