Mekelle - the Tokyo of Ethiopia

Well, I didn’t post last week as I went to Mekelle for the weekend. Mekelle is a city about 400km north of Dessie. It is the prime minister’s home town so a lot of money has been spent on it and to my mind it looked more European than anywhere else in Ethiopia but then after six months here my judgement may be slightly warped, but they don’t allow farm animals in the city so that is probably what makes it feel more normal, even in Addis Ababa there are sheep and goats in the city centre. Mekelle also has palm trees lining the streets and footpaths!! It is no wonder that Ethiopians joke it is Tokyo!

We had a great weekend, I managed to get a lift in a four wheel drive that was going from here and for the small inconvenience of allowing the driver chat me up for the whole journey I got to sit in the front, worth it for the comfort though I had to enlist help shaking him off when we got to Mekelle. Also he allowed me to keep my window open which is unheard of in Ethiopia, I think it may be a criminal offence to open a window in a moving vehicle but every time he shut the window I stopped smiling so he allowed me to keep it open.

I left Dessie at 5:30am and was in Mekelle by 1:30pm, just in time for lunch. There I met with a whole load of other volunteers from Addis, Mekelle, Abi Adi and Dilla. Including Susan the other Irish volunteer, so we just had a great weekend taking it easy visiting the cafes by day and the pubs by night (they actually have pubs in Mekelle! and a night club!!!!!). It was a very relaxing weekend, but I was staying in a not very nice hotel but it was clean on the last night I moved to a seemingly nicer hotel, where I was attacked by cockroaches there were loads of them, I killed eight of them but they kept coming so I went and stayed with Susan. Susan came back to Dessie for a few days with me, so we headed to the bus station to get the bus, no one wanted to know when we said Dessie all they cared about was who was going to Addis Ababa. There were hoards of people queuing up and a man was beating them back from the gates with a stick, I asked another man was there a bus to Dessie, and he took us past the stick beating man and into the bus station, where another person put us on a bus for Dessie a good half an hour before they let the crowd in and good job because the crowd all ran and pushed onto the bus and it was full in two seconds, sometimes I don’t mind the preferential treatment. It isn’t like other African countries as Ethiopia wasn’t colonised so there is no anti-white feeling and they are just really nice to you because you are a guest, the sad thing is they always say “but if I were a guest in your country it would be the same” somehow I don’t think so.

Back in Dessie I finally bit the bullet and went to the doctor after a bit of an on going stomach complaint. The trip to the doctor was a memorable one but one I don’t think I will share with the world it was all embarrassing enough at the time without repeating it, but things are done very differently here and I was just very very glad it wasn’t the young doctor who I had to see. I think the doctor was afraid of misdiagnosing the foreigner so diagnosed many things and put me on a clatter of tablets, I have been asleep for practically three days and when awake feel slightly out of it, but the stomach problem has improved so should be right as rain again next week.

Due to all the sleeping I didn’t go to work too much this week, but people have been really good calling me to see if I am ok and offering to come visit etc. We got a delivery of new books this week and next week will have a meeting with the supervisors and a teaching resources preparation workshop so the second semester will be kicking off and hopefully we will be a little busier in work.

This week Susan was here and one day we were discussing how if Irish people meet each other abroad you generally say hello etc and how other nationalities don’t seem to do this, that night coincidently we met a man in the local shop who was travelling around Ethiopia and he was from Killarney. I think he was as shocked as we were to meet someone from home but we had a good chat, it was very surreal.

A wet birthday

Well last Sunday Gillian – my housemate and colleague headed off to Addis Ababa to meet her daughter and from there they went travelling to Axum and Lalibella, they just arrived back yesterday, but a quiet week for me it was not, people seemed to think I would be incredibly lonely without Gillian and so very kindly made sure I went out for either lunch or dinner everyday which was really nice of them.
Tuesday was my birthday. I am now a quarter of a century old!! Very old, if I lived here I would have two children at least by now! When we were training with VSO before we came here on one of the courses they showed a video of a volunteer somewhere in Africa, and it was his birthday but he didn’t tell anyone and he felt really depressed, well my birthday wasn’t at all like that! Ethiopians don’t celebrate birthdays but everyone was happy to celebrate mine, my colleagues took me out for lunch and Steve (Kenyan Volunteer) came for dinner as it was Steve’s birthday too.
It rained as well on Tuesday which is a happy occasion here as seemingly there should be more rain so people are afraid there will be a drought, so everyone was in good form. Our water supply here comes and goes so sometimes you turn on the tap and there is no water which was obviously what happened to Sercalum on Tuesday and she forgot to turn off the tap again and locked up the house and went home. At 3pm I decided to nip into the house on my way back from the post office, every other day last week it was after 9pm when I came home so it was a happy chance that I came to the house when I did as our garden was uncharacteristically wet (it hadn’t begun to rain at this point yet), then I opened the door and the hall was covered in water and there was a tremendous noise coming from the kitchen, I waded through the water in the kitchen to the tap which isn’t over the sink like you would expect but actually over the drainer so the water was thundering out onto the drainer and onto the floor instead of down the plughole. So I spent an hour and half bailing the water out of the house until it was raining so much outside and I was so fed up of baling that I just headed back to work.
So I had decided to cook Tibs for Steve it is like fried meat Ethiopian style, but mine didn’t turn out slightly spicy and very tender it turned out black and as tough as an old boot! Possibly because I had to wade through the water back and forth from the stove to the counter etc so wasn’t really taking good care of my cooking, a bit of a disaster, but we had a good evening, we had birthday cake and some drinks and listened to songs from the 80s and 90s and told Abdu (Steve’s guard) about all the things you can get in Ireland and Kenya that you can’t get in Ethiopia. It is funny that although Steve is just from Kenya which is next to Ethiopia, it is still totally different here from Nairobi. So if anyone has been to Kenya and thought it was pretty bad poverty wise just think there are worse places!
On Wednesday two of the younger women from work and one of their sisters came for lunch and we had a nice lunch and a good chat and then on Thursday evening I went for dinner with one of the other lecturers and on Friday I went to one of the women’s houses for lunch so a busy busy week!
In work there wasn’t much to do this week I typed, wrote reports and plans, did illustrations for a book, and made a new Aesthetics display.
Today another volunteer James was coming to Dessie to stay for a few days but he missed the bus, so he will come tomorrow instead and on Friday I am heading to Mekelle for a few days and meeting with some other volunteers so it should be a good weekend.
So not much else to report really, life is as normal here in Dessie,
Take care
Ciao,
Orla

Post from fourth of February

Well, things are going well here in Dessie. Everyone here is football mad at the moment, not for the Ethiopian Football league like you guys, but for the African Cup. Football is on the TV all the time and the staff lounge is strangely quiet except for when there is a goal, a near goal or a foul undetected by the referee. Some of the footballers have the worst hairstyles, mostly bleaching their hair in mad shades of yellowy white, and during the week I spotted a teenager in Dessie with a similar hairstyle so I hope it doesn’t catch on as it looks disgusting.
Well on Monday this week our manager from VSO came to visit, he is a really nice man who was mostly concerned that we are healthy and safe as opposed to being too worried about how much work we had done, although he was interested in our work too and took us out for lunch and dinner!
So we had a meeting with all the stakeholders in the clustering and it was very good we have much clearer idea of some of our objectives, we had been getting on well with the in-service training but some of the other objectives were a bit vague especially on how we would work with the college lecturers but it is much clearer now. He was visiting other cluster workers and VSO have decided we can have two meetings for cluster volunteers so the first one is in Gonder in Mach. So we are looking forward to seeing Gonder. We couldn’t all decide on where we will hold the next one but hopefully it will be somewhere else on the tourist route!
I was also working on my Table Tennis this week, feeling confident enough to play against some of the men in college. I haven’t beaten any of them yet but soon I reckon I will.
Gillian my housemate and colleague is heading travelling for the week as her daughter will be over for ten days. I am looking forward to meeting her daughter, as I have heard so much about her, being the only two native speakers of English in town and living and working together I think we probably know everything about each other at this stage. I thank God that we get on so well together or it could have been a nightmare.
We went out last night for dinner and we must be known as alcoholics now as every time we asked for the bill, the waitress brought us another beer. After that we decided to be really brave and go to the off licence to buy some beer. The shopkeeper tried to charge us 60 birr to begin with, but after much laughing and bargaining we got him down to 12 birr and gave him a ten birr deposit on the bottles. 12 birr is €1.20 for four bottles of beer, not a bad price!
Then we had to sneak them past our guard as we gave out to him for drinking on the job, so we didn’t want to seem hypocritical.
So today I plan to go into town and buy some shoes and perhaps a bag, at home going shopping on a Saturday would be a pleasant experience, here however I have to summon up my energy to bargain and argue for ages to buy anything.
Anyway take care and have a good week,
Ciao,
Orla