Back in Dessie again

Hi
Well I am back in Dessie now ready to start the new academic year but there are not many other people ready to start with me! All the staff are at a ten day meeting about continuous professional development. Four of our supervisors were selected to give this lecture region wide in all the colleges of education – this is a big thing for our supervisors who use to be regular primary school teachers and they are now giving training to the college lecturers!

My shower has now been fitted with a water heater so I now have hot water in my part of the house at last; it is a great luxury to be able to have a shower whenever I want.

I was in Addis for the last few weeks helping with the orientation of the new volunteers. They all seem very nice for the first few days they asked me endless questions about everything in Ethiopia which was very tiring but after that they all settled down and turned out to be a really great bunch.

Gillian my house mate had a bus accident a few weeks ago and broke her collar bone so as a result we got a lift back to Dessie in the VSO car which was very nice instead of the bus. I also had a terribly long bus journey up to Addis it took 12 hours as opposed to the regular 8 hours and during the journey we got a puncture and the radiator over heated and to top it all off if the bus was in third gear it stopped moving so we had to drive in second gear apart from down hills where he could quickly shift into fourth gear, but at least I got there in one piece. Gillian is fine now thank God.

We are now planning how to spend the funds raised. Last year we got a donation of 11,000 books from the British council, they were all the same book – The Magic Stick and we found because schools got about 70 of the same book they were actually willing to put them in the classrooms and let the children read them as opposed to when they get one or two copies of a book and they just put it away in the library never to be touched again! So we are now planning to produce a book for all the schools here so we are hoping in the next few weeks to run a story competition with the schools to select stories to go in the book. So thank you to people who raised money this is one of a few projects we hope to be able to complete with these funds.

The Dean of our college has been appointed the Vice President of the new University which is to open next October in Dessie (it isn’t yet built!) so we will be getting a new boss, hopefully one of the Vice Deans will be promoted.

So hopefully I will be able to write more regularly now that I am back in Dessie.
Take care
Ciao
Orla