Orla in Ethiopia

A Great Holiday

2007-03-12T20:25:00.000Z

Hi
Well it has been a busy few months here. Time is flying by since I came back after Christmas.
We have continued training in rural areas and training Kindergarten teachers this means delivering five sessions of training a week and with preparations this really fills up the week.
The college where we work very kindly gave the three volunteers a gift of a holiday for one week in Northern Ethiopia to thank us for all our work. They gave us a car, driver, fuel and expenses and sent us off for a week to enjoy ourselves, which we did. This was really generous of the college.
We went to Mekelle first, this is usually an eight hour journey and we were set to leave in the morning at 9 a.m. but we didn't actually leave until 2 p.m. as the usual college disorganisation ruled and as this was a gift we couldn't really get too annoyed. We arrived in Mekelle at 9:30pm at night, in Ethiopia it is not permitted to drive after dark but the driver was determined to reach Mekelle and the police allowed him to keep going.
In Mekelle we met with other volunteers. I stayed with Susan another Irish volunteer. Steve was fixing a computer so this meant we had to stay in Mekelle for a few days we saw the market, the war museum and a rather unknown waterfall, which was impressive. We ate in nice restaurants and generally relaxed and enjoyed ourselves.
From Mekelle we drove to Axum, we decided to cross the Tembien which is a spectacular mountainous desert of Ethiopia not realising that we would have to cross it again on our return so this made the holiday a very bumpy holiday. We arrived in Axum at about 8 p.m. or so and hit the sites early the next day. Axum in the ancient capital of the axumite empire which stretched from Egypt to Somalia and Sudan and down to Madagascar (according to the museum!!) It is a very nice place, full of ancient palaces which are just like stone walls, burial chambers and its most famous site the stellae field which has these huge pillars of decorated stone marking graves. Seemingly they lifted them with Elephants but there is one that was stolen to Italy in three parts and has now returned but they are having difficulty figuring out how to stand it up again but these ancient guys had no such problems, amazing! It is quite amazing when you see the quality of the stone masonship and the measuring tools they used.
We saw Axum in record time and departed before lunchtime, the things to see are quite amazing but don't take very long to actually see. We then headed to Adwa where we ate lunch with Rebecca another Canadian volunteer. After lunch we moved on back the way we came across the Tembien because Steve hadn't finished fixing the computer so we had to return to Mekelle again! We stopped off en route in Abi Adi a really small town with three volunteers. Abi Adi makes me appreciate life in Dessie. There was no mobile network and they had just got 24-hour electricity a few weeks before. We hadn't intended to stay but the volunteers there were so happy to see us they insisted we stayed, and we were glad we did. We all went out to dinner, at the invitation of their college, then we had another dinner back in the volunteer's house as they had taken pork out of the freezer for us (the first time I ate pork in Ethiopia!). Two of the volunteers in Abi Adi are from the Philippines and the Filipinos love pork.
We were back in Mekelle again, the computer was fixed and so we had a good dinner with the other volunteers and the next day headed to Lalibella, which the driver thought would be 5 hours away, 9 hours later we made it to Lalibella!!
I hadn't really been too pushed about visiting Lalibella for the second time but actually it was good. We bumped into an ex-student of ours on the first night and he insisted on being our guide and he refused any payment.
It was interesting as although I knew him from the college I didn't know much about him. He had been born in the rural area but his parents died. He had five older brothers and sisters and they stayed in the rural area but when he was young, his aunt took him to Lalibella where he went to school. He then became a guide, after a while he decided to pursue his education further and went to the college to become a teacher. He was one of the highest scoring students last year. He then was deployed to the rural area where there was no electricity, shops, proper houses etc. He was just about to leave teaching when he was called to teach in the high school in Lalibella town as there was a shortage of secondary teachers so he now is teaching there. This summer he will start studying for a degree in law which will take him five summers to complete and then he hopes to get a job in the regional capital. Meanwhile his brothers and sisters are going around in skins and just living a boring life
Anyway he was an excellent guide and added much to my knowledge of Lalibella. We saw all the town churches in one day getting to the last one at 4:57 p.m. they close at 5 p.m. The next day we headed back to Dessie stopping on the way at one more church which was really good, full of treasures (old illuminated bibles, gold crowns, crosses etc). These treasures aren't kept in a museum as you might expect, no just in an old cupboard and you are allowed to touch them, hold them, photograph them with flash etc. In this church there was some magical holy water which we all drank as it cures illnesses everyone else was fine but I was sick for three days afterwards so not sure what message God was sending me! The priest who showed us around here was wearing an Irish Celtic cross on his jacket!
We headed back to Dessie this was by far the bumpiest part of the journey and we were glad just to get out of the car by the end of the trip. It was a really good holiday though apart from the bumpiness.
Now we are getting ready for our next adventure tomorrow a television crew will arrive from Teachers TV to make a documentary about Education in Ethiopia in which we and our work will feature. So that should be fun, they are here for one day and are quite ambitious about what they will achieve so we will see. They broadcast on satellite and on the Internet so I will inform you when it will be showing and you can try and watch it.
After that I am heading to Addis Ababa for St. Patrick's day. Last year the Irish Embassy threw a big party in the Sheraton. This year however, it is simply a lunch time reception in the ambassadors house but we are going anyway and I am going to drink and eat as much as I can. I may just refuse to leave at 14:30, then he will wish it was in the Sheraton and not in his house. On the Saturday there is a big ball as well for St. Patrick's Day and just about everybody is going so I am really looking forward to that too. So hopefully it will be a good weekend.

Our day guard Serkalem is pregnant the baby is due in 24 days very exciting so we are trying to persuade her to take maternity leave but I think she probably gets more rest in our house than at home. From today she has a young cousin from the rural area helping her. It may have been the cousin's first time to see white people and she just stared at us most of the time but I am sure she will get use to us.

Anyway for now I think that is all the news I will keep you posted on the TV programme schedule.

Ciao
Orla

Back to Ethiopia after Christmas

2007-02-03T21:49:00.000Z

Sorry I haven’t posted in a long time. I must have loads of news by now.
Well the conference in Sodere was successful and the weather was fabulous.
Following that I headed home to Ireland for Christmas.
The day before we were due to travel a freezing fog attacked London Heathrow which we were due to travel through. All other airlines made other arrangements for their passengers but not Ethiopian Airlines who decided to just hope for the best. We were of course as luck would have it flying with Ethiopian Airlines.
On the morning we were due to fly. CNN and Sky news were showing pictures of people huddling in blankets in tents outside Heathrow, the reality of this didn’t really hit home at the time as wearing a blanket is the fashion in Ethiopia.
So much for high security at Addis Ababa, both Susan and I managed to take bottles of wine in our hand luggage.
So we flew pleasantly to Rome almost forgetting about the whole Heathrow thing until the Pilot announced that we would be spending the night in Rome and flying tomorrow. We decided to see if we could avoid Heathrow and fly direct to Dublin but Ethiopian Airlines said no. Then they served us up a nice tasty dinner of European chicken and just as people were enjoying this they announced that we had 15 mins to get on another plane to Heathrow. So everyone ran through the airport following the Ethiopian Airlines man but of course hours went by and we still weren’t on the other plane. We asked Alitalia as they were the only staff around if they thought we could fly to Dublin tomorrow, they said “sure no problem two flights to Dublin tomorrow just get your ticket endorsed by your airline”. Well Ethiopian Airlines weren’t having any of it. They accused us of causing a security risk and threatened to call the police as we would be travelling without our luggage, however if the airline loses your luggage I don’t think you can call the police on them.
Anyway in the heal of the hunt they eventually gave us back our luggage but made us pay for the new tickets to Dublin and promptly disappeared leaving us with no where to stay and nothing to eat. We felt like Tom Hanks in the film Airport as we just stayed in the Airport all night and most of the next day. Trying to actually lodge a complaint against Ethiopian Airlines has so far proved impossible and even though they claim to have a customer charter they actually don’t.
Anyway finally got home safe and sound and had a wonderful Christmas at home, seeing friends, family and new babies. Eating all the food I had missed in the last fourteen months. In general having a very good time, it was definitely worth the hassle of coming home.
On return to Ethiopia, I felt less depressed then I had expected. I think the blue skies and warm weather of Addis Ababa contributed to that as well as getting to spend a few days with Francis. After a few days of rest and banking business, I headed back to Dessie.

Nothing much had changed here. Everyone was delighted with their presents and seeing as I had missed Ethiopian Christmas, my colleagues made Christmas dinner for me again which was very nice. We have been training in rural areas and training Kindergarten teachers and generally keeping busy. Our manager was here from VSO and we may be appearing in a TV documentary … watch this space! We will also be hosting a large conference in April and organising a symposium in August at which point I had to break the news that I did actually intend on leaving Ethiopia at some point!

Last weekend we decided to cook a chicken. Now it has become clear to me why our maid never cooks chickens. It took from 8:30 am – 2pm for all the preparation and cooking, which involved killing the chicken, plucking it, and cutting it up and washing it many many many times. It is much easier to buy one in the shop ( although they don’t sell them here) I can tell you.

Tomorrow I will head to Addis Ababa for meetings next week, it is nice to get out of Dessie but there is always the knowledge that you have to return and it always seems much more boring each time. Not on week days but at weekends there really is very little to do. Luckily I have a lift to Addis tomorrow so no bus thank God.

Thank you very much to everybody who gave me money for the work here in Ethiopia at Christmas. We are now going to buy library books for 70 schools in rural areas and are giving a grant to each school to help HIV AIDS orphans so thank you very very much for your help and assistance.

Anyway I will try and be better at keeping in touch.

Ciao
Orla

Well it is Mid-November already now

2006-11-13T08:38:00.000Z

Well it is mid- November already now, time is flying by. Schools in Ireland must be on mid term break now and we here haven't even begun the term yet! Last year I thought it was because of all the political trouble that the college took so long to get going but now I see it isjust the way things are.
We had three other volunteers come to visit the week before last. Julian is an IT volunteer in Debre Birhan (about 6 hours south of Dessie) and Liza who works in the Ministry of Education in Addis on Non formal education and Nigel who works in the programme office in VSO and is doing advocacy research into Valuing Teachers. VSO has a global research project into valuing teachers which it hopes will raise the status and improve the conditions of teachers across the developing world.
It was really interesting to see our project through their eyes. They have only been in the country five weeks and I think it was quite inspiring for them to come and see a project which is in its sixth year and see that over a long period of time - VSO does work and make adifference. So they had a good time and we enjoyed their company for a few days.
On the Thursday night of their visit another volunteer Emma who is working in Asossa as a Democratization Advisor was passing through Dessie with her mother and friend on a tour of northern Ethiopia so weall went out for dinner, which was really nice.
On Saturday Steve and I headed back with the visitors to Addis. Steve and I are on the organising committee for the Annual Volunteer Conference which will take place in December. The meetings were Monday and Tuesday but we were able to fit in a weekend in Addis so that was an added bonus. On Saturday night two of the volunteers hosted a Halloween party in their house and everyone brought food and drink and there was an amazing array for food from all over the world and quite a lot of drink too! The party was really good fun and a good chance to meet loads of volunteers. One volunteer I was speaking with was sympathising with me for living in such an isolated place as Dessie and then I found out she had just spent six months volunteering on Kiribati an island in the south pacific which kind of made me appreciate Dessie! On Sunday I met with other volunteers for a very long lunch and then on Monday it was work time.
The meetings went really well and we have the conference almost organised. It will be in Sodere which is a thermal spring resort in theSouth of Ethiopia. In December Dessie is freezing so I will be living to reach Sodere where it will be roasting and I will hopefully be able toget a nice tan before I head back to Skerries for Christmas. We are having a quiz at the conference so if anyone has quiz questions(Dad has already sent me a lot but more are welcome) they can email themto me at mccarthyorla@eircom.net they will be much appreciated.
On Wedneday we made the horrible 8 hour trip back to Dessie in a minibus. The worst part of the journey is that you begin at 4 am and it is freezing and bumpy for the first four hours and then roasting for the next three hours. This time we met some other Aid workers who were coming to Dessie to work with the leprosy sufferers. One of them was a Christian missionary and had made double the amount of sandwiches he needed just in case he met anyone else hungry on the journey so Steve and I happily took a few off his hands.
Last Saturday we went to Steve's house for a Kenyan lunch he cooked for us. There are five or six Ethiopian women coming to lunch too who nearly died of shock to see a man cooking. On Tuesday Lukuli from the World Food Programme called in with a newmember of staff a Gambian lady who had just come from working in Darfur and was rather distressed at being in Dessie which doesn't say much for Dessie, but I suppose in Darfur there is probably a huge community of international aid workers and in Dessie well there are now five of us -including her. It was really really cold in Dessie this week.
One day it was cold and misty with a light rain and it felt just like Ireland. Only in Ireland there is central heating and here there isn't. If you can imagine working in a building made of concrete blocks with a corrugated ironroof and the weather being maybe 13 degress or so and there are noheaters - it becomes very difficult to type. Thankfully it has become warmer this weekend. Dessie is in a small valley at the top of some very high mountains so if there is no cloud cover it is really cold then if there is cloud cover it is somewhat bearable. So while I am suffering in the cold at this end of the continent, I am presuming my Aunt Gay is now basking in the heat at the other end of the continent.
On Tuesday we will begin training teachers in rural areas. I am lookingforward to it despite the fact that we will have to get up at 5 am toreach these areas and probably bounce along mud tracks to actually find the schools. It will be a total contrast from having worked in the town schools, where things are not so bad. The areas where we will be working suffer from chronic food shortages so I imagine the problems facing the teachers will be many. In some ways I feel like I will be adding to their problems coming along and telling them that they have to do continuous professional development and change their teaching methods to include active learning, group work, problem solving etc and there theywill be with their 100 odd students all sitting on pieces of wood or on the floor in a mud hut, but I suppose unless the children are educated to think creatively and to problem solve the community will not develop and it has been achieved in other places and can be achieved here, but I envisage an uphill struggle persuading them to change, but we will see.Sometimes I also wonder in the future will the trace the emergence of ADHD and other modern day problems back to the time when they reformed their teaching methods and introduced active learning into the classroom!
Next weekend I will be heading to Addis Ababa for some meetings so looking forward to having a normal weekend. Weekends in Dessie are incredibly tedious and boring. Last night the electricity went so I litsome candles but there wasn't enough light to read by and there was no electricity so I couldn't use my lap top and I couldn't plug in the heater, so I just sat on the chair under my sleeping bag thinking what away to spend a Saturday night! Luckily the electricity came back eventually.
They are building a five storey shopping centre in Dessie in the main square with a cinema - this is very exciting however I may have left Dessie by the time it opens, but still for the people that will still be here it must be exciting. I was just telling Addis and she has never been in a cinema so is very excited now even if it may be a year till it actually opens.
Anyway I think that is all the news for now,
Take care,
Orla

Solomon our driver died, RIP

2006-10-22T18:33:00.001Z

Solomon one of the college drivers died today, that brings the death toll of our colleagues for this year (since September) up to two. He had been sick on and off for some time, but nobody knows with what.

We developed an English workbook for the kindergarten and a big Alphabet book to accompany it, drawing the pictures for this book has been the bane of my life this week and I still have four or five more to do!

We now have the internet in our office which has made our office very popular with members of our colleagues' families. One of our colleague's sons has just graduated with a degree in Applied Maths and Computer Science, however he couldn't figure out how to switch the computer on or how to turn on the printer and without realising that he had disconnected the switch for the server, it makes you wonder did he actually ever get within ten feet of a computer during his degree.

This week on Wednesday we have three other volunteers coming to visit; Nigel who is doing research into valuing teachers, Liza who is trying to database Non-Formal Education and Julian who is an IT volunteer in Debra Birhan so it will be full house and they will stay till Saturday. Then as well as them Emma another volunteer from Asossa who is a democratization advisor is coming with her friend and her mother on
Thursday so there will be loads of us around. I wish visitors could spread themselves out so we would have something to look forward to each week rather than all coming together but Murphy's Law!

At the moment we are trying to figure out when Ied will be. Ied is the end of Ramadan and is a Muslim festival and a public holiday here. The Muslims only know it is Ied when the full moon appears in Mecca or something like that. So it could be Monday or it could be Tuesday we have to wait for the sound of singing from the mosque which will be hard to differentiate from the regular singing which comes every evening from the churches and mosques. We have workshops this week in the college so we don't want to think it is Ied and not turn up and leave all the participants sitting there waiting.

Today we had Steve, Addis and Addis' sister for lunch. We cooked a feast of roasted vegetables, Moroccan beef, garlic bread, crème caramel, and chocolate cake. It all went well even though our oven threatened to blow up in the middle of it all, but we caught it just as the plug started to melt. It is a far cry from when we use to have to just cook on the kerosene stove and the very damaged electric ring!

I bought a new pillow yesterday a foreign pillow as I am sick of my Ethiopian foam one which no matter what I do ends up like a big ridge and my head is about 20 cm off the bed when I sleep. I bargained the new pillow down to 50 birr (€ 4.50); Jill had seen them in Addis for 130 birr so I really thought I got a bargain. It is like a pillow at home, when I told Addis she had to see it and bring her sister to see it, as she
couldn't imagine a pillow costing so much.

Addis has a new mobile now and although she is still fighting with telecommunications for a sim card. One of the lecturers in college has given here a long-term loan of a sim card he had so for the moment she is happy.

So that is all the news from here, I hope you all have a good week.

Ciao Orla

Hey, We have Two New Cars

2006-10-15T14:52:00.000Z

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

Back in Dessie again

2006-10-06T16:33:00.000Z

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

Kidnapping in South Ethiopia

2006-09-21T09:29:00.000Z

Hi to everyone who has phoned, texted and Emailed enquiring about Orla’s safety in Ethiopia. We telephoned Orla and she is safe and well. Ethiopia is such a big country that anything happening in the South of the country might as well be happening on another planet. Obviously our thoughts are with Donal O'Suilleabháin and his family at this time. Many thanks for your concern.
Ray

Back Home Once Again

2006-08-31T20:33:00.000Z

Well it really is ages since I have written. I hope when term starts again and I am back living in Dessie all the time that I will start posting regularly again. The college and schools have been closed or should I say open as everyone is doing summer courses but the regular programs are closed so we have been given the freedom to explore Ethiopia and enjoy the rainy season.
Since I posted last my parents have been to visit, both they and I had a fabulous time while they were here. A very kind friend in Addis lent me his home for the first few days so that was an easy or easier way to adjust to Ethiopia than jumping straight in, also fortunately another very close friend Francis works for the UN so we were able to hitch lifts in the UN land rovers for the first part of the holiday too which made things a lot easier. My parents did extensive touring of Ethiopia and saw Addis Ababa, Dessie, Lalibella, Gondar, Bahir Dar and Ambo. If you know Ethiopia you will raise your eyebrows at Ambo but believe me it is worth a visit if only to see the five storey hotel with landscaped gardens, marble floors and a lift towering over the nearby mud houses.
My parents also know the airports of Ethiopia very well and are on first name terms with most of the Ethiopian Airlines staff as in the rainy season it really is a 50:50 chance as to whether you will fly or spend the day in the airport. However my parents met many interesting characters in the airports so that hanging out in airports became a feature of the holiday rather than a hassle.
As the representatives of all those who have raised funds for the schools in Dessie, they got a dinner thrown in their honor where the staff of the college surprised them with gifts of traditional Ethiopian clothes and jewelry, it was a wonderful evening for them and for the college staff. Another highlight of the holiday was getting to meet fellow Skerries man – Gerry Reddy who is working in Somalia but is based in Addis we had a lovely lunch with Gerry and his family in Addis. All in all it was the trip of a life time for them and I hope they will post some photos up with this blog.
As soon as my parents left I had more visitors. I am the most visited volunteer in VSO and the only volunteer who hasn’t gone home, but then where would I find time to go home among all the visitors. Jane, Audrey and Jean were working and traveling in Kenya and very kindly flew over for the weekend to see me in Addis Ababa. We did nothing touristy but ate in the best restaurants, drank in the best bars and danced in the best clubs which Ethiopia has to offer and laughed for three days solid.
As soon as they left I headed for Yirgallem in Southern Ethiopia to complete a two week intensive Amharic Language Course. It was very intensive, classes ran from 8 am – 5:30pm every day except Sunday and there was homework to do every night, however the other volunteers on the course were all great fun and the frustration of learning Amharic was a great bonding experience. It has paid off as I can now understand a lot and talk a lot more confidently in Amharic.
After Yirgallem, I traveled back to Dessie for two days which was just enough time to greet everyone in college and wash and dry my clothes before heading to Kenya. We headed to Kenya on the 18th August - a group of us two Irish, one Kenyan and three British spent ten days exploring and enjoying Kenya. The Kenyan – Steve was chief organizer and did a fantastic job. We spent a night in Nairobi – where we sampled crocodile and camel at Kenya’s famous Carnivore restaurant. The next day we headed to Mombassa. Susan and I went by bus and the others traveled in Steve’s car. The bus was a joy after Ethiopian buses. The seats reclined, you had a seat to yourself, you could choose your own seat, the bus left at a designated time and best of all you could open the window (this is forbidden on Ethiopian buses in case people catch disease from the fresh air!!). We left Nairobi at 1pm and arrived in Mombassa after mid night. However Mombassa was something like you would imagine paradise. We rented cottages beside the beach, the cottages also had a swimming pool. Everywhere had palm trees and the sea was so blue. It was fantastic, the highlight being the marine park where you snorkel in the coral reefs. After our first visit to the supermarket we realized we would need to extend the holiday so we changed our flights home by a day. We must have seemed very odd in the supermarket as we got over excited about the availability of wheetabix!!
Kenya is nothing like Ethiopia. If I had traveled to Kenya from Ireland perhaps the poverty would have been shocking but coming from Ethiopia it was the modernity, the prosperity and the development which shocked me. I suppose I had come to picture all of Africa like Ethiopia. I had a compelling urge to return to Ethiopia and fill coaches with politicians and decision makers and bus them down to Nairobi so they could see with their own eyes what it is possible to achieve. Nairobi is like any other developed city, all it is lacking is big name shops and franchises such as Mac Donalds, Benneton, Burger King, Virgin Mega Store etc and then again is this really a deficiency?? The rural areas are less developed but nothing like Ethiopia, I imagine that to the North and West things may be more similar but in the South and central areas things are very different. Steve’s father is a farmer and he showed us all the different grains he was growing and explained about his plans for introducing new grains, he showed us the live stock and explained to us about the breeding systems he uses and he talked about how the farming has become sustainable and profitable – we were blown away. Farmers in Ethiopia are afraid to even fertilize the land and when the land doesn’t give a good yield they explain it as God’s will. The trip to Kenya has convinced me even more that having volunteers from more developed countries within Africa come to Ethiopia could really aid development here.
So I came back to Addis on Tuesday with my bags overflowing with toiletries and food items which aren’t available here. For the past three days I have been working in VSO office, planning the training which the new volunteers arriving in September will receive. There are 45 volunteers coming out to Ethiopia, it is hard to believe that one year ago it was me who was preparing to come here, preparing for the unknown and now I feel totally at home here, it will be nice to have the chance to welcome the new volunteers and get to know them before they head out to their placements. I will be here for two – three weeks in Addis when they arrive to help with the training and orientation.
Tomorrow I am flying to Gambella which is as far west as you can go in Ethiopia without hitting Sudan. Francis has moved there for work so I am going out to visit him for a few days, in theory it should be warmer there but for the last few days he has said it is raining there too, but it will be interesting to see another part of Ethiopia and of course to see him too.
When I return I will go to Dessie for what seems like the first time in months I have been out of Dessie for so long and I will only be there for a week before I come to Addis for the training.
Anyway I hope you have all had a good summer and I will try and keep you posted more often.

Ciao,

Orla

Hey Everyone!

2006-06-14T08:32:00.000Z

Hey Everyone,
Sorry it is so long since I wrote our internet has been awful and I have been very busy as well.
Well what has happened since I last posted? I am sure quite a lot but as I can’t actually get online to look at what I last posted I may repeat myself …. sorry.
Well over the last few weeks I have been giving English language methodology training for second cycle teachers, which has been going well but very difficult to coordinate given that each school seems to have a different time table.
I also visited a special needs unit here and I thought they were doing fantastic they had really tried to organize the classrooms well, however when I watched the DVD Untamed Love the other day which is about a Special Needs class it brought me back to earth!!
But really, the teachers were lovely with the students and had made lots of media, they have deaf students and blind students and then Learning disabled students, however very few actually come to school regularly and mostly boys come as parents see no point in sending the girls. The teachers said no body knows what to do with the learning disabled so although I know very little I will try over the next while to help the as much as I can. So far I have made jig saws and other toys to develop motor skills, but I think our special needs unit is miles ahead of any other from what I have heard so at least we are starting from a good base.
We have been basking in the glory of the national conference since it finished given that it was a roaring success however it also means the workload has increased this week alone (an it is only Tuesday) we have a team of researchers come to assess the schools and students to see if the international donors should expand their funding program for cluster work, we have been told by the Regional Education Bureau to give training for all supervisors in the region, and following that all high school teachers. So it is busy busy here at the moment.
I am looking forward to my parents coming to visit now; I wonder what they will make of everything here. It is very hard to remember what it was like at first, as now it just feels like home.
People have been really good fundraising for the schools here and really, people here appreciate it very much. This week we will be buying computers for the schools, we have already made blackboards and we are arranging to get brail text books for the blind students and have many other projects planned – a little money goes a long way here.
So thank you to everyone who has been fundraising, especially to the perfume sellers in Selskar Court.

Anyway, I will try and improve on the posting. I am going to ask Jerome to post this for me as it is impossible for me to access the site at the moment I don’t know why!

Take care and enjoy the warm weather as your weather is heating up ours is cooling down.

Easter in Ethiopia

2006-04-30T12:13:00.000Z

Well last Wednesday I had quite a surprise when my two friends - Daithi and Eoin who I had planned to meet in Addis on Friday turned up in my house, so I had some nice days with them in Dessie. on the Thursday night we had a great party with Irish and Ethiopian music and dancing - a good night.
Then on Friday headed up to Addis, Daithi and Eoin's bags were the only luggage on the roof until Debre Birhan when the driver strapped a live sheep to Daithi's bag which was very funny as for the next two days everything he wore smelt of sheep!
We hit the town in Addis once again on Friday night, then Saturday did some shopping and had a lovely indian meal before they headed home.
Was little bit sad to see them go and made me feel homesick, so to compund that I headed to a party in the Irish ambassadors house just to mix with other Irish people!! but the Irish were few and far between at the party.
Then had a good day Sunday and monday meeting friends etc, and came back to Dessie on Tuesday. Tuesday evening had dinner in a friend's house, then Wednesday lunch in another teacher's house and Thursday lunch in yet anothers, and on Friday lunch with guests in my house, holidays are long things here, it was Easter last sunday but the celebrations went on for quite a while.
This weekend we had a workshop for high school and preparatory school teachers and next Tuesday a workshop for second cycle teachers and then to Addis on Wednesday for a VSO workshop on clustering then quick back to Dessie for the national workshop on clustering so it is busy busy.
We had a major break through this week when the photcopier we requested in October finally arrived in our office, this is making our work much easier, up till now to get photocopying done we have to go to the photocopying woman who can't speak English and who doesn't really understand copying machines and it is a nightmare that takes half a day at least, so now we can just copy in our own office.
So not much other news here, I saw an article in the Irish Times on Friday about the famine and drought in the South of Ethiopia but you wouldn't know it here, it is sunny and green here at the moment, but it is a huge country with poor communication systems and really the media only tell you good news stories here, that way everyone keeps more positive!
Anyway take care
Ciao,
Orla

Back in Dessie

2006-04-18T15:26:00.000Z

Well very very sorry I haven’t written in so long, I have been out of Dessie more than I have been here lately. After Gondar I came back for just a few days and then I had to head off on the college tour which was fantastic from start to finish even if we didn’t visit that many colleges or do so many educational things we had great craic and now the college is like one big happy family so it was a successful tour all round. We went to Awassa which is a really nice lakeside town and then to Dire Dawa and Harar and then Jijiga which is close to the boarder with Somalia in terms of distances it was probably like travelling all over Europe and many of the teachers had never been to any of these locations before so it was great fun the highlight for everyone was getting to swim in two thermal pools as there is no where to swim in Dessie so they were all like beginners splashing around. After the tour I had two friends coming to visit so I hung around in Addis for a few days waiting for them and then stayed in Addis a few days with them to let them settle.
Then we came to Dessie where they visited lots of schools playing the bodhrán and feadóg for all the children which the kids and they really enjoyed. Our unit is hosting a national conference on School Clustering next week although invites are yet to go out in true Ethiopian style so we are very busy getting ready for that so I didn’t travel with my friends who have gone to Lalibella, Gondar and Bahir Dar. I hope to go to Addis at the weekend to say goodbye to them, there was a time when I wouldn’t have dreamt of travelling for eight hours to see people for one night but now I have gotten use to Ethiopian distances. Also my two friends had so many funny incidents in just the few days I was with them that I can’t wait to hear how they have gotten on for the rest of the holiday. The funniest incidents were when one of them refused to let a woman on the bus thinking she was a beggar but actually she was sitting beside him on the bus! The other incident was when my other friend mistook a sink for a urinal in a hotel and the sink was in full view of everyone!!!
I have put a photo of me eating a toasted cheese sandwich with this, it was to be top of my list of things to eat when I got home but i found a cafe in Addis which makes them so might as well stay!
No seriously my school have kindly agreed to extend my leave and the college have kindly agreed to let me stay so I will be staying in Dessie for another year.
Anyway this is a very short post as there are no taxis and I am in college and it is getting dark so I need to head home soon!
Ciao and I will write more again soon,
Orla

Trip to Gondar

2006-04-18T14:51:00.000Z

Well loads of news here from Ethiopia, it has been a busy two weeks. I was sick for much of last week so was at home as the toilet in college is disgusting so when sick it is better to be at home. Then Abdu who was Steve’s guard and a good friend of mine was called to University in Mekelle, the poor guy was supposed to begin last October but due to construction works in Mekelle he couldn’t start till this week, so last Wednesday night we had a party for him and gave him some money to help him get books and things and he was so pleased it was amazing and humbling just to see how happy he was and how big a thing it was for him when it was really only a small gesture on our part.

So Thursday saw me loaded up on tablets making my way to Addis Ababa. I had contemplated not going but it was St. Patrick’s day and the Irish Embassy had organised a huge party in the Sheraton hotel. So good old Kieros our guard got me a front seat on a mini-bus, I got on the bus at 4:30am it then drove around Dessie till 6am picking up passengers!! So by the time we hit the road I fell asleep by Kombolcha, but the man beside me woke me up as I was going to cause an accident if I banged against the driver so he kindly offered that I could sleep on his shoulder so there I was like the dying AIDS sufferers we see on buses all the time, being held by this strange man as I slept for most of the journey, turns out that the strange man was actually the assistant manager of the Hilton hotel in Addis and a World Bank Consultant so good person to fall asleep on, I think he was quite worried about how sick I was and minded me the whole journey and has just rang me a few minutes ago to check I am ok and to invite me for dinner next time I am in Addis so being sick has its advantages!

Finally arrived in Addis by 2pm (which was fast!) so I headed for lunch and hung around VSO until Susan eventually turned up after her bus breaking down and all at 5:30pm. We quickly got ready feeling the most glamorous that we had since we got to Ethiopia and headed for the Sheraton where we strolled up the red carpet and into the ball room. The party was amazing there were about 900 people there and about 30 Irish people, there was loads of food and deserts and they were pouring Baileys like milk and of course it was all free! So we had a great night after the Sheraton we headed to some Ethiopian club where they let the Irish Trad band play for a song or two and then we organised all the Irish to come outside the club where the trad band played and we danced and sang and I played the spoons and generally we all acted like a big bunch of drunk Irish people at a party which was very familiar and home like and then the Ambassador dropped us all home. I was staying with Iseult who works in the Embassy and has a fabulous house. I stayed in a real bed again with a duvet it was fantastic, I slept till about lunch time when poor Iseult returned from work she had had to go to a meeting. She cooked – and this may be the most memorable part of the whole trip – sausages which she had bought in Dublin Airport!!!! Amazing! She also has a car (the life of a diplomat is a nice one) so she dropped me over to VSO as after dancing on the stones outside the club the night before in bare feet I don’t think I could have walked.

At VSO I met up with Frank another volunteer who I was staying with for the weekend. We headed to Sally’s house yet another volunteer for dinner which was lovely and just had a good old chat and catch up on everyone’s news. Then Saturday I met up with Iseult and some other young Irish women for lunch which was really nice, it is great to meet people in the same boat, so we all had a good old Irish conversation about “do you know so and so etc” which freaked the one American who was there out as yes we did all know some of the same people as you do when you are Irish! Then headed back to Frank’s house but got caught in the rain so ended up soaked to the skin and a rat ran up my leg so then I ran back to Frank’s house. We ventured out in rain coats and umbrellas etc to get something to eat later and a bottle of Ouzo, then we were supposed to go meet some other people but the rain was so bad we just stayed in and talked and drank and had one of those nights where you solve all the world’s problems theoretically! Next day Frank and I worked on our research papers we are both doing and then headed to a really nice Indian restaurant for dinner – in Addis normal life exists! Then I took some photos of the life size picture of Jesus which Frank’s land lord insists he keeps on his bedroom wall!

The next day I headed to the British clinic, where I got advice on anti-malarials, got checked to see the amoeba is gone and got told that the ulcer is just going to take weeks to heal (weekends in Addis don’t help!). Noticed I had lost another half stone in the last few weeks still huge in comparison to Ethiopians but there are some benefits to being sick! Then headed to St. Gabriels hospital where somehow managed to skip the queue and get a hep A and Hep B booster vaccination. Then I went shopping in Shola market and bought some clay pots, coffee pots and pictures for ridiculously low prices. Then I decided to treat myself and headed to the Hilton for a hair cut my first since I arrived and for the equivalent of 7 euro I got a head massage and a hair cut – a very nice hair cut too.
That night we headed out to dinner with a load of volunteers.

The next day we flew to Gondar, for the Cluster workshop. We stayed with Karen and Jan two volunteers who are lovely and we had a really nice time with them. Karen had been sick too so she looked amazingly thin, she is a physiotherapist and her work is really interesting but very difficult, she is training Ethiopia’s first physiotherapists and also supervising community physio practice so she had really great photos of her work, but it is very stressful and she gets all kinds of illnesses from working with such sick and poor people. Also she has to try and change their whole attitude to rehabilitation as many people over here wouldn’t be disabled if they got enough physio at the right time but instead they might get just one session and then be sent home with perfectly curable disabilities.

The workshop was really great we got loads of work done and we got to share a lot of experiences, it really reminds you what a difference our work is actually making and enthuses you for it all over again, by far I think it is the best project VSO is involved in as the results are so visible and are actually benefiting the local communities so it was really good and we will have another workshop in May to keep the good work going. So again loads of socialising with other volunteers while in Gondar.

We also got to see the castle which is betam conjure or very beautiful. I will try and stick a photo with this.
So we flew back to Addis again went out with other volunteers and then got the bus back to Dessie yesterday and here we are back in Dessie today with no electricity and no water and back to reality! The college tour starts on Tuesday so we aren’t back for long just enough to get the clothes washed if the water ever comes back!

Life in Addis is so different to here, there you can get anything you want, go anywhere you want there are pubs and clubs and proper shops, but I suppose here we get the authentic Ethiopian experience and it is nice to have Addis as somewhere you can go to for a break and a bit of normal living. When I arrived I thought Addis was a dump but now it really is like New York to us country folk!

Anyway so on Tuesday health permitting I will head off on the college tour which as Steve put it is a once in a life opportunity! When else will I get the chance to spend ten days on a bus with all my colleagues bumping around one of the largest countries in Africa, but looking forward to seeing the sights and I will just take it one day at a time if it gets too much for my stomach I will bail out and go stay in a hotel!

When I get back from the tour my friend Daithi and his friend Eoin will be here for two weeks, so it is go go go here. Eoin and Daithi have done some amazing fundraising for the schools here so it will be brilliant to see how happy everyone will be and to see how we can really back up their work as we are encouraging the teachers to address the problems in the schools at present but with these funds we will also be able to financially support some of their solutions so it will be good.

So by the time they are gone it will be the end of April and we will just have two months left on the programme and then the Summer will be here and my parents will be here for four weeks which I am really looking forward to and we will provide English language courses for teachers over the Summer as well. So it is amazing how the time is just sailing by, but despite the lows and the hard times the good times far out weigh the bad, it is an amazing country with amazing people and what use to just look like the third world pictures on a trocaire box now looks like home to me and those people are my friends and neighbours and really it is a privilege to be here and work here.

The Miraculous Workshop

2006-03-12T17:51:00.000Z

This week we began workshops again, so it was a busy but interesting week.
On Monday I worked hard at getting this research topic I am carrying out into shape. I am researching the attitude of children to learning English, more because it is expected that academic members of staff should engage in research and our department has been a little lax in this area so I thought I would do something to set an example but it has been interesting if a little time consuming.
Tuesday saw the first of our second semester of workshops, this workshop deals with organising the classroom and using action research as a problem solving technique. So Tuesday was the school with the most problems and the least English, always good to begin with a challenge. However about 45 minutes of the workshop was taken up by them arguing over their problems in Amharic, I began to my think that we may have done more harm than good drawing attention to all the problems, however on Friday I called into the school for another purpose and to my utter astonishment they are actively trying to solve their problems, the teachers were arranging their classrooms and had got locks for the doors (resources going missing was a big problem). They had also decided as a staff to donate a certain part of their salary each month to form a breakfast club for the hungry students and to buy notebooks and pens for those students who can’t afford them. I was speechless, I couldn’t believe that they were actually really getting to grips with the issues and coming up with their own solutions. It is things like this that reassure me that I am not wasting my time here and that there is a need to share skills and not just money with developing countries.
So this miraculous workshop continued all week and was well received in all schools, which is surprising as in essence it says “you aren’t trying hard enough and you have to solve your own problems, no-one else is going to do it for you” however with the action research model I think the teachers are surprised themselves that by discussing the problems and brainstorming they can actually come up with their own solutions. Another good example of this was the school I trained with on Friday; this schools main problem outside of not having materials was a lack of skill and confidence on the part of some teachers in organising their classrooms. They decided to come to the college on Saturday to see the model classroom and while there had a discussion about what they could do, and they have decided to organise all the classrooms as a team, instead of each teacher having to organise his or her classroom by him/herself so this will share skills and ensure all classrooms are well organised, also because of the shift system different grades use the classrooms in the morning and afternoon, but they have decided to rearrange the timetable so the same grade uses the classroom morning and afternoon to allow them to share resources. They also managed to collect a lot of materials from different departments in the college while there.
So all in all this workshop is going very well and so far is already showing great results. I was further reassured of the value of the programme when I visited a teacher who had attended a continuous assessment workshop at the beginning of the last semester, she showed me all the records she had kept of assessment and even though she had 56 children in her class she had really comprehensive records of their performance in all subjects and records of the assessment techniques she had used, I think she would put a lot of teachers at home to shame!
We also had a visit from Hossanna College of Teacher Education on Monday, getting a little tired of all the visitors to the college but I suppose it does show that the college is held in high regard by other colleges. Each visit involves a dinner or lunch which we always are invited to so that is nice and of course this one was no different only this time the people I ended up sitting with had very little English so between Amharic and English the conversation didn’t last too long.
We will be off on our own college tour soon which has been rearranged to take in a few more tourist attractions such as Harrar which is a very old walled muslim city and Awash national park which has a lot of wildlife so it sounds like it will be a good trip. This is following our trip to Gondar next week for the clustering workshop. I am heading up to Addis on Thursday for the Irish Embassies St. Patrick’s Day Party which hopefully should be fun. I of course had nothing that I could possibly wear to the party so had to go shopping yesterday and managed to get an outfit, not sure it is exactly what I would have bought if I was at home but never the less it will do.
No real other news, played a lot of table tennis yesterday and went to lunch in Yikatties house, Yikattie works in the English department and we are good friends. Then today we had a procession of visitors. This morning I decided that seeing as we have a well fenced in compound and given that the outfit I bought will show some previously unexposed parts of my body, I should sunbathe to get rid of the farmer tan, here in work it is really only ok to have your lower arms and head uncovered everything else is covered up. So I was sitting out trouser rolled up, sleeves rolled up when who should let himself into our compound but our landlord, at home you wouldn’t care but I am developing a sense of Ethiopian modesty so was highly embarrassed so he came in for a cup of tea, soon after Steve the other volunteer called with Mohamed the vice dean and his two children and then Yikattie and then Addis another woman from work so it was a very full house but really nice to see everyone, Dessie being Dessie everyone seemed to know each other anyway. Later Yikattie, Addis, Steve, Gill and I went for lunch and met up with another teacher Ashenafi for coffee afterwards, Steve came back to use my computer and has only left. So the weekend has flown by, it is amazing how easy it is to settle into a place like this.
My stomach is improving, I have identified foods which cause pain which unfortunately rules out most of the food available here, as it is lent Christians can’t buy meat at the moment, so we had to ask a muslim friend to get us meat the other day as any kind of spice was causing a lot of pain but thankfully it is improving now.

Anyway that is all the news, I shall be away next week but will post when I return the following weekend.

Ciao and Lá ‘le Pádraig Sona Daoibh

Orla

Busy Busy Week

2006-03-04T15:31:00.000Z

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

Mekelle - the Tokyo of Ethiopia

2006-02-25T15:07:00.000Z

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

2006-02-12T15:38:00.000Z

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

2006-02-12T08:52:00.001Z

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

The Weather is Getting Warmer in Dessie

2006-01-29T10:28:00.000Z

Well last Sunday we had Pirko and Matti over for lunch we hadn’t seen them in ages so it was really nice to catch up they are Finnish missionaries who work here in Dessie with Aids orphans. They have been in Ethiopia seven years now so it is interesting to talk to them as they know European and Ethiopian culture very well. In the evening we went to a wedding reception which was great fun, there was dinner and dancing. Our Ethiopian colleagues were in stitches at our attempts to copy their traditional dancing. It was a good evening and in typical Ethiopian style we were on the bus home at 8:30pm after being some of the last to leave the wedding! But weddings here go on for days really with different sets of people going to different parts of the wedding, we were invited to the meal for his work colleagues – as we work with him, but this meant it was mainly men invited to this part except two of them brought their wives with them so they must be extremely modern Ethiopian men as mostly wives don’t get to go out at all, but they were both lovely women so it was a nice opportunity for us to get to socialise with other women.

In work this week we were training in Kombolcha on Monday and Tuesday and on Tuesday all the supervisors, directors and Woreda officials took us out for lunch – they know the way to get to the top of our training schedule in future!! Then on Wednesday we were working in college where a very large workshop is taking place on Wednesday the topic was teaching English reading so I attended one of the workshops and periodically the trainer would call on me to add something to what he had said, but he is a highly intelligent man with two masters in the subject of teaching English so there wasn’t much I could add except paraphrase what he had already said, but I was gratefully thanked by the funders for my assistance and got free soft drinks for the rest of the week from the workshop funders as every time they had a break whether I was around or not they would buy a soft drink for me and have it sent to my office and even if I went to the canteen at another time to buy a soft drink the canteen had been instructed not to take my money that it was on the workshop account so there you go they probably didn’t understand a word I said and feel I have shared some new and valuable information about teaching reading with them!

On Wednesday evening we also got a phone call from another VSO volunteer who is working as a Management Advisor in Abi Adi College of Education, his name is Alan and he was in Dessie when he phoned. He had come ahead of his college who were coming on a tour! The first we had heard of it. Anyway we met Alan for dinner and had a lovely time chatting and a good excuse to have a few beers. We ran into college the next day to inform them about the Abi Adi College coming on tour but it turns out they already knew just all the notices about it were in Amharic and they had forgotten to tell Gill, Steve and I! So on Friday they came to the college all the teachers from Abi Adi and shared experience with our teachers and had lunch it was really nice and seemingly our college will also be going on a tour where yet we don’t know.

Yesterday we were sorting millions of books again over at another school which have been donated from America and then we went for lunch with Habte and Hannah a couple we are friends with and went to see the site for their new house. Really their new house will be in the most beautiful place on Earth it is up on a mountain coming into Dessie and has views of Dessie, the mountains and even as far down as the lowlands of Kombolcha it is really incredible scenery.

Also more experience sharing has taken off with one of the Dessie clusters going on a visit to Kombolcha where they have drawn up an agreement to help each other further in the future and share resources. The cluster in Dessie is going to give some of these donated books to Kombolcha and the cluster in Kombolcha which has access to chemicals is going to share some chemicals with the Dessie cluster for teaching science, so it is really good that they are now working together themselves.

Politically here things are up and down we don’t hear much but all the teachers all over the country are now being called to big meetings by the government to be basically told to support the government and we heard this week that the children in one school broke all the windows in the school and some of them were arrested and in another school a female student was beaten to death by the police for handing out anti government leaflets. So although on a day to day basis you can pretend it isn’t happening, the human rights abuses here are appalling. Luckily we haven’t been in any school when there have been disturbances. I’ll probably be tracked down for posting about it on the website!!!!

Anyway it’s amazing how caring people here are, all this going on in their own country and still they are shocked and saddened by all the people dying in Russia from the cold. Everyone is talking about it here they are really sorry for the people in Russia, I think they also think it is near us because it is Europe so they express their sadness to us, but it is crazy that people here are so upset for the people in Russia, people here probably expect that people all over the world are upset by the human rights abuses here in Ethiopia but in reality it isn’t even in the media in Europe or USA.

Anyway life goes on here in Dessie, we may be having a semester break next week though no one is sure but they said we could go ahead and arrange our holidays if we wanted to as they don’t know yet if the college will be closed or not so I think I will take a few days down the South of the country, it will be nice to have a break again! It doesn’t seem that long since I was in Lalibella.

Anyway all take care and I hope you have a good week,

Ciao,

Orla

Holidays and Funerals

2006-01-21T15:56:00.000Z

Well this week we were training in Kombolcha on Monday and Tuesday. Kombolcha is a town where the model of clustering in Education is working exactly as it was planned to work. The supervisors are really on top of things and motivate the teachers and work really well with the directors. The teachers all plan together in departments and use their own money to make resources for their teaching and the woreda education officials which are like from the town council are really supportive so it is a pleasure the work there and the teachers are really appreciative of the training.
On Wednesday we had to cancel the training due to a holiday so we went to college which should have been open and there were no teachers to be seen just loads of students so we were sitting around for a while but there was no electricity either so it was difficult to do any work. We remembered that today was the day that the man from the funding agency which funds the college was coming for a visit so we thought everyone must be at a meeting with him and forgot to tell us, but then we see a man wandering around with a folder under his arm so we ask him is he ok and it turns out he is the man from the agency and he can’t find anyone either anyway to cut a long story short it turns out the Dean of the college’s brother has died which was tragic he was killed in a bus accident near Dessie, (travelling by bus is very scary as there are many accidents) and everyone absolutely everyone had gone to the funeral as we had been in Kombolcha no one had told us about the funeral and obviously no one had thought to tell the funding man either.
So we didn’t know where the funeral was but we found a student who knew and asked him to accompany us to the funeral to show us the way. The funeral was very long and I am sure the man from the funding agency found it a great use of his time, after the funeral there as a another ceremony back in the house but we thought the funding man may have had enough of the funeral so we took him to see Kombolcha schools where he was absolutely amazed at how great they were. He also informed us that his agency would give 1000 birr for each of the 45 schools we are working with so they could make resources and we were to also organise experience sharing between the two towns and his agency will organise a National Conference of Teacher Training Colleges to see the great work going on here …. So despite the fact that almost no one from the college gave the funding man the time of day they have ended us smelling of roses, but the good thing is that the teachers on the ground will actually benefit so it was a good week and already the plans are underway for two experience sharing visits this week and a field trip for one of the Dessie Schools to Kombolcha so it finally feels like our work may be getting somewhere even though it was complete chance that we were the only people around to meet the funding man!

There was a big holiday here on Thursday and we went into Dessie to see, each church in Dessie sang and danced up the main street and into Piazza, it was really good and really colourful. The dances and songs were arranged by St. Jared in 560 something BC and haven’t changed at all since then except now they use loud speakers. The town was really crowded but the police were very calm and handled everything well including letting all the foreigners stand on the inside of the police cordon actually they allowed us to sit on the big round about in the middle we felt a bit conspicuous but then some Chinese people and Indian people were let inside too so we didn’t feel as strange but we got a good view and a seat so we weren’t complaining. In Addis Ababa the celebrations got a bit too rowdy and the police shot two people but in Dessie it was fine.

Today we sorted out about 1000 books which had been donated from schools in America and we gave them to six schools there are about another 2000 books to sort next week, the schools were so happy and the teachers gave up their free time to sort the books so these schools some of which had no books before now have an instant library they were praising God to a height and kept thanking us, we had to explain many times that we weren’t from America and we hadn’t sent the books!

It is raining today, it had looked like it would rain for about two weeks now and finally it has and in an instant Dessie has turned to mud it will rain on and off between now and April but at least it is a little warmer now than it was before. In the south of Ethiopia there is a severe drought which is causing a famine and here we have rain and plenty of food it is odd but I suppose even here it would only take one or two seasons of no rain to cause a famine too. Here no one is talking of the famine in the South of the country only I have seen it on BBC world news and CNN.

I had a very funny incident in a restaurant this week, I had drank three beers in the evening which totally shocked the waiter and I decided to use the toilet so in I went, the toilet in this restaurant is a lot better than others but is still a very smelly hole in the ground with no running water. I think the man in front of me really should have closed the door but I presumed he just didn’t care and then when it was my chance to use the toilet I realised there actually was no door, the door was totally gone disappeared so I didn’t know what to do but as I really needed to use the toilet I decided to ask the man would he just keep an eye out that no one came along, which he obligingly did although he was a little shocked and for the rest of the evening him and his friends kept winking and smiling over at me across the restaurant so he is probably some kind of legend now for having been so intimate with a white woman!

Anyway that is all the news I think, I hope you are all keeping well, Ciao,
Orla

Holiday Time

2006-01-14T09:21:00.000Z

We arrived back from Addis Ababa yesterday from the VSO HIV and AIDS workshop. The workshop was very good and worth the journey. We had to travel by bus 10 long hours up and 10 long hours back, but we had hired a mini bus so it was not too bad. AIDS and HIV are really prevalent here many of the teachers we work with have AIDS some know they have others are just sick or die so you suspect it, but in a country where people don’t think of the future its hard to know how it will be prevented, it is possible to die here from many many things any day of the week and so AIDS is just another threat. On of the women who was at our Christmas party died during the week having her appendix removed and she has three young children and a young husband, but death is a regular thing here.

Last weekend was Ethiopian Christmas so on Saturday we went to one of our female colleague’s house for dinner and watched traditional dancing videos and had a coffee ceremony. Then on Sunday we went to our male colleague’s house for dinner but at 10:30 am!! I think they had a lot of guests to fit in during the day, where again we had lots of sheep to eat and lots to drink – their home brew beer and gin and the coffee ceremony. So it was all very pleasant.
This week we worked in Kombolcha on Monday training teachers, it was our first time to train there and the teachers are very good and the classrooms well organised. Then on Tuesday it was Ied Arafa a Muslim holiday so we had no work and then Wednesday we headed to Addis.

The price of eggs has risen dramatically from 50 cents to 1 birr because all the chickens or nearly all the chickens have been killed because of the two holidays last week, with another holiday this week who knows how much we shall be paying for eggs next weekend! This week the holiday is Timkart and seemingly will involve lots of singing in the streets and processions to different churches so I am looking forward to that.

So no real other news, I got a new electric stove so I have to head into town to get an adapter for it, but after all the travelling of the last few days I am very tired so I am trying to get the energy to go into town, as a trip to town involves talking to about 50 people I will know and meet along the way and also every child will shake my hand which is lovely but tiring there is no nipping out to the shops quickly around here.

I hope you are all keeping well,
Ciao,

Orla

Christmas

2006-01-10T08:13:00.000Z

Hi
Wrote the blog below on Saturday last but due to internet problems wasn't able to post it. Ethiopian Christmas consisted of much meat eating and beer drinking, so was very enjoyable.
Take care
Orla

Hi, I haven’t written anything here in a while as was very busy with Christmas, much the same as everyone at home I imagine!
Today is my second Christmas this year as it is Ethiopian Christmas today. So when it was our Christmas there were no trees or decorations to be seen but now the town is looking really festive and everybody has been running around over the last few days getting ready. Getting ready here means buying a cow, goat or sheep and sharpening your knives! Its mad everyone is walking around with an animal or has one tied up outside their house and on every street corner there are knife sharpeners and every man is carrying a scarily big knife.

Today we are going to Aregash’s, one of our colleagues house for Christmas lunch and tomorrow to Shimelis’ house – another colleague. So this year I will have celebrated two Christmases.

Our own Christmas was lovely, really nice which was great as we were all a little apprehensive being so far from home, but James a friend of mine from home came over and Susan another Irish volunteer in Dilla came to Dessie to stay and Gill my colleague was here too and we had a lovely day. We managed to get rashers and sausages in Addis Ababa and take them on the ten hour bus journey back to Dessie, so we had a real fry on Christmas morning along with Ethiopian Shampagne and orange juice – very nice and a far cry from the bread and tea we usually have for breakfast. James was like Fr. Christmas with all the presents he brought from home and we decorated the house with balloons and handmade decorations.

Later in the day we had a party which our colleagues and friends attended, it was a good evening although we had bought 100 bottles of beer and we were left with 70 after the party!!

On the Tuesday after Christmas, myself, James and Susan headed for Lalibella where legend has it 11 rock hewn churches were built in 23 days. Lalibella was amazing really spectacular. It is incredible that they built it at all. The stone masonry is amazing. However Lalibella may possibly be one of the poorest places on the planet, the people were so poor even in comparison to Dessie. Usually when I say I am Irish here, people say “Roy Keane” but in Lalibella they said “Bob Geldof”. There are no banks or pharmacies or anything in Lalibella. In fact a man there asked me to bring some money from him to his brother in Dessie, I thought it was a bit odd that he would trust me a totally stranger with the money but with no banks there is no other way to transfer money but to give it to someone on the bus and well a ferenji is a good bet! So we had two lovely days in Lalibella and then headed back to Dessie

On New Years eve, we had another party this time a bit smaller where the aim was to finish the beer. It was a really good night we drank and danced Ethiopian and Irish dancing and a mixture of the two! And we learnt to play an Ethiopian Christmas game as well. By 2am there were only 7 bottles of beer left so we allowed people to go home.

So since then it has been back to work, observing teachers in preparatory and primary schools, making resources, teaching in the kindergarten and drinking many cups of coffee. Next week we will be in Kombolcha training for one day and then we are going to Addis Ababa for a workshop on HIV & AIDS. So it will be on the bus again. Travelling over here is hard going as the roads are so bumpy and the buses very old and crowded.

So Happy Ethiopian Christmas to all,

Ciao

Orla

Christmas is Coming

2005-12-18T10:23:00.000Z

Just Back in Dessie after a great few days away. On Tuesday we flew to Addis Ababa. The plane from Dessie is a 17 seater little propeller jet. It is tiny and doesn’t even have real seats, well it has seats but they aren’t solid or padded just pieces of material suspended between two pieces of metal. The flight is fantastic though, you can see incredible mountains, rivers, valleys and little villages perching right on top of the mountains, this gives way to a flat blanket of perfectly neat fields as you approach Addis. From the air it is also possible to see how successful irrigation schemes can be here; as every so often you can spot lush green fields in amongst the parched yellow ones.
The airfield in Kombolcha is good fun too. It is basically just a stoney but flat field with a shed to the side of it and before the plane comes there are cows on the run way and horse and carts. In the shed you meet the man who sold you the plane tickets in Dessie, he looks after all aspects of flying except actually flying the plane himself. Looking at the runway I didn’t think the plane would take off but it did and very smoothly in fact I have had worse take offs and landings in Europe than here. The flight attendant told me that Ethiopian Pilots are the best (though he could be paid to say that) because Ethiopia is at such a high altitude the fuel doesn’t burn as well so they are really skilled at take offs at high altitude and also dodging mountains as they fly!

When I arrived in Addis Ababa last September I thought I had arrived in hell. It is one of the poorest cities in the world and the poverty is everywhere, however Tuesday was my first time back there after three months in Dessie and this time it looked like New York, I couldn’t believe how good the shops looked and all the modern cars driving around it was amazing. While in Addis I bought stock cubes, cupa soups, super noodles, Pringles, salted pea nuts, and English magazines, all are unattainable in Dessie. I ate cannelloni, Pizza, chips, I even had an Irish coffee! I also met other volunteers who are living in really small places in the middle of no where. One guy had taken six buses to get to Addis Ababa, even though he is only maybe 300km from Addis it had taken him 2 days.

After a day in Addis we headed to Sodere which was fantastic, it was really hot and there was an olympic size thermal swimming pool which was like a huge hot bath. I had a great time in Sodere we had a pub quiz one night, a camp fire and Christmas party another and well lots of drinking. I wasn’t in bed before two am any night which is quite unusual now for new Ethiopian Orla. During the day we also had workshops and sessions. There was a lot about the security situation here, there are still a lot of problems and people have seen horrific things in their placements and there is a lot of tension at the boarder so we are all braced for the worst but we don’t know what will happen. I hope it won’t get too bad, on the one hand no one should be oppressed in the way the Government oppresses people here but at the same time a war or trouble will cause so much damage here and Ethiopian people really need a break they can’t afford any more fighting. Anyway it is a complex situation especially as essentially we work for the Government here so that presents its own difficulties. Some of the NGO’s who publicly condemned what happened have been warned that any more complaints and they will be expelled. So you never know I could be home earlier than expected but I really hope not!

So, I am back in Dessie now for another week of workshops and then on Friday I will head back to Addis (by road this time) to meet James and Susan. One of the VSO in Addis is having a Christmas eve party so we will attend that and then fly back to Dessie where we will have our own Christmas party here. During the following week we plan to go to Lalibella for a few days to visit the rock churches there so I am looking forward to all that.

So Merry Christmas everyone, enjoy the last week of work and enjoy the festivities next weekend. I’ll miss the usual Christmas eve fun in Skerries and of course I will miss being at home with my family Christmas day, but I am really glad I will be with friends here anyway and it will be a different Christmas but one I am really looking forward too.

Nollaig Shona

Three Months in Ethiopia

2005-12-10T13:40:00.000Z

Well I am three months in Ethiopia now and I feel so settled in. At first I liked it but I thought I would be happy to go home at the end, this week I wish the time would go more slowly as I am enjoying every minute. Once you get use to the African pace of life, you appreciate how great life here is.
Everybody here is so friendly it is incredible and everyone always has time to stop, to talk, to take coffee it is really nice. One of the lecturers Hamde, spent a year in England doing a masters and this week I was talking with him about how he found life there, and without a doubt I believe it is easier for me to come here and settle in than it was for him to go there, as here people really go out of their way to make us so welcome.
This week we began the fourth workshop, this one deals with Group work, Action research and Positive behaviour promotion in the classroom. It is a bit more challenging for the teachers. We are trying to establish if they are happy with the workshops and if they are using the methods we are teaching but it is impossible as it is the culture here to appreciate everything and to compliment everything so they will not criticise our work at all which while very nice does not help us to improve.
Yesterday we visited the Preparatory School and met with the English department who wish to work with our department. It was a good meeting; they have a brand new school which is really nice and are really committed to improving English. It is amazing how committed people here are to improving society, I am not sure if it is like this everywhere or just in Dessie.
We made a new discovery this week; we can toast bread by holding it over the electric ring! This has added a whole new dimension to our cooking. Last night we had a night out which somewhat resembled one from home. We went to a restaurant in town with Hamde and had four beers! This is the most I have drunk since I arrived in Dessie ….. I am glad to say I can still hold my drink. We left the restaurant at 10 pm and the town was deserted, late nights in Dessie do not exist.
I have been to the Ethiopian Airlines Office seven times this week to sort out our flights for Tuesday and spoken to them on the phone twice but finally the tickets are arranged. I will have the patience of Job when I return as things just take ages here and there is no way to hurry things up. Anyway now we have the tickets and will jet off on Tuesday to Addis Ababa, on Wednesday we will travel to Sodere for the Annual Volunteer Conference. I am really looking forward to seeing everyone again and just relaxing by the pool for a few days. We will fly back to Dessie on Sunday.
We are planning a Christmas party in our house. We will invite everyone we know in Dessie to try and thank them for all their hospitality so far. It will not be Christmas here till 19th January. So we are planning to decorate the house, we have Christmas music, we are going to go shopping in Addis Ababa for party nibbles and we will get some beer so it should be good fun. It will be strange for the Ethiopians as they don’t have parties like us, they have coffee ceremony and dinner etc but not just standing around having a drink parties but we are encouraging people to do party pieces and Ethiopian’s are good dancers and singers so hopefully it will be good although everyone will probably have left by half eight as it will be a very late night for them!
Our guard is keeping well, still collecting the shoes! He now realises I can speak some Amharic so he now has little conversations with me which is nice as up until this he just said ok ok but he had to tell me about the water bill during the week and to his surprise I understood and was able to answer him!
Speaking of Bills we made a third visit to the Telecommunication Company today. In September they cut us off for not paying the bill we are now afraid they will do the same thing and call in weekly to check can we pay. Today they said “no no you must pay on the 30th October” and we said “but it is December now” and they said “yes yes so come back and pay in three weeks!!!” How this makes any sense I do not know, but I do know we have not paid bills for October or November yet and so I am expecting the phone to be cut off any day now then we will have to pay a reconnection fee. I suspect this is their plan to raise more money.
Anyway thank you for all the messages and have nice week I will think of you all as I relax in the thermal springs of Sodere!
Ciao,
Orla

Walking in Dessie

2005-12-03T13:20:00.000Z

Well this week was slightly uneventful, one of those weeks which just make the time go by, pleasant but nothing special.
So apologies if this news is all mundane. We got a new teacher’s lounge in work. The teachers lounge use to be beside the student’s lounge and therefore teachers didn’t like going there as it wasn’t really a break from students .So the new lounge is in another part of the college and now well so far but I suppose it is still a novelty, everyone goes there to hang out at break time. This is great for us as we get to meet more people. Also there is a table tennis table in the staffroom now and I am learning to play much to the relief of one of the curriculum lecturers Ali who was the worst player in college but I have now relieved him of this title, even though I am useless at it, it is fun and I provide entertainment for the whole room with my bad shots etc.
There is also a coffee machine in the new lounge, so we can now enjoy machiato’s which I am sure will appear in Starbucks very fast if they are not already available as they are very nice a little like a cappuccino but nicer. We are also getting a fridge for the soft drinks and Digital Satellite TV for the teacher’s lounge!! I won’t want to return home to our little Staff room in school after this! The digital satellite TV is courtesy of America, however no one could figure out how to set it up until Steve (the Kenyan volunteer) arrived.
Well it is December now and it is very cold here. The temperatures drop below zero during the night but heat up to around 20 degrees during the day, so you leave the house in thermals, and many layers of clothes and later on find yourself sweating as the day heats up. I don’t know how people here are accustomed to it. I am sitting outside in the sun now typing this and it is about 16 degrees but later I will be frozen inside huddling around the electric fan heater which keeps breaking down and requires about three or four kicks a night to keep it going.
We are very much looking forward to Christmas here now. Tuesday week will see us flying to Addis Ababa …. According to VSO anyway. We checked with the airline and they say there is no flight but VSO insist they have booked us on a flight so we will see. So we will fly to Addis Ababa meet all the other volunteers and then head to Sodere – a thermal spring resort for a few days of relaxation …. And we need it. How the Ethiopian people just keep on working with no holidays is beyond me. They did have a lot of holidays but the Government did away with them at some stage so for Christmas they will have one day off!! I think if they had proper holidays they might work harder during the term but this is their country so if they are happy!
Then on Christmas Eve a friend of mine James is coming over from Ireland and we are meeting up with another Irish teacher here Susan to do some travelling so I am really looking forward to that.
I am sitting beside our guard’s hut at the moment, this man appears to have no family we think he may have come here after the war with Eritrea and there are still a lot of displaced people from that war so perhaps he has family somewhere. We can’t really communicate with him as he speaks Amharic but whenever we speak he just says ok ok ok whether we speak Amharic or English. Anyway he lives in a tin shed in our Garden and guards our house and he is very nice we, his clothes are the most raggy things you ever saw however under his shed I see five pairs of shoes!! He just keeps acquiring more and more shoes and mostly he wears a pair of broken white sandals, its quite mad he obviously loves buying shoes as since we paid him on Wednesday he has bought two more pairs!! Very strange!
Yesterday our housekeeper Sercalum cut her finger while cleaning the kitchen and guess what she did to cure it … took soil from the garden and mashed it into the cut. I suppose she has never heard of tetnus! When I came home from work I of course cleaned and dressed it for her and tried to explain to her not to put soil in her cuts, but it is no wonder people get sick over here. I heard of another person who burned her sandals to put melted rubber in her cuts in an attempt to heal them!!
Just back from a walk – much to the amusement of the local people I have started going for walks, well there is nothing else to do in the evenings and it is always interesting but local people can’t understand why anyone who could afford not to would walk anywhere. I walked up to the new church today to take some photos I met the same old priest as last time – Alamayo but at least this time my Amharic had improved enough for me to hold a conversation with him. I also met a man called Misehfin who is a musician and who invited me to come to his house and meet his wife and he will play some traditional music for me so I will have to take him up on this offer sometime or else he will no doubt be insulted, but it would be interesting too but strange as I don’t know him but that’s the way people are here, they just invite you to their homes or to have a coffee or that all the time. After the church I met Ato. Bayenen who was the principal of a school here and ruled it like Hitler but after the recent disturbances here, the government has put him in charge of Security – no better man!! He wants to call in to see me some day in work. Then I met a student Solomon who lives near us and then eventually had to talk to all our neighbours to get back to the house. This was a typical walk in Dessie, people are so friendly but a quick walk can turn into a long walk when you have to keep stopping to talk to people but it is nice.
So things are going well and the time is passing by very quickly. We have run about 38 workshops now in the last two months so things are very busy but interesting.
Anyway I hope you are all keeping well,
Take care
Orla

Appreciating the Cold ;-)

2005-11-26T16:56:00.000Z

Well everything here is going well. Not much to report this week as I was working very hard – for a change!! We had workshops everyday ad had heart failure twice when the college car didn’t turn up on all occasions it was nobody’s fault or at least no one would admit to it. So after we gave the general manager clear printed out instructions of our schedule we thought we were on to a winner but no of course he didn’t come to work on Friday so again no car!!! Anyway this is the way things are here – you just have to go with the flow.
The amount of people dying and sick is beginning to impinge on our work, every training course we get a litany of apologies about people who can’t attend for funerals or because they are sick. It will be hard for the country to develop with everyone dying.

Today we went to Kombolcha a town just down from Dessie. It was very pleasant, it is much warmer there as it is lower so we felt what it would be like if we had to work in real tropical temperatures. It has made me appreciate the cold of Dessie!! Anyway I see from the Irish Times that it is much colder at home so I should no longer complain.
We went to Kombolcha in search of the swimming pool, I expected some kind of hole in the ground filled with dirty water, but to our surprise it is a lovely swimming pool with nice grassy areas and tables with umbrellas and a café. It was recently build by a Polish man who has a textile factory there. Unfortunately or perhaps fortunately for the future! They were cleaning it today so we could only look, but we will definitely visit it again in the future. Of course in Kombolcha people thought we were tourists and so we got ripped off by every taxi driver in town. We were ripped off in total to a tune of ninety cent nothing to us but a lot to them. In Dessie people don’t overcharge us as they see us around and no tourists ever come to Dessie so they know we live and work here. In one taxi a boy got in who had never seen white people before he was from a rural area, he stared at us with eyes as big as saucers and then told us he would like our hair on his head.

This week we will begin workshops in Maths, so that will be a change. It is heavy going always giving workshops as between travelling to the different schools and trucking all our resources with us and then delivering the workshops and listening to all their problems etc it does make you tired but at least we are busy.

In December we will be going to a Conference for VSO in Ethiopia so we are looking forward to that. It will be in a town which has thermal springs and thermal swimming pools so that should be nice. It will also be a trip to Addis Ababa where we can buy all the things we can’t get in Dessie so we will have made a long list of things we want by the time we go.

Last Sunday we went to an Evangelical Church with some missionaries here, it was hilarious only we couldn’t laugh. Everyone was singing and crying and dancing etc. We didn’t know what to do or what they were saying. I hasten to add I won’t be going again. Afterwards we went for coffee in a café close to our house which we had avoided up until then because of the name, it is called the Semen Café!!! However it turns out to be a spelling mistake it should read the Semien Café after some mountains in Ethiopia and it turned out to be ok too!

My Dad has put up some photos on my website. www.geocities.com/orlasvso/vso.html I must say that our house is not typical of Ethiopia and it stands out like a sore thumb among all the mud huts. The houses all around us look like dilapidated cattle sheds. So yes we are very lucky to have such a nice house. Everyone in town knows our house as it is so different from anything else.

Anyway take care and I hope it isn’t too cold there. I saw the snow in the Irish Times. I have to say the grey skies at home are something I don’t miss at all.

Ciao

Orla

A Better Weekend!!

2005-11-19T09:10:00.000Z

Well this week went well, the trouble in Dessie appears to be calmed down now. Although we have heard they are arresting people who they suspect of being opposition supporters and there is certainly still a lot of political tension but no violence this week anyway.

This week we held workshops everyday twice a day. On Wednesday we finished the Continuous Assessment Workshops. I think the teachers have the idea of continuous assessment now but how many will actually use it is hard to know. Yesterday one teacher did show us some lovely examples of assessment she had carried out, so I suppose some people will.
This workshop now is on teaching English, mainly improving children’s spoken language, using big books and handwriting. Some of the teachers have so little English it is hard to know how they can teach English. However they enjoy this workshop more as there are loads of games and practical ideas. Yesterday one man from a far away school, this school hardly ever attend training, came along to the workshop and afterwards he asked if we could help him to make visual aids for his first grade class, so he is coming to the college on Monday morning for us to help him, so that is good that he actually came forward himself looking for the assistance.

In college this week our two colleagues were absent, one because his sister died and the other her aunt died. Death is pretty common here. The sister was particularly tragic as she has five young children and she had just given birth a few days previous. We called over to her house to pay our respects and it was very interesting. Quite like if someone died at home really, loads of relatives had come and all the women were preparing loads of food. They had an Arab tent in the garden as the house couldn’t have accommodated everyone and it has been raining here this week.

About two weeks ago we met some other white people out in a restaurant and we had said to them to call in some time and today the woman called in to our house. They are a Finnish couple. They have been in Ethiopia six years working with the Lutheran church. They work here in Dessie with Aids orphans in an after school club and home visits. It is really nice to meet other foreigners and they seem really nice. Tomorrow we are meeting them to go for a walk and have some lunch so we are extending our circle of friends! And part of our work is to increase Aids awareness so hopefully we may be able to do some work with them too.

This evening we are going in search of Hyenas. Sercalum is taking us over to a place near her house where the Hyenas come and people feed them as there is a meat factory there and the Hyenas come and if the people give them some meat, they will eat that and be full so they wont try and steal the good meat. So it should be interesting.
Here the weekends can be long so it is nice to have things to do, so with that this evening and meeting the Finnish people tomorrow this weekend will be quite interesting.

We headed into town last night Gill and I, Steve was at another funeral of someone else in college’s sister. We went for something to eat and had two beers and a coffee and got the last bus home at nine o’clock pm. So that was a wild night out in Dessie, actually it is a nice break from the routine and to eat out is as cheap to eat at home.

Anyway that is all the news at the moment, the weeks are flying by I have been here in Ethiopia nine weeks now. I don’t really want the time to rush by but it just does. This time next month we will be in Addis Ababa for the Christmas conference which will be a chance for all the VSO volunteers to meet up so I’m looking forward to that and the week after that James (a friend of mine) is coming over for ten days for a holiday so again I am really looking forward to that it will be a chance for me to be a tourist for a while.

So I hope you are all keeping well, the weather must be getting cold there now. Here it is warm mostly during the day and cold at night. Although this week we had a lot of rain which people aren’t too happy about as it will ruin their crops as it wasn’t nice soft rain but really heavy rain for a few days.

Anyway I’ll post again next Saturday, as they say here Ciao!

Life as normal

2005-11-12T13:19:00.000Z

Hi,
Well this Saturday is very different from last Saturday, we have electricity and running water for one and there hasn't been any trouble since Tuesday and in typical Ethiopian style, Tuesday seems a life time ago and life here in Dessie has returned to normal.
On Tuesday a house behind ours was set on fire and there was lots of shooting but since then it has all been quiet.
We resumed the workshops yesterday afternoon and to make up for all the missed days we will be giving workshops every weekday, twice a day for the next two weeks so we will be tired but the teachers appreciate it.
My Amharic language is coming along, I can understand most of what people say now and use simple sentences back which is useful for shopping etc.
Was speaking to one of the school supervisors here during the week and it turns out he use to be in scouts when he was young, but scouting had to stop here due to the communist regime but he is very keen to get it up and running again, there is one small scout troop in Dessie now. So I offered my assistance and he is off on a mission to find the leaders so we will see what happens.
We were supposed to go to Addis this weekend but with the trouble we couldn't so we are hanging around Dessie, today we went into town and had lunch bought a few things such as a blanket for our night guard who is freezing!! and we watched "I dream of Africa .." a film on TV in a cafe.
I think we will watch a DVD tonight, in our sitting room cinema, may even make pop corn! Its a far cry from my life at home, however life here is an awful lot simpler and everyday is a joy with clear blue skies and sunshine in November and of course the work feels worthwhile so it helps.
Yesterday we went to see a new church they are building here in Dessie. It was incredible, there were stone masons working by hand to carve different pictures from the bible on every wall and pillar - it will be fantastic when finished a real tourist attraction, however it will cost one million pound to finish so it may not be done in my life time but still the people are happy to work on it bit by bit - the people here have such reverence for God it is unbelievable but I suppose if this life isn't great they must hope the next will be better.
Our housekeeper Sercalum has no English, yet if we talk to her about religion she will with mime and simple Amharic speak for ages on the subject.
So it will be a busy week here in Dessie, with workshops on continuous assessment up until Wednesday and then on English methods from Wednesday on.
So take care
Orla

A Troubled Land

2005-11-06T16:10:00.000Z

Well, perhaps you have seen Ethiopia in the news this week … or perhaps not, but if it has been in the news then you will realise that about 36 people were killed by government forces in Addis Ababa during the week and about 150 or more injured. The background to this as far as we can gather from our Ethiopian friends and colleagues is this ..

In May general elections were held. Prior to the general elections the government feeling very confident in itself decided to engage in the democratic exercise of televising debates between the party leaders in the weeks prior to the elections. The Ethiopian people who had never experienced democracy in this way became very interested and very politically aware and for the first time ever they could discuss politics openly and honestly with friends and colleagues and they could openly criticise the government without fear of persecution. So in May the election took place and the EU and the USA sent observers, the USA reported that while things weren’t perfect – it was the fairest election to have taken place so far in Ethiopia. The EU – reported that the Government rigged the election. Everyone I have met whether they support the government or not says the election was rigged. Anyway the Government lost all their seats in Addis Ababa the capital and anywhere else where the ballot stations were monitored by NGOs and UN however in the country where there was no monitoring the Government won??
So naturally the Ethiopian people are annoyed because the Government who had first introduced them to democracy is now abusing it. The opposition refuse to take their seats until the Government admit what they did and the Government have declared they will take action without any regard to human rights if the opposition organise any protests.
And so in June lots of people were killed by the government. While we were in Addis there was a protest which luckily no one was killed in and now during the week there were more protests. The opposition and protesters are not using weapons just stones, the Government forces are shooting people in the head and chest. They have shot women, old men and young children, so Addis is deserted; people have stayed home afraid to go out.

In Dessie the Army arrived on Thursday and public transport ceased, we had two days which were tense but peaceful and then on Friday afternoon, trouble seemed to start with students, the army kept one school hostage overnight and killed someone in another part of the town and after they banned schools they then shot at any children who turned up for school. We could hear gun fire but it wasn’t close by and things around where we live were very quiet. On Saturday morning we were woken by gun shots right outside our house – someone had tried to set the Pepsi factory which is near our house on fire. Well for us that was as exciting as it became. We spent Saturday in the house all day – very boring and from Saturday lunch time we had no electricity or water. Just now on Sunday evening the electricity has returned but still no water. Last night we had to cook our dinner on a charcoal stove – very scout like. Today things seemed peaceful so we went to Steve – Kenyan Volunteers house for lunch and then to the hotel in the town for a drink. In the hotel the TV was on and on came the Ethiopian News and it reported about a Halloween party in Canada and someone getting a new necklace and other frivolous things and made no mention of any of the trouble!!

To add to matters the Ethiopian and Eritrean Armies are said to be advancing towards each other at the boarder … we had believed this to be a rumour but we live on the road to Eritrea and we have seen many trucks of soldiers heading north so it’s a troubled country in more ways than one. I could go on at length about all the checks and precautions, we, VSO and the college are taking to ensure we are and that we remain safe but it’s a bit boring suffice to say everyone is over cautious when it comes to our safety and I am not in the least bit worried for me.

However it does make you appreciate the things we take for granted, like freedom of speech, and safety. I mean I would certainly hope Irish Soldiers wouldn’t shoot at children if they accidentally arrived for school on a holiday!!

We began the workshops this week and we are really beginning to see that the people here have nothing … just nothing. We are running workshops for teachers, and these teachers come voluntarily in their spare time for the workshops. Many of them walk miles to attend the workshops. These teachers are teaching in mud huts, dilapidated rooms and something resembling sheds. There are not enough desks, books, paper etc. The children are orphans or sick or hungry. If they have parents the parents usually don’t care about school and so the teachers have very little support from parents, yet they are committed to improving the education system, they really believe that they are changing Ethiopian society and I hope they are.

Anyway after all that negative ranting, I can say this it is the most beautiful country in the world, with the friendliest people and the most admirable teachers. I am settling in well and constantly surprised by how many friends I have made, even walking today the postman stopped to say hello, then a taxi driver, then a teacher and then just a person we met on the bus one day, so you can’t help but feel a part of the community.

So I’ll leave it there and even if it isn’t in the news – you might spare a thought for the Ethiopians as they fight for what we take for granted – freedom.

Happy Halloween

2005-10-29T17:53:00.000Z

Well, thank you all for all the messages it is lovely to hear from everyone.
Life here in Dessie is still good, picking up pace now in work. This week in work we made Big Books of Ethiopian versions of The Boy Who Cried Wolf and Goldilocks, everyone was so impressed the college are going to organise a workshop for all the schools to come and learn how to make big books – it’s the simple things over here that seem to please them most.
Then we made maths equipment and visited the model Kindergarten which is very far removed from what a model Kindergarten should be but not for the lack of trying. The two teachers are lovely and really want to teach well but don’t know how and the college has spent loads of money on equipment which some of which is too advanced for the children and the others they just don’t know how to use. On our visit the children sang many songs again and again for us. This seems to be the main activity in the Kindergarten!
So we made some simple maths equipment – Play dough, counters and sorting boards, number cards and picture bingo and taught a demonstration lesson, but the really sad thing is the children didn’t know what to do with the equipment and couldn’t use their own initiative. We put the play dough out for example and gave each child a piece and they just sat there and then we showed them how to make things with it but it took ages for them to even try, so a lot of work will be needed but the college and the Kindergarten teachers were delighted with the help and seemed to realise that the children need to be active to learn, but it explained a lot about Ethiopian culture.
Here people don’t really work … I know most of you are thinking well sure loads of people at home skive off too, but here people don’t even know how to work they just learn in school to sit quietly and repeat what the teacher says so later they just sit quietly, everywhere there are people sitting doing nothing and if one person is working there will be five others looking at him, so they are going to have to change their entire culture to progress. Luckily teachers seem quite motivated and willing to change they just don’t know how so I suppose that is our job.
Even in our office, our Ethiopian colleagues are really motivate and dedicated and talk all the time about the future they hope for Ethiopia and the changes they wish to see etc. but take all day to do a small task and can’t figure things out like how to use a binder or stapler but when you see how the children are taught in schools you can see why, and up until a year or so ago there was no freedom of thought or that so I suppose it will take a while for things to change
But after that negative griping the good thing is there is a real feeling of optimism here, in Dessie particularly and if you take our housekeeper for example:
Sercalum is 22yr old and she left school when she was ten because her family couldn’t afford to send her anymore. But now because she is working for us (well for VSO) she will be able to afford to go back to school at night. So she will work here from 8 – 5pm and then go to school from 5:30pm till 8:30pm five nights a week and she hopes in three years to go to university. There are loads of young people like her who are getting an education and who have ambitions for the future so hopefully things will be better.
Well I have started Amharic lessons and have found a local teacher Mr. Gilletay who worked on submarines so learnt loads of languages travelling the world, he is a pretty old man now but he seems a good teacher. Its amazing how much Amharic I have learnt as it is all anyone speaks here really, well young people have some English and try it out on me all the time I can’t walk down the road but for ten or so people stopping me to say what is your name, where are you from, what age are you, where are you going etc etc all very friendly though.
No Halloween here and no bank holiday weekend, we will start giving workshops on Monday – the first one is on Continuous Assessment. We will give the same workshop twice a day for seven days so we will be well sick of it!
I will be heading down to Addis for a workshop on HIV and AIDS on the 15th November it is a Tuesday so we hope to take some time off and go for the weekend.
Tomorrow we are planning to go to a near by town called Hayak which has a lake and a church, Religion here is really big. There is a mixture of Muslims and Christians in the town and luckily they all get on well together, but at almost all times during the night you can hear either wailing from the Mosque or wailing from the Church. Sercalum was telling us that she goes to mass twice a day every day and during the night she gets up at 12am, 3am and 6am to pray – Every Night!! People here believe they are poor because God is punishing them so they do everything to please God which means there is no crime and you can get rid of beggars by saying God will bless you!!
So all is well, I have well over 30 insect bites now luckily I brought half a pharmacy with me so I am treating them all. Here pharmacies are called Drug Vendors so up on the road there is a big sign for the Rural Drug Vendor!! I must take a photo of it. Also saw a sign today for weeding cakes!!
Well take care and enjoy your Halloween 

Climb Every Mountain (or at least one anyway)

2005-10-23T06:42:00.000Z

Hi All,
Thanks for all the messages and emails. Things are great here in Dessie, the rainy season now seems to be behind us and it is now warm during the day and cold at night it is about 22 degrees during the day and i don't know at night but once the sun goes behind the mountain it is very cold. Dessie is at 2600m above sea level so it is high up in the Valley between many Mountains. Yesterday we climbed the highest of these Mount Tossa, it was fabulous, the sun was shining and the views are spectacular. We were really close up to monkeys and a huge variety of hawks it was amazing, and when we got to the top of Tossa there are villages of people who live up in the mountains and farms and all and these people climb up and down the mountain everyday to go to school and to go to the market even though the mountain is so steep, we met many people some very old carrying huge loads of wood on their backs going up and down. Three little children joined us for the walk probably with nothing better to do and they were great singing songs for us and telling us the names of all the animals in amharic so we shared sweets and lemonade with them and I don't think they had probably ever had sweets or lemonade before so it made their day!! When we got back the best surpirse of all awaited - our landlord had got a boiler fitted so we could have hot showers - joy!! So I had my first proper hot shower in three weeks just when I had mentally adjusted to cold showers - However just after my shower they cut off the water in Dessie for maintenance on the pipes so Gill - the other volunteer is still waiting for a shower. This week we visited Schools in the Dessie area some of them are so badly off with hundereds of orphans and a great lack of resources but the good news is the teachers are really trying hard to make their own resources and teach good lessons. We will begin our training courses on monday week the first workshop is continuous assessment with 40 to 60 children in every class I can see the teachers difficulty in carrying out continuous assesment!!
At the moment we are making maths resources from locally available resources to put in the model classroom and advising on the model Kindergarten. We had a visit from another college during the week to see our cluster office and it was hilarious to see how competitive the colleges are with each other, however the staff at our college felt they came out best from the visit and so spirits are high!!
So today we are having some ethiopian friends for dinner going to cook bruschetta, spagetti bolegnese and fruit salad- which will all seem very exotic and european to Ethiopian people and also only invovles one pot as two of our stoves are broken though a man has just arrived to fix them, broken things don't get thrown out in Ethiopia a new stove would cost €4.80 so I wanted to just buy a new one but our housekeeper insisted in finding someone who will fix it for 60c. So we will see how he does at the fixing probably it will be better than a new stove as people here are very good at making and fixing - they have to be!
So take care and I look forward to all your messages,
Slán
Orla

And the Sun is shining

2005-10-17T19:01:00.000Z

Well the weather has taken a change for the better here in Dessie, In fact on Sunday I got sun burnt!! We had a good weekend on Friday we treated ourselves to a meal out and a beer!! On Saturday I fumagated my mattresses after allowing many insects to gorge on my body on Friday night. Then I enjoyed a few hours reading in the Garden enjoying the fabulous scenary and burning my arms. Then headed in shopping where I tried out being Ethiopian and carrying my shopping on my head but I think it may take years of strenghtening my neck muscles before I can really carry it off. On Sunday we went in search of vegetables and with what we could find we decided to prepare, a salad, Irish Stew and banannas and chocolate for the Dessie Social event of the week - our first Dinner party. The first surprise was an added guest with no warning at all VSO dropped off Steve another VSO volunteer who will be working in Dessie. Steve is from Kenya and it will be good to have three vols in town for the social company. The dinner party went well, food was enjoyed by all and it was a nice chance for Steve to meet some of the lecturers. One of the lecturers brought his baby who is five months old and adorable. Today once again in work there was another reason why we couldn't visit schools so we busied ourselves making name badges for the teachers we will train. In the afternoon I thought one of the guys how to send an email, it was quite amazing for him as he had no understanding of the internet what so ever so it was also quite funny for me, given his questions and broken English but at least today I feel I helped someone. So life is good here in Dessie, and thanks for all the emails, and messages,
take care
Orla

Dessie

2005-10-11T18:24:00.000Z

Well Dessie is a mud bath!! well only temporarily it is raining at present, but it is a very nice town very lively and high up in the mountains. It is cold though today I am wearing a jumper and two cardigans!!
People are so friendly here and our social life is begining to take off, we were invited to dinner last weekend by an Ethiopian couple it was lovely - their house was like a shed though a nicely decorated shed, our house in comparision is a mansion in Ethiopian terms.
Work is good hasnt really taken off yet but I think it will be good, the people are lovely so kind and friendly.
Met two other foreigners at the post office today - the place to hang out!! the pst office should open at two pm but it was more like 2:30pm but as we were "guests" we were allowed sit inside to wait. Anyway will post again soon, I have the internet at home now so should be much easier,
Slán
Orla

Moving on ....

2005-10-03T12:22:00.000Z

Hi Everyone,
Thanks for all the posts and emails it is so nice to hear from everyone. Well the big day has almost arrived tomorrow I will be heading for Dessie - my placement, I am very excited. There is some political trouble here and up until yesterday morning we thought we would be stuck in Addis all week but thankfully for the first time in Ethiopia's history they managed to slove the problems peacefully so hopefully that will bode well for the future people here are very relieved.
So we can go to our placements so tonight will be our last night together as a group - the group is really great so while it is sad to split up it is still great to be going and we will be all back to gether for a HIV seminar in November and Christmas conference in December, to be honest I am glad to get away from Addis and all the smoke and smells. We met the Physics lecturer from our college last week and he seems really nice, the college seem to be doing great work so I hope we can keep it going.
I have to admit I went to the Sheraton Hotel for dinner on Saturday it would be luxurious by any standards but here it is like disney world but it was nice to be back in semi normality for a few hours - we wont have such comforts in Dessie but hey...

Anyway take care and I will post when I have news of Dessie and my job.

Slan

Orla

settling into Ethiopian life

2005-09-22T18:11:00.000Z

Hi
Everything here is tiru that means good in amharic, my amharic is coming along after about 8 hours of lessons so far, it seemed very very difficult at first now it is just difficult it is so unlike european languages that you have to just give up trying to find translations or understand the logic, to say hello you basically ask someone how they are how their family is how the harvest went how their cows are and so on it can last ten minutes but it is a nice language too as it is very polite.
Also getting to like the food here had mince meat and scrambbled egg for breakfast and injera for lunch, the injera is nice it is like a lemony pancake.
Went to the museum today and saw Lucy our ancestor it was very interesting.
Well so far so good here and thanks for all the comments,
I'll post again soon.

Arrived Safe and Sound

2005-09-17T13:42:00.000Z

Hi all,
Arrived safe and sound here in Addis Ababa, last night at about 2am. The weather was lovely up till two minutes ago when it began to thunder and lightening and raining but its fine. The VSO people here are really nice and are really looking after us and they have a good two week programme of training and sight seeing planned for us.
Addis is very like I expected.

well I only have a few mintutes now so I'll post again soon,

Slan

Orla

First Blog

2005-08-29T19:59:00.000Z

hi,
Welcome to my Blog spot this is where I hope to keep people up to date about my adventures in Ethiopia. I'll try and keep it all cheerful and I hope interesting.
Slán
Orla