Busy Busy Week

Well it was a busier week this week than many of the previous weeks. On Monday Bonga college came on a visit to Dessie, with them was a volunteer Monique was the Netherlands who we know, so we went out for dinner and had a lovely evening with her.

College tours are very popular in Ethiopia; basically all the lectures in the college get on a bus and travel around for a week or two visiting other colleges and sharing experience and from what I have seen we have hosted three colleges so far they are very worthwhile. The colleges get to see each others work and ask questions about how other colleges have solved similar problems to ones they are facing and they are social occasions too with lunches and dinners so it means that the Education community in Ethiopia is a close knit one even though the country is huge. So Dessie will be heading off on a tour too, in 20 days time all the staff will be going to Addis Ababa, Nazareth, Awassa, Dilla and Jimma. It will take ten days and while ten days on the bus does sound like hell, I am really looking forward to seeing the South of Ethiopia, seeing other colleges and getting to know our colleagues better.

Tuesday saw us sorting out 15,000 birr worth of books which the college had bought for our department, so it was a long day of cataloguing and shelving the books, but our unit now has a well equipped library which will serve the local teachers, as the local libraries have very few books on Education. Also on Tuesday we went to the Preparatory school and spoke to the students about our countries and showed them pictures and that, they really enjoyed it and we will be making a programme to go regularly to support the English department. On Tuesday we also registered local school directors and supervisors for a computer course, myself and Tammarat (the computer technician) are giving the course and the trainees had probably never seen a computer before, I also wonder when in the future they will ever get a computer but still should computers suddenly zoom to Ethiopia, these directors and supervisors will be ready! And they are very keen, yesterday there was no electricity and they still all turned up and wanted a lesson so I surprised myself by teaching computers for an hour with no electricity! The fact that Tuesday was pancake Tuesday did not escape our attention and even without real milk we managed to make pancakes with powdered milk and they were very nice.

On Wednesday we had a meeting of all the supervisors in Kombolcha and Dessie and the Woreda (local authority) Education Officers, the meeting went well mostly in Amharic so was quite tiring for us to try and concentrate and there was a lot of political talk, most of the people high up in Education are also members of the Government party so frequently have to spend their work time doing other political things so it leads to problems, but in the end I think they all sorted most of it out and have agreed now at our suggestion to have monthly meetings so that the problems don’t just build up. We will be delivering training starting from next week for first cycle teachers in Classroom organisation and Action Research and then following that we will train second cycle teachers in English and Mathematics. So it will be nice to be back out in the field again (as they say over here).

Thursday was a holiday here, not that anyone noticed in work till we pointed it out. So I took advantage of the day off to go back to the clinic, where first off they didn’t want to see me because I hadn’t got my pink card, but as luck would have it one of the local teachers was also there and his uncle owns the clinic so he got behind the counter and found my file and brought it down to the doctor for me. After a short wait I got to see the doctor who has decided I now have a peptic ulcer! I think you could go in to the clinic with a headache and come out with a brain tumour! I was then given a full tour of the hospital, which has an operating theatre, a labour ward, general wards, dentist, x-ray department, it is they told me the best hospital in the region, so should I get very ill I am very lucky to be living directly across the road from the hospital!

On Friday we went to the kindergarten, this time Gillian had made play dough and the children had great fun making things from the play dough and nattering away to us in Amharic, which they obviously don’t realise we can’t speak. We planned out the forthcoming workshops and prepared resources for a school which had requested help.

Today we went to Robbit school where we once again sorted millions of books and shared them out between schools which were there, so it was a bit of a busy week but the coming weeks will be busier, I think we have work scheduled up until the middle of May so it will be all go, which is good.

So I didn’t know what to give up for lent, as there isn’t much left to give up over here, but then the doctor decided for me, he has told me not to drink alcohol for the duration of my medication which coincidently is forty days, so its no drink for me or berbere (which they put in everything here) or coffee or citrus fruits and really I am not to eat most of the available foods in Ethiopia, so it will be a fun lent! This week I have mostly been eating cabbage and lentils not my favourite foods!

Anyway take care and have a good week,
Ciao
Orla