Hey, We have Two New Cars

On Monday the ten day meeting which all the college teachers had been attending finally came to an end and we all had a big dinner in one of the restaurants in town to celebrate the start of the new college term, as usually we had to sit at the top table and not at the table in the corner with all the other women!

The college now has two new cars, these cars can fit twelve people each, that are like huge land rovers with benches in the back. So we and a lot of other people got a lift home in one of these. This means that the college now has five cars and will shortly have a bus, but only three drivers and one of them is sick so really only two drivers so hopefully soon they will employ some more drivers to go with the new fleet. Having more vehicles should also mean that we can work in rural areas more, which is the plan for this year.

The week after next one of the other volunteers; Nigel is coming to visit. He is carrying out a research project for VSO. VSO have a global campaign to have teachers valued more and the research is part of it. We had a very good example of how teaching is the career to go into if there is nothing else this week. Our old Amharic teacher called to the house to tell us his son had pretty much failed his leaving cert so the only hope now was that he would get into the teacher training college, which he successfully did. The son doesn't want to be a teacher at all in fact wasn't even bothered to register himself so his father went and registered for him. When you think of all the 6th year students in Ireland studying all day and night to get enough points to get into a teacher training college!

Today we went to Addis' (a young colleague's) house for lunch she had been preparing it since yesterday. She made Doro wot which is a very complicated and delicious chicken stew which you have for special occasions. Her sister has come to live with her and to study in Dessie. Addis lives in one room about the size of a small car and now will share this with her sister, it must be odd as they have never lived together before as one of them lived at home and the other lived with her granny.

Then we went into to town to see if Addis had been successful in getting a sim card, in Ethiopia the only mobile phone service is run by the government. Each town has a different number and it costs more to ring outside the town that your number is from. So I have an Addis Ababa sim card and I can call anyone else with an Addis Ababa sim card for 20 cent a minute but it is 50 cent a minute if I call someone with a sim card from another town. There is no text messaging allowed for the last year as people were texting to organise political demonstrations so the government banned text messaging and there is no voice mail so all the mobile can do is make calls and even that is with difficulty as the network is nearly always busy.
So Addis registered for a mobile sim card in Dessie about three months ago and today was the big day where they were going to put up the names of the lucky people allowed to buy a sim card today. So outside Telecommunications on a board they had stuck up 500 names in no order and you had to try and find your name and then you could go in and buy a sim card if your name was there. Unfortunately for Addis her name wasn't there and as today was for buying only she would have to return on Monday to find out why. She spent the rest of the day complaining about the man who she had registered with the funniest threat she made towards him was that when she had her own car, if she sees him and even if he looks really tired she won't give him a lift! So he better watch out!
The rainy season seems to be coming to an end (I hope I am not speaking too soon) it is only raining a little bit on the odd night here and there. I swapped my DVD collection with Susan (another Irish volunteer) so I am working my way through her DVD collection now. I have watched three series of Sex in the City and feel like I have had a vacation in New York and feel pretty lucky to be living a simple life in Africa instead!

Francis moved from Dessie to Gambella a few months ago and left a rug and picture for me, which I received from his friend this week. The rug takes up about half my sitting room and the picture is very large too and they look really nice in the sitting room and make the place much more cosy and home like, this combined with fridge, water heater, oven and electric heaters makes my life much improved on what it was last year.

It is hard to get used to the routine of life here again after travelling and being in Addis for so long. Here I get up about 7am have a shower and breakfast go to work come home for lunch go back to work, then come home from work around 5:30pm or so. Then I have a cup of tea and read a book, after a while make some dinner and then watch a DVD and go to bed about 9:30pm. So it is a very quiet life. I am trying to savour the calmness and quietness of life here as I suspect I will never experience it again, even if it does have some very boring moments particularly in the evenings.

Time flies by though and sometimes I am scared by how little time I have left. I know from last year that from about Easter onwards it is very difficult to get work done so the next 6 months are really it for getting projects completed and ensuring that the cluster work will be sustainable after we go. I think it will be, as long as our colleagues stay but Aragesh told me the other day that when she gets her degree she would like to work for an NGO, and I can't blame her, the pay would be better and the status and she would be very capable, so we need to make a long term plan so the work will continue. All schools have been ordered to model themselves on Dessie and Kombolcha now, which is all very good but the schools in Dessie took a lot of work for many years to reach where they are so I am not sure the ministry are prepared to support all schools in reaching the standards here, but then at least it has been shown to be possible to reach the standard here and at least the government won't have the excuse that it can't be done.

Well I think that is all the news for this week, I will post again soon.

Ciao,

Orla