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