Newsletters from Nekemte, Ethiopia
on Richard and Emilie VSO (Ethiopia), 02/Feb/2012 16:19, 34 days ago
October 20th 2009I never finished the saga of the passports. We were due to set off to London from Málaga on Friday, 11th September. Our passports, which we had had to send to London for them to get us Ethiopian entry visas, had been sent off by VSO to the courier company on the previous Monday with “next day delivery guaranteed”. I looked at the tracking number on the company website and noticed that on Tuesday it still said “Heathrow hub”. Throughout Tuesday and Wednesday I was phoning VSO and the courier company in London and still was told that they were “looking into it”; always comforting words, aren´t they? By Thursday morning, VSO was telling me that they were looking into alternative flights for us, which would have meant us missing the London-Addis flight, on which all our VSO colleagues were heading out, and arriving late the in-country training course as well as missing Rebecca, who was flying into London from Dubai on the Friday to see us for the day. We were determined that this would not happen, so I asked the courier company in London to give us the phone number of their Spanish counterpart, which turned out to be DHL. We’d booked a taxi to leave Estepona at 8.30 am the next day to get us to the airport in good time. The DHL office finallyinformed us that our passports had been sent to Alicante to the address where another volunteer was having her passport sent. They insisted that they had only one address for all the passports, though the girl at VSO similarly insisted that they had been in separate packets with separate addresses,which I am inclined to believe as the London courier’s website did give our correct address. Anyway, DHL said they could not get the passports to us, even at the airport to pick up there, before 12 o’clock on Friday, with our flight leaving at 11.30! We were now desperate and it was 5 pm on Thursday with disaster looming. I toyed with driving to Alicante myself through the night (it’s at least a 5-hour drive) or of hiring a taxi from Alicante to bring them (which would cost a fortune), but finally I sprinted down to a courier company in Estepona which takes my boxes of exam papers toCambridge after every exam session. They said they could get the package to us by 8.30 am the next morning when their vans arrived at the Estepona office if their man in Alicante could make it to the DHL office by 5.30 this afternoon, within a few minutes. Almost saved, but fearing the man wouldnot get there in time or that the van would be late the next morning. So, at 8.20 am with the taxi waiting outside we were at the Nacex office, biting our fingernails as if anticipating our exam results. The van arrived on the dot and they began the long process of off-loading and identifying boxes and packages of all shapes and sizes. Finally, (why did it have to be the last one?), the boss gave us a small envelope and we shrieked with relief and elation, thanked him profusely and leapt into the taxi. The moral of this tale: think globally, act locally.There was another drama in that last week which we had not wanted to talk about at the time. On the Tuesday, Emilie went to the doctor a little concerned by a lump on her collar bone. The doctor, saying that as a long-time friend he wanted to be even more cautious than usual and knowing that we were going to a place where getting skilled medical attention (or any) would be difficult, recommended its immediate removal. He personally phoned the surgeon in Marbella to arrange it (something a doctor in Spain wouldn’t normally do) and the surgeon phoned back to say he would fit Emilie in the next day. So, she had the trauma and physical after-effects of that to cope with as well as that of our impending trip and the passport saga. Emilie didn´t feel up to going to a farewell dinner friends had arranged for us, but insisted that Richard went. We only got the emailed result, another medical favour, saying that it was benign once we’d arrived in Addis. Luckily, too, there was a medical volunteer who could take out the stitches at the in-country training there.That all seems a very long time ago now. It’s typical of expats to moan about the lacks and hardships of their overseas lives and to make fun of the places they have chosen to go and live in and I’ve indulged in a bit of that, but let’s talk about the many positive features of our life here. We went for a long walk on our first sunnySunday morning (it poured in the afternoon, but I wasn’t going to be negative!) and ended up visiting an Ethiopian Orthodox church. This is a form of Christianity, older than any in Europe, dating back to the 4th century. There was a wedding in progress and the celebrants were just leaving the church, the bride and groom dressed in white robes with crowns on their heads. Many others were dressed in the traditional white robes, too, and there were drums and singing as they milled around the couple who were then seated on thrones, chairs covered with multicoloured cloths. To their right sat four young women all dressed alike in white embroidery-decorated robes and to their left sat four men similarly attired. We were standing at a respectful distance taking photos when a man approached us to say that the couple had asked if we could participate in their wedding by sitting next to them on the “best men’s” bench. Emilie was given a white shawl to wrap around her. Food was being served to be eaten plate in hand and we felt obliged to participate in that, too. A crowd of beggars gathered nearby were fed the same as the guests, obviously a tradition at these events. Can you imagine anything similar in your countries?We attended a service another Sunday at the Roman Catholic church in Nekemte. The region has a new bishop whom we had read about in the Dutch press before coming. You can imagine how the word‘Nekemte’ jumped out of the paper at us. The new bishop is Dutch and originally comes from a town near Leiden, where we were at the time. We though we would have a chat with him at the church, but he wasn’t there that day. It was interesting to us to see how the service, though entirely familiar in its structure and rituals (though not a believer of any kind, I have attended many services over the years out of obligation or curiosity), had adapted to the African context, with the choir using drums, and swaying and singing in a purely Ethiopian way. Also, the sexes were segregated, men on one side, women on the other. A woman from the congregation declaimed for several minutes at one point with an amazingly powerful, bewitching voice; we would love to have been able to understand what she was saying. Generally speaking, there does seem to be a high degree of religious tolerance in this country, though there was news that there had been a punch-up between Protestants and Orthodox believers elsewhere in the country recently; it would have had more significance, I think, if it had been between Christians and Muslims as there must be some risk of the encroachment of the fundamentalist, intolerant Islamic beliefs common in the neighbouring Sudan and Somalia. I suspect that the Protestant-Orthodox rivalry will be the main one in the near future as the latter seem to be losing adherents to the former. Here in Nekemte we have mosques and Christian churches of every stripe, with the Evangelical Protestants becoming a major force. Muslims have time off work on Fridays for their celebrations and Sundays are a parade of well-dressed Christians, bibles in hand, going back and forth to their various rituals, all of which involve a great deal of singing and chanting. The main Muslim festivals of Aid el Adha and Aid el Fitr are also national holidays for all, just as Christmas and Easter are. Muslim girls at the university do cover their heads and wear full-length garb, but it’s rare to see anyone with her face covered and the degree to which the head is covered, whether fully or only flimsily, and the clothes cling or not varies. I’ve read that overt Islamic forms of dress are increasing in the country, but we must hope it’s not to the detriment of the tolerance between religious groups.Men and women, boys and girls, mingle quite freely here, notwithstanding what I said about segregation in the Catholic church, and the youngsters certainly copy western styles in their dress, if not entirely in their behaviour. In general, people of all ages are curious, courteous and ready to smile and speak to us. Girls certainly care about their appearance and their straightened hair or elaborate braided styles testify to many hours spent in front of a mirror. There are many very attractive people and I haven’t seen a bad set of teeth yet, or hardly a fat person. Maybe there’s a health advantage to having less than the West, up to a point. Both teenage girls and boys favour jeans and T-shirts of worldwide provenance. The slogans they bear give the names of towns and regions in the West (“Saffron Walden Bee Keepers’ Association”, “Sol’s Bar Mitzvah”) that make us think there must be a market for clothes donated or sold from there. This is not at all to say that they are scruffy; except for the obviously extremely poor, everyone takes great care with his or her appearance. Older men often wear suits and ties while women totter around the uneven stony streets in skirts and high-heels with the agility of mountain goats, though women carrying huge bundles of firewood or charcoal go barefooted. There must be quite a lot of sex going on judging by the high birthrate and thecondom packets often to be found lying on the road sides. We’ve heard that some groups of university students share the rental on a house in town where they can have their assignations. The main brands of condoms, Sensation and Trust, are widely advertised and available. At least someone is listening to the anti-HIV/AIDS campaigns in a country that has suffered considerably.(I’m very much aware of the danger of facile, hasty opinions about a strange country. It is said that after a week you can write a book, after a year an article and after that you don’t know what to say as things have become too complicated!)Another lovely feature of Nekemte is the countryside and the views of it that we get from our hilltop perch, up at 2,000 metres. At this time of the year, after months of rain, there is greenery everywhere and some effort is made to grow gardens and even to trim neat hedges in the most unpromising of locations such as the forecourt of a petrol station. Amid the mud bath or the dust bowl of the university campus, a little garden has been created with a heart shape picked out in different coloured flowers.There is wildlife, or not so wild, everywhere, a town obviously offering rich pickings. Apart from the domesticated cows and goats that wander around, there are packs of wild dogs that mostly sleep during the day but take over the streets at night, howling and fighting as well as presenting a threat to humans who dare to be out. We had a couple, perhaps in the marital sense too, of black and white colobus monkeys jumping on the noisy tin roof of our house recently. There is a variety of multicoloured birds, including little red or blue ones which seem to be of the same breed and which sip delicately from the puddles on the streets and don’t seem to worry about being trodden on. Others are humming bird like, with long beaks for getting the nectar out of trumpet-like blooms on a tree in our yard. Another one has an enormous long, heavy tail which you would think would unbalance it. We saw what we took to be its mating dance. What we assumed to be the female, which lacks the tail, sat insouciantly on an electrical wire while the male, with his heavy tail, had to use all his energy flapping like mad to stay in front of her to try to make an impression and demonstrate his virility. The things we males have to do to win our females over. Vultures and hideous black birds with beaks curved like Arab daggers hover threateningly over the university, though I don’t know what that is telling us about the state of decay and potential for death. One thing it tells us is that we’re not far from wild nature.This is not the area that produces the great Ethiopian runners, but along all the flat road sides there are ping pong tables and boys, never girls, play fiercely and enthusiastically, if not expertly. These are rented out by adjoining bars or shops. On the same Sunday morning that we went to the Catholic church we found the athletics track, an earthen one, with a well-attended meeting in progress. As one might expect, the standard of the long-distance running seemed quite high. There must be a martial arts club somewhere in town, too, as we saw an exhibition in the town hall soon after we had arrived. I’ve not seen anyone jogging yet and I don’t think I would dare to be the first. Our attempts to introduce beach tennis, to a country that hasn’t even got a beach, got off to a good start the other day as another volunteer, Frits, and I started playing on a patch of grass and soon a crowd gathered to see the weird foreigners and their bizarre sport. We offered to let some play and soon everyone wanted a go. We’ll have to bring more bats and balls next time. Maybe it should be an Olympic sport.It’s heartening to see how education is valued. There is a poster in town that reads: “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance!” Mind you, it is just outside a private, fee-paying college which has an interest in the matter. There are several well-attended private primary and secondary schools charging about 100 birr (5 UK pounds) a month which offer better facilities than the state schools and private so-called universities (what we would call further education or vocational colleges) teaching courses such as Food Handling, Nursing, Hotel Management, Accounting, IT and so on. Equipment is terribly lacking (the university hasn’t even got one CD player we can use for the Listening Comprehension CDs we brought with us from Spain, so almost all teaching is highly theoretical. Even the shops here still only sell tape recorders; the CD revolution hasn’t arrived yet.Only the university lecturers can be seen, occasionally, carrying books; their students don’t possess any and just walk around clutching notebooks into which to copy the teachers’ notes gleaned from the book he or she may get hold of. Most of the books in the library seem to be out of date rejects from the West. In spite of these difficulties, education is truly seen as the route to both individual as well as national progress and there is an investment in it, again at both levels, that is wonderful to see. My Ethiopian counterpart is the child of peasant farmers, as are most people inthe country, who had already lost one child at birth. He does not know his exact age because it used not to be recorded, though now it is. He has a Masters degree and lectures in Psychology. His big ambition is to get a scholarship to do a PhD. He says that infant deaths have been drastically reduced because of the network of rural clinics, though this is causing the population boom until people realize that their newborns will survive and they do not need to have so many to ensure that some will live long enough to work and to look after them. Curiously, Marie Stopes is a household namehere, albeit spelt Marriee Stooppes or some variant in the local Oromifa language, because of the reproductive health clinics which are seen in all the towns.Finally, I really have to commend the postal service. Three items of mail, one a package, arrived from Holland in 6 days. This should be an inspiration to you all to write us an old-fashioned letter; we’d probably see it more quickly than if you email us. Snail mail takes on an opposite meaning here.Finally, I have to admire the way decisions are spontaneously made and acted upon. The 3,200 new students haven’t even started yet, at the end of October; they are waiting at home to be summoned. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Education has decided that their level of English is too low so the English Department here at the university has been told to write and organize a course of 48 hours, 3 hours a week for all of them in order to raise their level. The 15 English teachers here have just been told to get on with it. Such a lack of foresight and imposition of extra work would be met with riots anywhere else, but the teachers obediently go away and get started. Is such passivity a vice or a virtue?Am I guilty of the kind of mocking tone I condemned earlier?December 2009Internet has arrived on campus! There are few pens, little paper, still no CD player for Emilie to do listening activities, only out-of-date books in the library, no running water except for a couple of standpipes, donkeys, goats and cows roam about, but we have forty new computers with internet connection for staff to be able to look for scholarship opportunities to further their careers. It worked perfectly for the first three days, but is out of action now.It doesn’t make much difference to our jobs one way or the other. Richard is teaching university lecturers a course designed by volunteers and Ethiopians at the Ministry of Education what are known as ‘active learning methods’, classroom management, lesson planning and so on leading to a diploma which eventually all university and further education college teachers will be obliged to hold. Besides teaching the four two-hour sessions per week to two groups totaling 37 people, unfortunately all men this year, Richard has to observe them teach and make comments, mark their obligatory assignments and train an Ethiopian counterpart.Emilie has to run what is called the English Language Improvement Programme. She also has to train a counterpart, this time a female, who, ostensibly, will take over when Emilie leaves.‘Ostensibly’ because no staff stay here long before trying to go off to do a Masters or Doctorate, which are the only ways that promotion comes about. She runs classes for 2nd and 3rd year English language major students, for English department teachers as well as a class for teachers of othersubjects. All subjects are taught through the medium of English, but there is recognition that the standards are low. Emilie suffers from a complete lack of resources so she has to use the ELT books we brought with us, the Guardian Weekly, to which we subscribe, and her imagination and experience.There is no such thing as class sets of text books. She has also organized a weekly class just for female students as they are a shy minority and need ‘consciousness raising’ as well as English improvement to give them more confidence to speak up in class. Her latest idea is the setting up of an English Club where students can decide their own activities, such as watching and discussing films, having debates and so on.Apart from our official VSO-designated university commitments, we also help to run an English language session on Saturday afternoons for orphans, of whom there are a lot mostly due to AIDS and the fact that people do die young here, aged 50 or so on average. The intention is to make it fun, teaching through songs and games. We are planning to set up a Saturday morning workshop once a month or so for primary school English teachers, to improve both their knowledge of the language as well as their methodology of teaching it.Life for students at the university is hard and boring. There are few activities for them to take part in at weekend and the campus is forty or fifty minutes’ walk out of town. Even the communal ‘line taxis’ don’t go that far and you have to walk for about fifteen minutes to where they turn round to go back to town. There is no running water in their dormitories and they have to collect water from the couple of standpipes on the campus, even sometimes washing themselves and shampooing their hair, in the case of boys, under these taps, when there is water which is not always. Instead of the four to a room there are supposed to be, there are six or eight. The food they are given is very poor with no fruit or vegetables and meat only oncea week. The few richer students eat out in neighbouring shacks which serve food with a little more nourishment and variety. According to one of Richard’s students, who teaches Health and Disaster Management, there are very serious health risks on the campus because of the poor quality of the food and lack of sanitation. Students even go to the river fifteen minutes away to wash their clothes. The fact that it’s still a building site creates other dangers, though not from machinery of which there is little as most work is done by hand, by both men and women with no gloves or hard hatsfor protection. The dangers, besides to the workers are also to the staff and students as there are cracks, crevices and holes in the ground and wires dangling everywhere. You need the agility of a mountain goat to successfully negotiate the campus. In general it can be said that the patience andendurance of discomfort of people here is amazing to us spoilt Westerners, though for them it’s normal. A seriously handicapped student who uses a wheelchair finds it impossible to use on this campus with its undulations and rocky terrain, so he crawls. A female student who needed an urgent colonoscopy couldn’t afford it and a collection was made among staff and students to raise the fifty pounds, or sixty euros necessary. That’s a lot of money here. There were to be other collections taken up for sick staff or students as people realize that poor families otherwise could not affordthe cost of treatment.The students have no books and the books in the library, often donated by the West, are often out of date or inappropriate. So, the students totally depend on their teachers’ lecture notes, creating a situation in which “the teachers’ notes become the students’ notes without passing through the brains of either, according to one educationalist’s view of the standard lecture method. There is very little equipment in the laboratories so most work is purely theoretical with very little opportunity to practice. Nursing students do, however, go to the local hospital to watch or help out.There is an enormous programme of university building in Ethiopia with thirteen new universities, like ours, undergoing construction at the moment. The priority has been to put up the buildings rather than build the roads or install the water supply, causing appalling dust or mud and poor hygiene. In general, there has been a massive effort to expand education. School attendance has gone like this: 1975: 900,000; 1986: 2,900,000; 2000: 3,900,000; 2006: 14,100,000. Unfortunately, such is the shortage of teachers that teachers may be youngsters who have only just finished high school themselves and have received no training. There is also a big problem of female dropouts owing to the lack of toilet facilities, early marriage, child-bearing and, for boys as well, the need for labour on the farms, which occupy 85% of Ethiopian working population and which are labour-intensive with little use of machinery. Children look after the animals, fetch water and firewood, and sell produce at the roadside, if there is a road nearby. University teachers are generally very young and inexperienced, too, usually just having finished their Bachelors degrees. Richard is the oldest person on the campus and Emilie the second oldest!Religion and political activities are banned from the campus, though Richard was talking to two teachers about wealth not bringing happiness and giving as an example the problem of youth in Saudi Arabia who are drawn to religious extremism and even terrorism; one of the teachers said it was because they were not Christians. Another man in the street told us that he admires Britain and America because they are fighting for Christianity. I’ll write about religion another time. There are national elections in May next year and we have been warned that there may be political agitation here, especially as Nekemte is something of a hotbed of activity for the Oromo independence movement, which argues that the Oromo people get a bad deal, despite being numerically the majority, in an Amhara-dominated country.January, 7th 2010Today is the Ethiopian Christmas Day, so‘Ayana killi gari’ to you all in the local Oromo language or ‘Mery Chiritmars’ as a local coffee bar has it. Everything to do with dates and times is different here as Ethiopia didn´t adopt the Gregorian calendar in 1582 when the rest of the Christian world did, so it´s 7 years and 8 months behind and each year has 12 months of 30 days and one month of just 5 days or 6 in leap years! The time is different, too, each day starting at 6 am, so when they say 7 o´clock, it´s our 1 o´clock and vice versa! Today is a major meat-eating day for people for whom meat is a luxury. The butchers’ shops are about the only shops open this morning and they have long queues. Many people get together with neighbours, family or friends to buy a whole sheep or cow and have it slaughtered to share out. Western Christmas decorations are making a timid appearance in a few shops and cafes, but, apart from that, there is no atmosphere that we would regard as typical of Christmas: no shops packed with special goodies or children´s toys, no shopping sprees, no wrapping paper for presents. As far as we can see, no presents are given at this time.It seems an appropriate day (7th January in our calendar) to write something about religion in Ethiopia. To say it´s a religious country would be an understatement as people often mention it and everyone practises it, if by religious we refer to membership of organised churches. In the country as a whole, Christians and Muslims are about evenly-balanced in numbers, though the east is predominantly Muslim andthe North and West mainly Christian. In fact, Ethiopia has the second-largest Muslim minority in the world, after India. Everywhere, however, they are intermingled, though rarely intermarried. There are also animists among the 45 different ethno-linguistic groups which live in the south. Religionis not always coterminous with ethnic group as the largest, the Oromo, can be either Christian or Muslim. We´ve been told that ethnicity is a far more significant rallying idea politically than religion and this is why the country is now a federation of ethno-linguistic regions. The same person also said that ethnic rivalry was Africa’s biggest problem. Historically, the Amhara were the dominant people and their language was imposed on the other regions as and when they fell under Amhara control. This causes resentment even now, particularly among the more numerous Oromo, who feel they don’t get their share of the power and wealth of the country. These days children are taught in their local language until English is used in secondary school as a common, neutral language. Amharic is still, though, for other purposes, the official national language. The Amhara are usually Orthodox Christians, Christianity having arrived here as early as the 4th Century, subsequently being strongly influenced by Judaism. The Orthodox faith and the Amhara language were, under Haile Selassie´s feudalistic regime, seen as the official church and the national language, as the Catholic Churchand Castilian Spanish language were for Franco´s Spain, all other beliefs or languages being suppressed. I’ve heard an Oromo nationalist complain about the noise emanating from an Orthodox church, saying that it´s the Amhara flaunting their dominance!I find it pleasing that there may be a historical link between two of my VSO stints; there has long been a mystery about how Jewish people, or at least their rituals, found their way to Ethiopia. There is strong evidence to suggest that that there was a Jewish temple on Elephantine Island in Aswan, Egypt (where I was a volunteer in 1973-4) which was destroyed by the Egyptians around 410 BC. Nobody knows where the Jewish community went but one recent historian has attempted to show that they were the founders of the Falasha (Bet Israel) community who lived in the Amhara region of Ethiopia until the last of them were airlifted to Israel in 1991, having been recognised as true Jews by the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem in 1973. (The only way I can see the faintest link to my other VSO experience is if Thor Heyerdal was correct with his‘Ra’ theory – another religious connection as Ra was the Egyptian sun god - that the ancient Egyptians colonised South America, which he tried to prove by sailing a reed boat such as those seen on the walls of the tombs of the nobles in Luxor and which are very similar to those still sailed today on Lake Titicaca between Peru and Bolivia. He only got as far as the Caribbean islands, thus making the slight link to my time in the Turks and Caicos Islands in 1968-9!)The Marxist military movement that overthrew Haile Selassie in 1974 and ruled until 1991, tried to suppress religious belief, particularly that of the more proselytising Protestant denominations, and one of our university colleagues was imprisoned then for that reason, but now there is a constitutional right of religious freedom and what seems to be a live and let live tolerance prevails. Like any ideology that people feel deeply, through childhood indoctrination or adult conviction, there is competition for converts and fear of falling numbers of adherents. All believers think they know best and that others are benighted for not seeing the truth so I am told that churches certainly do preach a degree of hostility to other religions or denominations but religiously-motivated violence has seemed rare in recent times. An Ethiopian Lutheran told us, however, that he was worried about the influx of Muslims into this region. It has come about because of a government policy of relocating people from the poor, desert eastern part of the country, where survival is difficult or impossible, to here where the land is relatively fertile and rich. He has the Macchiavelian idea that it is a plot to deflect the politically-aware Omoros from their opposition to the government and towards a minority group in their midst, in an overwhelmingly Christian area of the country. A university lecturer told me he had been brought up to believe that a good Christian would not eat food prepared by a Muslim. So, there are all sorts of myths and prejudices surrounding religion. An elderly man in the street told me once, after asking where I was from, that Britain and the States were fine countries because they were supporting Christians and Christianity around the world! We live in a town, where younger people certainly do have boyfriends and girlfriends of other denominations, but between religions that would be far more difficult. We can’t really speak for the countryside or other regions of the county.Religion intrudes in our lives on Saturday night– Sunday morning with the haunting moaning, chanting, singing that is emitted by the Orthodox churches and continues all through the night. Though founded so long ago, and still using an ancient liturgical language, Ge’ez, that is no longer spoken except in church services, this church has no qualms about using modern amplification equipment to spread the word and, in our case, to prevent sleep. This noise is joined at about 6 am by the new,neighbouring Evangelical Church which advertises for custom and similarly abuses such modern equipment by blaring out religious pop music. Though abit early for our taste on a Sunday morning, it at least has the virtue of being jolly and boppy, whereas the preaching which follows it is downright scary, consisting of hitlerian hysterical screeching interspersed with meaningful hushed whispers and phrases repeated over and over for the awed congregation to chant back. Finally, we get paroxysmic crescendos of shouting of ‘Alleluyha’. The whole show lasts for about six hours by which time we´re ready to cut the cables or the preacher´s hoarse throat. In this area, it seems to be this type of evangelical church that is most on the rise, sponsored by foreign money, largely from the USA, I would guess.It was a great surprise to us to be in Holland in July, having accepted the placements in Nekemte, to read in the Dutch press the name that a new Catholic bishop, a Dutchman whose town of origin was right next to where we were sitting, had been appointed to Nekemte. We now know that he has lived in Ethiopia for donkey´s years (an appropriate metaphor as Ethiopian has the world´s second largest donkey population, after China) and that he covers a huge region, not just this town. The family who rent us the house we live in are Catholic and we went with them to the church to try to meet the bishop, but he wasn’t there that day. It was interesting to see, though, how the liturgy has been adapted to Ethiopian culture. The way the hymns were sung, accompanied by drumming and swaying, was pure Africa and mercifullly non- amplified.Career….At the university, female students whom we presume to be Muslims cover their hair with scarves and wear long dresses but only a very few wear the kind of long robes which completely disguise their female forms. We have heard, though, that the wearing of this kind of garment is on the increase and that there is Saudi and other Arab money going into the propagation of their version of Islam, more rigid than that traditionally practised in Ethiopia.Belief in a deity is apparently universal and the only incomprehensible phenomenon is non-belief. I’ve learnt over the years never to get into debates about my own beliefs so when I´m asked what my religion is I always answer that it´s a private matter which I don´t discuss. One of my university colleagues, who lectures in economic development and who loves serious conversation told me thathe believed that God had made all creatures exactly as they are now, that Man did coexist with the dinosaurs and that Darwin’s theory of evolution must be wrong because it defies the laws of thermodynamics. I´m afraid I couldn’t follow his argument, so maybe he´s got a point!Emilie tells me I sound too pedantic so here´s some more personal news. On our December 25th we had to work, but got off a bit early and met up with the other two VSO volunteers who are here, a Peace Corps volunteer and another Brit and two Swedish girls who are doing voluntary work for a few months at a school for deaf children. Sebastianhad arrived in Addis the previous week where I was attending a conference and Emilie was looking for books for her department at the university, which has none, as well as having a medical check-up. He came back to Nekemte with us and stayed for Christmas. He was our gamesmaster that evening andwe created our own spirit of the season, though it didn´t feel like the real thing at all. We did, however, have mince pies, which Sebastian had brought with him! He was asked at short notice to give a talk to a group of university students and 50 or so showed up and he did a good job, telling them about his life so far and the work he´s doing. He also came along to our Saturday class for orphans and led one of the games he knows. It wasn´t very touristy for him but he certainly saw a side of Ethiopian that the average tourist wouldn’t.We’re getting along fine with our work, though there are constant frustrations and, shall we say, cultural misunderstandings. I’ve had a bad knee which has been bothering me and the lack of any specialist attention in this town is a bit of a concern, but I will have to see how it goes to see if atrip to Addis is necessary.We wish you all well for the New Year and thank you very much for the Christmas cards some of you sent; you can´t imagine how much they are appreciated. Do please write if you have the time either by post: PO Box 328, Nekemte, Ethiopia or by email. We hope to hear from you.Late January-early February, 2010We’ve been away travelling for a few days during an inter-semester break at the university. We came to Addis on the public bus which is always an interesting experience. You have to get to the bus station before 6 am when the gates are opened to allow the huge throng of expectant travellers to burst through, with screams and shouts, in search of tickets and seats. No mercy or quarter are given; it’s every man and woman for himself. All the courtesies of which the Ethiopians are justifiably proud (“It’s our culture”, they say) are foregone where transport is concerned. There are ticket salesmen who shout out destinations and write you a ticket. If you are a foreigner they ask “Where are you go?” and point you in the direction of the buses concerned. This apparent chaos in the dark is disconcerting to those not in the know. If you are the last ones onto a bus you get the worst seats on the bench at the back which goes the width of the bus. I actually envy sardines in a tin, except that they’re dead. Six of you have to squeeze your bums together so tightly that you all have to stand up together to get free. Only Emilie or I could lean back on the back rest ata time while the other one leaned forward as there wasn’t room for us both to do so. A departure time of 6 does not mean the bus leaves at 6 as it will wait to fill up and if it has to leave before being full will pick up people who flag it down along the way. While the bus is waiting, traders take advantage of their captive market to sell nuts, chewing gum, biscuits, pineapples, coffee beans and other items essential for a long trip, beggars get on to seek monetary consolation for their woes and preachers may appear waving bibles or charging to kiss a cross they carry to guarantee our safe arrival. The bus exhibits a sign which reads: “ Arrive alive-wear a seatbelt”, even though there is not a seatbelt to be seen. Perhaps kissing the cross makes them redundant.When the bus eventually goes, the joys of blaring Ethiopian pop music are provided over the rattling speaker system to entertain the travellers. The buses hoot their powerful horns almost constantly, usually not in time to the music, to scatter the donkeys, children, cattle and any other road user in the way. The poorer Ethiopian public’s capacity for discomfort and ability to contort would astound Houdini. The bus may only make a pee stop every three or more hours when mostly only men get off and stand in a line at the side of the road peeing into a field; what the women do, I have no idea but they don’t usually get off to disappear behind trees on these occasions. There is also a phobia about opening the windows of the bus. Is it fear of catching cold or of ruffling their hair? If we ask to open a window there are murmurs of complaint and, after a discreet period, someone will close it again. Meanwhile, the day gets hotter; the heat, smell and squeeze of bodies is something I haven’t known since playing in a rugby scrum at school. When the bus stops for lunch in a town, there is the same rush of salesmen, usually pushy children, and beggars, who await the arrival of every bus. We arrive at the bus station in Addis, sweaty, cramped and exhausted after anything from eight to ten hours only to have to start all over again, contorting ourselves into collective taxis to get from one extreme of the town to the other.After a shower and a night in a hotel, we got the new luxury Sky Bus (“German technology-Chinese price” it announced, referring to the bus not the tickets) to Dire Dawa in the east of the country. These buses are air-conditioned with reservable seats but unfortunately, as yet, only serve a few cities. Even though it was a posh bus, its posh loo was out of actionand there were only two pee stops on the 9 hour journey so crossed legs or Buddhist mind over matter control were required. Dire Dawa, now Ethiopia’s second largest city, is beautifully laid-out with tree-lined avenues radiating out from the now disused railway station which was the town’s original ‘raison d’etre’, an appropriate expression as it was built by the French. The town was founded in 1902 to service the Franco-Ethiopian railway which ran from Addis to Djibouti. The tracks still do, but the trains don’t. The town’s importance got a major boost from the Eritrean-Ethiopian conflict and border closure which left Djibouti as Ethiopia’s only access to the sea. Why the railway has fallen into disuse is a mystery, but it is supposed to be undergoing repairs, though we didn’t see any evidence of that. As in all frontier areas, smuggling is rife and I can imagine that the smugglers talk of their Djib-booty. On our return to Addis, the bus was stopped for police searches and a Snickers bar, an imported luxury, disappeared from my bag while it was on the bus and we were off it, presumably confiscated pending further investigation.Down in the Rift Valley, Dire Dawa is fiercely hot and that, along with the herds of camels, which we haven’t seen anywhere else, and the arid, sandy landscape, made it seem more part of the Middle East. The vast market, in the Muslim area described in the guidebook as being more ‘organic’, with colourfully dressed Oromo and Afar women doing all the work, had the flavour of an Arab ‘souq’, though in the Arab world it’s usually the men manning the stalls.After one night there, we climbed the Rift Valley wall’s serpentine road in a collective taxi driven by a lunatic who drove with one hand and who thought it would entertain us to overtake lorries going into blind bends. His mate, the door operator and money collector, an essential feature of collective taxis, chewed ‘chat’, a narcotic leaf, ripping the leaves off from the branch like an animal in the zoo, as an Ethiopian who talked to us put it, probably to deaden the panic that any normal, undrugged, person would feel travelling with that driver. We were, after all, heading for the ‘chat’ capital of the world, Harar, from where it isexported all over the Middle East and, we were told even to Europe to comfort Horn of Africa émigrés. I had really looked forward to visiting the ancient walled city of Harar, considered by many Muslims to be the fourth holiest city of Islam, after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. My romantic imageof it had been inspired by reading of the travels of Sir Richard Burton who became the first non-Muslim to get inside the walls, albeit disguised as an Arab, in 1855. The town was only absorbed into the Ethiopian empire, by conquest, in 1887, Haile Selassie’s father being appointed Governor. Though the old town has 90 mosques, the main square is dominated by an Orthodox church and there is a lovely, hidden, stone-built Roman Catholic church with its own boarding school in a clean, neat, tranquil compound (too many adjectives are proof of bad writing!). The town has been recognized for its religious tolerance by UNESCO and a plaque commemorating that is set into the arch over the main gate. I was disappointed with the town, though, as it was dreadfully seedy and rundown with the shocking sight of men lining almost every street totally bombed on ‘chat’ and those who were still conscious daring to stick out their hands at the sight of us foreigners to beg, while their womenfolk bustled around buying and selling in the markets and generally leading a useful, if poor, life. We were disgusted and incredulous to be told that there were no campaigns against this vice, neither from the government, nor from the churches because, it is cynically believed, they all do it too and benefit financially from the trade in the product. So, these men spend their probably short lives in a stupour, not only being incapable of work of any kind, but also living off everyone else.We stayed in a dilapidated old government hotel which had a certain down-at-heel charm where you could imagine famous writers and travellers staying in its heyday, with waiters and waitresses who had been around to see them still wearing the same fraying uniforms. They were friendly and helpful enough. The one concession to modernity was a big screen in the lounge showing satellite sports TV enabling us to catch a bit of the men’s Australian Open tennis final and the Arsenal-Man U premiership football match whilst drinking Harar’s own excellent beer.We headed back to Addis and got another public bus to Awassa to the south, again down in the Rift Valley. This town was laid out 50 years ago, next to a huge lake of the same name, in grid fashion and is so spread out that walking is truly hard work and the threewheeler‘bajaj’ taxis, based on motorbikes made in India, are driven by lads who see dollar signs when a foreigner flags them down and ask what, for us, are absurd fares. Though lacking any character or old town centre, we found a crumbling oldish hotel next to the lake with an abundance of bird and monkey life in the trees and at the water’s edge. A monkey jumped onto our table, grabbed a bag of old bread that Emilie was going to use to feed the birds and joyfully scampered up a tree to enjoy his loot. Was it the same monkey who approached our table the next day, was shooed away by Emilie andwho ran up the tree over our heads and peeed and pooped on her?Now we’re back in Addis for Emilie to attend a workshop relating to her work and I’m using the VSO office to plan a workshop for when we get back to Nekemte, a trip which will enable us once again to savour the joys of public bus travel.February, 2010What does it mean for a country to be poor in modern times? The title of a novel by the Nigerian writer Achebe captures it:¨Things Fall Apart¨. Systems and supplies do not reliably meet people´s needs or expectations. The grip on basic modernity is tenuous. To give you an idea, here we may have electricity for a while, and/or water, sometimes internet, the scheduled university bus for teachers sometimes doesn’t show up with no explanation or warning, we go for our macchiato coffee but they can´t give it to us because there is no water, or no electricity, or no milk. A really bad day is when none of these is available. I came home from work today wanting a shower and was delighted that we had electricity, but there was no water. Last Monday we invited the other two VSOs for dinner and to play cards. There was no electricity so we couldn’t cook on our one electric ring. Luckily, we have a little backup kerosene stove and were able to put some food on the table and eat and play by candlelight. Internet may fail because there is a fault somewhere in the internet provision chain or simply because there is no electricity.There is an obvious lack of technicians, and the botched, careless way most jobs are done, be it painting, installing sockets, putting up a blackboard, even the non-technological hanging out of washing on a line, makes you either laugh or cry, but the motor mechanics must be superb, judging by the age of many of the vehicles still apparently reliably plying the roads. Harar, where we were recently, must be the Peugeot 404 capital of the world and they were 30 or 40-year-old models. I must also add that the capital is a different story, in some respects; I was given a thoroughly efficient MRI scan on my knee, even though it cost our medical insurance the equivalent of my month’s salary. We asked the President of the university what his priority would be if he were Prime Minister of the country and he had no hesitation in replying that it would be ‘infrastructure’. More things may be available these days, particularly in towns, but their supply is provisional andthey will often run out before being replaced, processed foodstuffs, beer (which is serious) and soft drinks being examples. Of course, in their present form these are all modern phenomena and depend on technology, but other types of systems fail for different, more human, reasons.There is a fear of corruption. Indeed, it is assumed that everyone who can be, is corrupt. They tell us frankly:¨We Ethiopians will always cheat or use deceit if we can, it´s the way we think¨. This is a gross exaggeration, of course, as there is a high degree of honesty in personal dealings, as there is almost everywhere. What they are referring to is where institutions, which are seen as fair game, are involved. So, systems have been put in place to discourage this type of corruption, but the effect is to stymie action and impede the achievement of the goals of the organisation. To give a couple of examples, we have computers with internet in the library, only for use by the staff. They are not attached to printers and to prevent viruses (i.e. corruption) no flash drives or CDs may be used to copy documents. Thus, nothing from internet can be downloaded and copied for use in the class, surely one of the objects of giving teachers access to internet. To prevent corruption a system is established which prevents useful action. A second case is that of money. There is a budget with detailed descriptions of what the money can be spent on. Anyone wishing to spend money for their department from the budget for their department must obtain three estimates from three different establishments for the item, but it must be exactly the same item, same make, same model. Many products are unique and are not sold in more than one shop so, either you go without, or the shop has three different stamps to feign being different shops to stamp your official forms. So, again, the system either invites the corruption it is designed to prevent, or prevents the action it is designed to foster.The result of all this is a fatalism about what can be achieved and how. Talent is wasted and good people become disenchanted time-servers who lose the ambition to make things happen. When plans are made for meetings or classes, everyone knows it might not happen because of some system breakdown, so meetings are held spontaneously without prior arrangement to ensure that it does happen, thus spoiling the plans of many of those who attend who may have been expected to teach a class or fulfil some other commitment. This is a bugbear of my work as teachers are forever missing my methodology classes because they had a spontaneous meeting. Often their students aren´t informed, either, and are standing waiting to be taught, not knowing why their teacher hasn´t shown up.We read a report on Ethiopia before we came here that said that Ethiopia is poor, but at least it is equally poor. This is obviously not completely true and we were sent a report by a Spanish newspaper that quoted the Spanish Prime Minister, Zapatero, as being surprised, while visiting Addis Ababa, at how modern things were. The report went on to say that he only saw the tiny island of recent wealth that is surrounded by the ancient sea of poverty. University teachers can not only not aspire to luxuries such as cars, but can´t even be sure of more mundane needs. The head of Amharic only gets water in her house twice a week, but the last month not at all. My counterpart hasn´t got electricity in his new house yet, after several months. Other systems fail them. They both taught summer school for two months last summer during their official holiday and signed for extra pay. The university has reneged on the amount of pay they signed for and has not yet even paid them anything.We take the reliability of systems for granted and are greatly put out when there is a failure (¨leaves on the line¨), but here the reverse is true and that attitude is a deterrent to entrepreneurship or ambition. How can you run a modern business, manufacturing for export, say, if you can´t count on a reliable electricity supply or internet for contact with suppliers or customers, or water, an ingredient in your production process? This is what underdevelopment means.This has affected us considerable recently as we have been writing materials for various workshops we are putting together. One is for English teachers in the ten local primary schools which we are running on Saturday mornings, team teaching the sessions with our two VSO colleagues who work at the Teacher Training College in Nekemte. I am running the teaching methodology side of it and Emilie the English language improvement. We started it last week and were delighted at the attendance of 40 teachers and the enthusiasm with which they received it. I even took my guitar and got them to sing a children´s song to use in class. We have also offered to run similar courses for third-year English major undergraduates, who will be teachers themselves next year, and those university teachers who have never done a pedagogy course. All this has involved hours of material writing on the computer and endless annoyance that the electricity has been going on and off for variable periods of time. It is heartening to read, and certainly makes us feel that what we are doing has some value, that ¨History has shown there is no investment more important as a determinant of personal access to an improvingquality of life than education.¨ (page 195 in ‘Key Issues in Development’ Damien Kingsbury et.al.)At least the supply of traditional products is not affected by anything I have said. Women still struggle into town with firewood or sacks of charcoal on their backs and the same few fruits, vegetables and coffee beans find their way into the markets. There doesn’t seem to be any danger of plastic shoes from China running out, in the metaphorical sense, either. Cows and goats still roam around guaranteeing the supply of meat to those who eat it. And the postal system still brings us occasional parcels of goodies that would never otherwise appear here, allowing us briefly and delightedly to escape from our dependence on what the national supply chains bring to our door.March 30th, 2010One of our greatest joys here is to sit on the little terrace in front of our house drinking tea or coffee and reading. We live in a bungalow built in more modern style, of concrete, on what they call a compound as we share the enclosed land, which has a corrugated fence and gate on the street side to give it great privacy, with another building. The other building is built in a more traditional way of‘adobe’ (mud and straw) and is just a single-storey row of five rooms with the corrugated metal roof that all buildings have. The building runs along the side of our house, around which we have a drainage channel as we are low, with steps and a sloping grassy, garden area leading down to our front door. In the first room lives Emebet who acts in some respects as our landlady as she speaks English reasonably well, having studied Law at a private “university”. Her boyfriend, Fikadu, is a lecturer at that university and usually stays over on Saturday nights. Next along comes a tallisherect young woman who dresses smartly in a skirt and jacket to go to work during the week. She works as a secretary or something similar. The next room is occupied by Selamawit a plumpish, jolly-faced young woman who is from Baku and who studies electrical engineering at one of the private colleges in town. She likes to dress somewhat outlandishly or, for special occasions, in traditional outfits. Both she and the tall lady go off to the Orthodox Church on Sundays and festivals groomed and wearing the traditional ´shamma´ shawl. Emebet is nominally Roman Catholic, though her boyfriendis Protestant. In the next room lives Emebet´s mother with a 3-year-old boy called Lombi, one of her other daughter´s children who has been farmed out as she´s busy with the other five, and Bontu a 7-year-old girl orphan, who may or may not be from some branch of the family, and finally there isa store room where the nightguard, Yadissa, sleeps. He’s a young man who studies Law in one of the private colleges so we can communicate with him to some extent in English. He´s a very soft, sweet man who always wants to help and we gladly use him to go to the bus station and grab seats for usat 6 am and to stop the bus nearer our house for us to jump aboard. It sounds colonial, but is commonly done here and we pay him extra for his troubles.We´ve been really lazy about learning any local languages, by the way, as English is the language of the university and, although Oromifa is the local language in these parts, there are many who live and work here who don´t speak it and only speak the more national language, Amharic. So, this presents a dilemma about which to learn. We do know a few greetings and expressions in Oromifa, but little more. English is so widely understood that, though we could not engage in a discussion about the finer points of quantum mechanics with them, we can manage to buy vegetables perfectly well from the ladies in the market.We sit watching the cock strut about imperiously and the hen clucks after her two remaining chicks, the other eight having survived only a few days and died one way or another. It´s not surprising their life was brief as Lombi would grossly mishandle them and anyone could step on them as they twittered around. One got its head trapped under a wire fence and Emebet´s mother shook it about and blew on it to revive it which, unsurprisingly, did not work. The remaining members of the family wander in and out of the rooms proprietorially if the doors are open. Occasional ‘wild’ dogs wander in and out of our compound. They seem to know how to open the gate, provided it´s not locked with a key, which is a bit more tricky for them. The main one recently has been a mother who must have had pups not too long ago, judging by the size of her teats, but has been attacked and has a flesh wound on one of her hind legs. It´s healing well, though. I say wild dogs, but they’re not wild in the sense of attacking people only in the sense that no one owns them and they live in the street where they feed themselves quite well to judge by their reasonable appearance and the plentiful bones of various other animals strewn around the streets. They don´t pay much attention to people being far too engrossed in their own battles and amorous escapades. They’re quiet in the day and whole families can be seen sleeping in a huddle, but are cacophonous at night when they rule the roost, so to speak.Humans have their interest, too, and we can sit and watch, as well as smell, the cooking procedures that are conducted in the various doorways over charcoal. Sometimes the smoke is overpowering and drives us away, though the worst smoke of all comes from the neighbours on a separate compound next door. We don´t know what on earth they cook, or burn, but when they do we have to close the shutters on that side of the house. When they roast coffee beans, the smell is delicious and gets our mouths watering. Lombi and Bontu play around, though they´ve been well-trained not to bother us or come to closeunless invited. They have no manufactured toys and have to be very creative with bottle tops, scraps of paper, cast off bits of chalk which they use to play at teacher and student, flowers which they break off and make a mini flower shop on a cloth on the ground. In the absence of television, theyare at play all day and never seem bored. Lombi is a singer and never stops singing scraps of the songs we have taught them at the orphans´ classes: ‘This is the Way’ and ‘Old MacDonald had a Farm’. ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ and ‘He´s got the Whole World’ obviously didn´t make the same impact. We speak to them in English and Bontu understands a lot, though Lombi just says ‘Yes’ to whatever we ask, except ‘How are you?’ to which he perfectly replies I’m fine, thanks. ‘Goodbye, see you later’ comes very easily to both of them when we leave. Hair isa constant source of activity and we see the various tasks associated with it, the washing, the brushing, the combing into elaborate styles, and that´s just Lombi. We don´t even know for sure where our neighbours go to the toilet, though there are a couple of out-houses, one of which we do knowis used for cooking ‘injera’, the round, flat bread-like substance that accompanies all meals. It´s a rubbery, light-brown-greyish substance which has been likened to carpet liner. There’s also a well which they throw half a tyre inner tube on the end of a long rope into, though usually they just use the tap on the side wall of our house. The garden at the back is quite extensive, with coffee plants among other trees from which they get the odd foodstuff. Emebet has talked of getting a cow, which the neighbouring house has, to supply various needs. That would give us another animalto watch, though we already see plenty roaming the streets. Though valuable creatures, they very often seem to be unattended as well as being intelligent enough to know where to go. Lombi and I are the only permanent males here in a very female-orientated little world. The public, outdoor world,is very much more dominated by males who gather in groups at the shoe-shining posts or just hang around, apparently idly.Both male and female circumcision are common in Ethiopia. Emilie saw Lombi looking upset in his grandma’s arms one day and was shown that his little willy had been done. She made some suggestions, not from experience of this particular event, about how the wound should be treated and a few days later was shown that all was well. The female variety is rightly known as female genital mutilation, being very different than the harmless male version, and seems to have been performed on an estimated 75% of the female population of Ethiopia. It’s a fallacy to think it is uniquely a Muslim religious ritual and, in fact, the main focus of the activity here is among the Orthodox Christian northernregions. We worry about Bontu, especially when we saw her all dressed up being taken off to some unspecified event the other day, and hope that the practice is less common in the cities. There certainly is opposition to FGM and we visited a primary school in Addis that had a woman teacher who wasa real campaigner even to the extent of visiting families who planned to perform the ritual on their daughters, if she got to hear of it, to dissuade them. She didn’t mind telling us that it had been done to her. One of the dangers, as she saw it, was that a husband would seek his pleasures elsewhere if he had an unresponsive wife.Changing the subject completely, at work, we have run two workshops on methodology for young teachers who have had no previous pedagogical training. One was Friday-Saturday, the other Monday-Tuesday for a day and a half each. The idea was to show them how to be practical in their teaching, using‘active learning methods’ to encourage their students to think and not just copy the teacher’s lectured notes. The turnout was poor as each was supposed to have 40 participants when, in fact, only 22 showed up to the first one and 16 to the second. It must be said that it was all organised in great haste with very little notice and the teachers had to hurriedly rearrange classes in order to attend. They are surprised by this new approach to teaching and tend to make excuses for why it will not work with the large classes that they have to teach and with the lack of resources at theirdisposal. We tried to show them how many of the methods could work, explaining that we have visited many classes in progress and are fully aware of the difficulties. We got further insight into some of the problems faced by anyone trying to achieve anything here with people who are supposed to beprofessionals showing up late, up to half an hour sometimes, or missing odd sessions with lame excuses. Many, though, were seriously interested and resolved to try out our suggestions as well as being pleasant people to chat to. Each workshop ended with a one-course lunch at a local restaurant paid for by the university. This kind of thing, as well as the certificate of attendance, are major incentives to get people to go to such events.Over lunch the first time, I had a friendly argument with a lecturer from the Journalism department about the problems of Africa, which he instantly blamed on colonialism and outside interference. When I cited Mugabe of Zimbabwe as a prime example of bad government, he denied that he was a dictator and that he had run his country into the ground, saying that I was getting biased information and that Mugabe was doing his best in the face of a hostile world otherwise why would other African leaders support him? He also found it most offensive, and it surprised me that he would know this detail, that Gordon Brown had refused to attend a Europe-Africa summit meeting in Lisbon because Mugabe was there. There