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on Richard and Emilie VSO (Ethiopia), 03/Feb/2012 15:20, 34 days ago
October 20th2009Inever finished the saga of the passports. We were due to set off toLondonfrom Málaga on Friday, 11thSeptember.  Our passports, which we hadhad to send toLondonfor them to get us Ethiopian entry visas, had beensent off by VSO to the courier company on the previous Monday with“next daydelivery guaranteed”.  I looked at thetracking number on the company website and noticed that on Tuesday it stillsaid“Heathrow hub”.  Throughout Tuesdayand Wednesday I was phoning VSO and the courier company in London and still wastold that they were“looking into it”; always comforting words, aren´t they? By Thursday morning, VSO was telling me that they were looking intoalternative flights for us, which would have meant us missing the London-Addisflight, on which all our VSO colleagues were heading out, and arriving late thein-country training course as well as missing Rebecca, who was flying intoLondon 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 theirSpanish counterpart, which turned out to be DHL.  We’d booked a taxi to leave Estepona at8.30 amthe next day to get us to the airport in goodtime.  The DHL office finally informed usthat our passports had been sent toAlicanteto the address where another volunteer was havingher passport sent.  They insisted thatthey had only one address for all the passports, though the girl at VSOsimilarly insisted that they had been in separate packets with separate addresses,which I am inclined to believe as theLondoncourier’s website did give our correctaddress.  Anyway, DHL said they could notget the passports to us, even at the airport to pick up there, before12 o’clockon Friday, with our flight leaving at 11.30!  We were now desperate and it was5 pmon Thursday with disaster looming.  I toyed with driving toAlicantemyself through the night (it’s at least a 5-hourdrive) or of hiring a taxi fromAlicanteto bring them (which would cost a fortune), butfinally I sprinted down to a courier company in Estepona which takes my boxesof exam papers toCambridgeafter every exam session.  They said they could get the package to us by8.30 amthe next morning when their vans arrived at theEstepona office if their man inAlicantecould make it to the DHL office by 5.30 thisafternoon, within a few minutes.  Almostsaved, but fearing the man would not get there in time or that the van would belate the next morning.  So, at8.20 amwith the taxi waiting outside we were at the Nacexoffice, biting our fingernails as if anticipating our exam results.  The van arrived on the dot and they began thelong process of off-loading and identifying boxes and packages of all shapesand sizes.  Finally, (why did it have tobe the last one?), the boss gave us a small envelope and we shrieked withrelief and elation, thanked him profusely and leapt into the taxi.  The moral of this tale:  think globally, act locally.Therewas another drama in that last week which we had not wanted to talk about atthe time.  On the Tuesday, Emilie went tothe doctor a little concerned by a lump on her collar bone.  The doctor, saying that as a long-time friendhe wanted to be even more cautious than usual and knowing that we were going toa place where getting skilled medical attention (or any) would be difficult,recommended its immediate removal.  Hepersonally phoned the surgeon inMarbellato arrange it (something a doctor inSpainwouldn’t normally do) and the surgeon phoned backto say he would fit Emilie in the next day. So, she had the trauma and physical after-effects of that to cope withas well as that of our impending trip and the passport saga.  Emilie didn´t feel up to going to a farewelldinner friends had arranged for us, but insisted that Richard went.  We only got the emailed result, anothermedical favour, saying that it was benign once we’d arrived in Addis.  Luckily, too, there was a medical volunteerwho could take out the stitches at the in-country training there.Thatall seems a very long time ago now.  It’stypical of expats to moan about the lacks and hardships of their overseas livesand to make fun of the places they have chosen to go and live in and I’veindulged in a bit of that, but let’s talk about the many positive features ofour life here.  We went for a long walkon our first sunny Sunday morning (it poured in the afternoon, but I wasn’tgoing to be negative!) and ended up visiting an Ethiopian Orthodox church.  This is a form of Christianity, older thanany inEurope, dating back to the 4thcentury.  There was a wedding in progress and thecelebrants were just leaving the church, the bride and groom dressed in whiterobes with crowns on their heads.  Manyothers were dressed in the traditional white robes, too, and there were drumsand 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 whiteembroidery-decorated robes and to their left sat four men similarlyattired.  We were standing at arespectful distance taking photos when a man approached us to say that thecouple had asked if we could participate in their wedding by sitting next tothem on the“best men’s” bench.  Emiliewas given a white shawl to wrap around her. Food was being served to be eaten plate in hand and we felt obliged toparticipate in that, too.  A crowd ofbeggars gathered nearby were fed the same as the guests, obviously a traditionat these events.  Can you imagineanything similar in your countries?Weattended a service another Sunday at the Roman Catholic church in Nekemte.  The region has a new bishop whom we had readabout 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 comesfrom a town nearLeiden, where we were at the time.  We though we would have a chat with him atthe church, but he wasn’t there that day. It was interesting to us to see how the service, though entirely familiarin its structure and rituals (though not a believer of any kind, I haveattended many services over the years out of obligation or curiosity), hadadapted to the African context, with the choir using drums, and swaying andsinging in a purely Ethiopian way.  Also,the sexes were segregated, men on one side, women on the other.  A woman from the congregation declaimed forseveral minutes at one point with an amazingly powerful, bewitching voice;  we would love to have been able to understandwhat 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 andOrthodox believers elsewhere in the country recently; it would have had moresignificance, I think, if it had been between Christians and Muslims as theremust be some risk of the encroachment of the fundamentalist, intolerant Islamicbeliefs common in the neighbouring Sudan and Somalia.  I suspect that the Protestant-Orthodoxrivalry will be the main one in the near future as the latter seem to be losingadherents to the former.  Here in Nekemtewe have mosques and Christian churches of every stripe, with the EvangelicalProtestants becoming a major force. Muslims have time off work on Fridays for their celebrations and Sundaysare a parade of well-dressed Christians, bibles in hand, going back and forthto their various rituals, all of which involve a great deal of singing andchanting.  The main Muslim festivals ofAid el Adha and Aid el Fitr are also national holidays for all, just asChristmas and Easter are.  Muslim girlsat the university do cover their heads and wear full-length garb, but it’s rareto 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 dressare increasing in the country, but we must hope it’s not to the detriment ofthe tolerance between religious groups.Menand women, boys and girls, mingle quite freely here, notwithstanding what Isaid about segregation in the Catholic church, and the youngsters certainlycopy 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 hairor elaborate braided styles testify to many hours spent in front of a mirror.  There are many very attractive people and Ihaven’t seen a bad set of teeth yet, or hardly a fat person.  Maybe there’s a health advantage to havingless than the West, up to a point.  Bothteenage girls and boys favour jeans and T-shirts of worldwide provenance.  The slogans they bear give the names of townsand regions in the West (“Saffron Walden Bee Keepers’ Association”, “Sol’s Bar Mitzvah”) that make us think theremust be a market for clothes donated or sold from there.  This is not at all to say that they arescruffy;  except for the obviouslyextremely poor, everyone takes great care with his or her appearance.  Older men often wear suits and ties whilewomen totter around the uneven stony streets in skirts and high-heels with theagility of mountain goats, though women carrying huge bundles of firewood orcharcoal go barefooted.  There must bequite a lot of sex going on judging by the high birthrate and the condompackets often to be found lying on the road sides.  We’ve heard that some groups of universitystudents share the rental on a house in town where they can have theirassignations. The main brands of condoms, Sensation and Trust, are widelyadvertised and available.  At leastsomeone is listening to the anti-HIV/AIDS campaigns in a country that hassuffered considerably.(I’mvery much aware of the danger of facile, hasty opinions about a strangecountry.  It is said that after a weekyou can write a book, after a year an article and after that you don’t knowwhat to say as things have become too complicated!)Anotherlovely feature of Nekemte is the countryside and the views of it that we getfrom our hilltop perch, up at 2,000 metres. At this time of the year, after months of rain, there is greeneryeverywhere and some effort is made to grow gardens and even to trim neat hedgesin 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 gardenhas been created with a heart shape picked out in different colouredflowers. Thereis wildlife, or not so wild, everywhere, a town obviously offering richpickings.  Apart from the domesticatedcows and goats that wander around, there are packs of wild dogs that mostlysleep during the day but take over the streets at night, howling and fightingas well as presenting a threat to humans who dare to be out.  We had a couple, perhaps in the marital sensetoo, of black and white colobus monkeys jumping on the noisy tin roof of ourhouse recently.  There is a variety ofmulticoloured birds, including little red or blue ones which seem to be of thesame breed and which sip delicately from the puddles on the streets and don’tseem to worry about being trodden on. Others are humming bird like, with long beaks for getting the nectar outof trumpet-like blooms on a tree in our yard. Another one has an enormous long, heavy tail which you would think wouldunbalance it.  We saw what we took to beits mating dance.  What we assumed to bethe female, which lacks the tail, sat insouciantly on an electrical wire whilethe male, with his heavy tail, had to use all his energy flapping like mad tostay in front of her to try to make an impression and demonstrate hisvirility.  The things we males have to doto win our females over. Vultures and hideous black birds with beaks curved likeArab daggers hover threateningly over the university, though I don’t know whatthat is telling us about the state of decay and potential for death.  One thing it tells us is that we’re not farfrom wild nature.Thisis not the area that produces the great Ethiopian runners, but along all theflat road sides there are ping pong tables and boys, never girls, play fiercelyand enthusiastically, if not expertly. These are rented out by adjoining bars or shops.  On the same Sunday morning that we went to theCatholic church we found the athletics track, an earthen one, with awell-attended meeting in progress.  Asone might expect, the standard of the long-distance running seemed quite high.  There must be a martial arts club somewherein town, too, as we saw an exhibition in the town hall soon after we hadarrived.  I’ve not seen anyone joggingyet and I don’t think I would dare to be the first.  Our attempts to introduce beach tennis, to acountry that hasn’t even got a beach, got off to a good start the other day asanother volunteer, Frits, and I started playing on a patch of grass and soon acrowd gathered to see the weird foreigners and their bizarre sport.  We offered to let some play and soon everyonewanted a go.  We’ll have to bring morebats and balls next time.  Maybe itshould be an Olympic sport.It’sheartening to see how education is valued. There is a poster in town that reads:“If you think education isexpensive, try ignorance!”  Mind you, itis just outside a private, fee-paying college which has an interest in thematter.  There are several well-attendedprivate primary and secondary schools charging about 100 birr (5 UK pounds) amonth which offer better facilities than the state schools and privateso-called universities (what we would call further education or vocationalcolleges) teaching courses such as Food Handling, Nursing, Hotel Management,Accounting, IT and so on.  Equipment isterribly lacking (the university hasn’t even got one CD player we can use forthe Listening Comprehension CDs we brought with us from Spain, so almost allteaching is highly theoretical.  Even theshops 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 intowhich to copy the teachers’ notes gleaned from the book he or she may get holdof.  Most of the books in the libraryseem to be out of date rejects from the West. In spite of these difficulties, education is truly seen as the route toboth 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 mostpeople in the country, who had already lost one child at birth.  He does not know his exact age because itused 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 todo a PhD.  He says that infant deathshave been drastically reduced because of the network of rural clinics, thoughthis is causing the population boom until people realize that their newbornswill survive and they do not need to have so many to ensure that some will livelong enough to work and to look after them. Curiously, Marie Stopes is a household name here, albeit spelt MarrieeStooppes or some variant in the local Oromifa language, because of thereproductive 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 fromHollandin 6 days. This should be an inspiration to you all to write us an old-fashionedletter; 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 startedyet, at the end of October; they are waiting at home to be summoned.  Meanwhile, the Ministry of Education hasdecided that their level of English is too low so the English Department hereat the university has been told to write and organize a course of 48 hours, 3hours a week for all of them in order to raise their level.  The 15 English teachers here have just beentold to get on with it.  Such a lack offoresight 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 Icondemned earlier?December 2009Internethas arrived on campus!  There are fewpens, 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 ofstandpipes, donkeys, goats and cows roam about, but we have forty new computerswith internet connection for staff to be able to look for scholarshipopportunities to further their careers. It worked perfectly for the first three days, but is out of actionnow. Itdoesn’t make much difference to our jobs one way or the other.  Richard is teaching  university lecturers a course designed byvolunteers 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 whicheventually all university and further education college teachers will beobliged to hold.  Besides teaching thefour two-hour sessions per week to two groups totaling 37 people, unfortunatelyall men this year, Richard has to observe them teach and make comments, marktheir obligatory assignments and train an Ethiopian counterpart.Emiliehas to run what is called the English Language Improvement Programme.  She also has to train a counterpart, thistime a female, who, ostensibly, will take over when Emilie leaves. ‘Ostensibly’ because no staff stay here longbefore trying to go off to do a Masters or Doctorate, which are the only waysthat promotion comes about.  She runsclasses for 2ndand 3rdyear English language majorstudents, for English department teachers as well as a class for teachers ofother subjects.  All subjects are taughtthrough the medium of English, but there is recognition that the standards arelow.  Emilie suffers from a complete lackof resources so she has to use theELTbooks we brought with us, the Guardian Weekly, towhich we subscribe, and her imagination and experience.  There is no such thing as class sets of textbooks.  She has also organized a weeklyclass just for female students as they are a shy minority and need‘consciousness raising’ as well as English improvement to give them moreconfidence to speak up in class.  Herlatest idea is the setting up of an English Club where students can decidetheir own activities, such as watching and discussing films, having debates andso on.Apartfrom our official VSO-designated university commitments, we also help to run anEnglish language session on Saturday afternoons for orphans, of whom there area lot mostly due to AIDS and the fact that people do die young here, aged 50 orso on average.  The intention is to makeit fun, teaching through songs and games. We are planning to set up a Saturday morning workshop once a month or sofor primary school English teachers, to improve both their knowledge of thelanguage as well as their methodology of teaching it.Lifefor students at the university is hard and boring.  There are few activities for them to takepart in at weekend and the campus is forty or fifty minutes’ walk out oftown.  Even the communal‘line taxis’don’t go that far and you have to walk for about fifteen minutes to where theyturn round to go back to town.  There isno running water in their dormitories and they have to collect water from thecouple of standpipes on the campus, even sometimes washing themselves andshampooing their hair, in the case of boys, under these taps, when there iswater which is not always.  Instead ofthe four to a room there are supposed to be, there are six or eight.  The food they are given is very poor with nofruit or vegetables and meat only once a week. The few richer students eat out in neighbouring shacks which serve foodwith a little more nourishment and variety. According to one of Richard’s students, who teaches Health and DisasterManagement, there are very serious health risks on the campus because of thepoor quality of the food and lack of sanitation.  Students even go to the river fifteen minutesaway to wash their clothes.  The factthat it’s still a building site creates other dangers, though not frommachinery of which there is little as most work is done by hand, by both menand women with no gloves or hard hats for protection.  The dangers, besides to the workers are alsoto the staff and students as there are cracks, crevices and holes in the groundand wires dangling everywhere. You need the agility of a mountain goat tosuccessfully negotiate the campus.  Ingeneral it can be said that the patience and endurance of discomfort of peoplehere is amazing to us spoilt Westerners, though for them it’s normal.  A seriously handicapped student who uses awheelchair finds it impossible to use on this campus with its undulations androcky terrain, so he crawls.  A femalestudent who needed an urgent colonoscopy couldn’t afford it and a collectionwas made among staff and students to raise the fifty pounds, or sixty eurosnecessary.  That’s a lot of moneyhere.  There were to be other collectionstaken up for sick staff or students as people realize that poor familiesotherwise could not afford the cost of treatment.Thestudents 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’ noteswithout passing through the brains of either, according to one educationalist’sview of the standard lecture method. There is very little equipment in the laboratories so most work ispurely theoretical with very little opportunity to practice.  Nursing students do, however, go to the localhospital to watch or help out.Thereis an enormous programme of university building inEthiopiawith thirteen new universities, like ours,undergoing construction at the moment. The priority has been to put up the buildings rather than build theroads or install the water supply, causing appalling dust or mud and poorhygiene.  In general, there has been amassive 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 theshortage of teachers that teachers may be youngsters who have only justfinished high school themselves and have received no training. There is also abig problem of female dropouts owing to the lack of toilet facilities, earlymarriage, child-bearing and, for boys as well, the need for labour on thefarms, which occupy 85% of Ethiopian working population and which arelabour-intensive with little use of machinery.  Children look after the animals, fetch water and firewood, and sellproduce at the roadside, if there is a road nearby.  University teachers are generally very youngand inexperienced, too, usually just having finished their Bachelorsdegrees.  Richard is the oldest person onthe campus and Emilie the second oldest!Religionand political activities are banned from the campus, though Richard was talkingto two teachers about wealth not bringing happiness and giving as an examplethe problem of youth inSaudi Arabiawho are drawn to religious extremism and eventerrorism;  one of the teachers said itwas because they were not Christians. Another man in the street told us that he admiresBritainandAmericabecause they are fighting for Christianity.  I’ll write about religion another time.  There are national elections in May next yearand we have been warned that there may be political agitation here, especiallyas Nekemte is something of a hotbed of activity for the Oromo independencemovement, which argues that the Oromo people get a bad deal, despite beingnumerically the majority, in an Amhara-dominated country.January, 7th2010Today is the EthiopianChristmas 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 Ethiopiadidn´t adopt the Gregorian calendar in 1582 when the rest of the Christianworld did, so it´s 7 years and 8 months behind and each year has 12 months of30 days and one month of just 5 days or6 inleap years! The time is different, too, each day starting at 6 am, so when they say7 o´clock, it´s our 1 o´clock and vice versa! Today is a major meat-eating day for people for whom meat is aluxury.  The butchers’ shops are aboutthe 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 shareout.  Western Christmas decorations aremaking a timid appearance in a few shops and cafes, but, apart from that, thereis no atmosphere that we would regard as typical of Christmas: no shops packedwith special goodies or children´s toys, no shopping sprees, no wrapping paperfor presents.  As far as we can see, nopresents are given at this time.It seems an appropriate day(7thJanuary in our calendar) to write something about religion inEthiopia.  To say it´s a religious country would be anunderstatement as people often mention it and everyone practises it, if byreligious we refer to membership of organised churches.  In the country as a whole, Christians andMuslims are about evenly-balanced in numbers, though the east is predominantlyMuslim and the North and West mainly Christian. In fact,Ethiopiahas thesecond-largest Muslim minority in the world, afterIndia. Everywhere,however, they are intermingled, though rarely intermarried.  There are also animists among the 45different ethno-linguistic groups which live in the south.  Religion is not always coterminous withethnic group as the largest, the Oromo, can be either Christian or Muslim.  We´ve been told that ethnicity is a far moresignificant rallying idea politically than religion and this is why the countryis now a federation of ethno-linguistic regions. The same person also said thatethnic rivalry wasAfrica’s biggest problem.Historically, the  Amhara were thedominant people and their language was imposed on the other regions as and whenthey fell under Amhara control.  Thiscauses resentment even now, particularly among the more numerous Oromo, whofeel they don’t get their share of the power and wealth of the country.  These days children are taught in their locallanguage until English is used in secondary school as a common, neutrallanguage.  Amharic is still, though, forother purposes, the official national language. The Amhara are usually Orthodox Christians, Christianity having arrivedhere as early as the 4thCentury, subsequently being stronglyinfluenced by Judaism. The Orthodox faith and the Amhara language were, underHaile Selassie´s feudalistic regime, seen as the official church and thenational language, as the Catholic Church and Castilian Spanish language werefor Franco´s Spain, all other beliefs or languages being suppressed.  I’ve heard an Oromo nationalist complainabout the noise emanating from an Orthodox church, saying that it´s the Amharaflaunting their dominance!I find it pleasing thatthere may be a historical link between two of my VSO stints; there has longbeen a mystery about how Jewish people, or at least their rituals, found theirway toEthiopia.  There is strong evidence to suggest that thatthere was a Jewish temple  onElephantineIslandinAswan,Egypt(where I was avolunteer in 1973-4) which was destroyed by the Egyptians around 410 BC.  Nobody knows where the Jewish community wentbut one recent historian has attempted to show that they were the founders ofthe Falasha (Bet Israel) community who lived in the Amhara region of Ethiopiauntil the last of them were airlifted to Israel in 1991, having been recognisedas true Jews by the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem in 1973.  (The only way I can see the faintest link to myother VSO experience is if Thor Heyerdal was correct with his‘Ra’ theory –another religious connection as Ra was the Egyptian sun god - that the ancientEgyptians colonised South America, which he tried to prove by sailing a reedboat such as those seen on the walls of the tombs of the nobles in Luxor andwhich are very similar to those still sailed todayon Lake Titicaca betweenPeru and Bolivia.  He only got as far astheCaribbeanislands, thus making the slight link to my time intheTurks and Caicos Islandsin 1968-9!)The Marxist militarymovement that overthrew Haile Selassie in 1974 and ruled until 1991, tried tosuppress religious belief, particularly that of the more proselytisingProtestant denominations, and one of our university colleagues was imprisonedthen for that reason, but now there is a constitutional right of religiousfreedom 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 forconverts and fear of falling numbers of adherents.  All believers think they know best and thatothers are benighted for not seeing the truth so I am told that churchescertainly do preach a degree of hostility to other religions or denominationsbut religiously-motivated violence has seemed rare in recent times.  An Ethiopian Lutheran told us, however, thathe was worried about the influx of Muslims into this region.  It has come about because of a governmentpolicy of relocating people from the poor, desert eastern part of the country,where survival is difficult or impossible, to here where the land is relativelyfertile and rich.  He has theMacchiavelian idea that it is a plot to deflect the politically-aware Omorosfrom their opposition to the government and towards a minority group in theirmidst, in an overwhelmingly Christian area of the country.  A university lecturer told me he had beenbrought up to believe that a good Christian would not eat food prepared by aMuslim.  So, there are all sorts of mythsand prejudices surrounding religion. An elderly man in the street told me once,after asking where I was from, thatBritainand the Stateswere fine countries because they were supporting Christians and Christianityaround the world!  We live in a town,where younger people certainly do have boyfriends and girlfriends of otherdenominations, but between religions that would be far more difficult.  We can’t really speak for the countryside orother regions of the county.Religion intrudes in ourlives on Saturday night– Sunday morning with the haunting moaning, chanting,singing that is emitted by the Orthodox churches and continues all through thenight.  Though founded so long ago, andstill using an ancient liturgical language, Ge’ez, that is no longer spoken exceptin church services, this church has no qualms about using modern amplificationequipment to spread the word and, in our case, to prevent sleep.  This noise is joined at about6 amby the new,neighbouringEvangelicalChurchwhichadvertises for custom and similarly abuses such modern equipment by blaring outreligious pop music.  Though a bit earlyfor our taste on a Sunday morning, it at least has the virtue of being jollyand boppy, whereas the preaching which follows it is downright scary, consistingof hitlerian hysterical screeching interspersed with meaningful hushed whispersand phrases repeated over and over for the awed congregation to chantback.  Finally, we get paroxysmiccrescendos of shouting of‘Alleluyha’. The whole show lasts for about six hours by which time we´re ready tocut the cables or the preacher´s hoarse throat. In this area, it seems to be this type of evangelical church that ismost on the rise, sponsored by foreign money, largely from theUSA, I would guess.It was a great surprise tous to be in Holland in July, having accepted the placements in Nekemte, to readin the Dutch press the name that a new Catholic bishop, a Dutchman whose townof origin was right next to where we were sitting, had been appointed toNekemte.  We now know that he has livedinEthiopiafor donkey´syears (an appropriate metaphor as Ethiopian has the world´s second largestdonkey population, afterChina) and that hecovers a huge region, not just this town. The family who rent us the house we live in are Catholic and we wentwith them to the church to try to meet the bishop, but he wasn’t there thatday.  It was interesting to see, though,how the liturgy has been adapted to Ethiopian culture.  The way the hymns were sung, accompanied bydrumming and swaying, was pureAfricaand mercifulllynon- amplified.Career….At the university, femalestudents whom we presume to be Muslims cover their hair with scarves and wearlong dresses but only a very few wear the kind of long robes which completelydisguise their female forms.  We haveheard, though, that the wearing of this kind of garment is on the increase andthat there is Saudi and other Arab money going into the propagation of theirversion of Islam, more rigid than that traditionally practised in Ethiopia.Belief in a deity isapparently universal and the only incomprehensible phenomenon isnon-belief.  I’ve learnt over the yearsnever to get into debates about my own beliefs so when I´m asked what myreligion is I always answer that it´s a private matter which I don´tdiscuss.  One of my universitycolleagues, who lectures in economic development and who loves seriousconversation told me that he believed that God had made all creatures exactlyas they are now, that Man did coexist with the dinosaurs and that Darwin’stheory of evolution must be wrong because it defies the laws ofthermodynamics.  I´m afraid I couldn’tfollow his argument, so maybe he´s got a point!Emilie tells me I sound toopedantic so here´s some more personal news. On our December 25thwe had to work, but got off a bit earlyand met up with the other two VSO volunteers who are here, a Peace Corpsvolunteer and another Brit and two Swedish girls who are doing voluntary workfor a few months at a school for deaf children. Sebastian had arrived in Addis the previous week where I was attending aconference and Emilie was looking for books for her department at theuniversity, which has none, as well as having a medical check-up.  He came back to Nekemte with us and stayedfor Christmas.  He was our gamesmasterthat evening and we created our own spirit of the season, though it didn´t feellike 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 talkto 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 fororphans and led one of the games he knows. It wasn´t very touristy for him but he certainly saw a side of Ethiopianthat the average tourist wouldn’t.We’re getting along finewith our work, though there are constant frustrations and, shall we say,cultural misunderstandings.  I’ve had abad knee which has been bothering me and the lack of any specialist attentionin this town is a bit of a concern, but I will have to see how it goes to seeif a trip to Addis is necessary. We wish you all well forthe New Year and thank you very much for the Christmas cards some of yousent;  you can´t imagine how much theyare appreciated.  Do please write if youhave the time either by post: PO Box 328,Nekemte,Ethiopiaor byemail.  We hope to hear from you.Late January-earlyFebruary, 2010We’vebeen away travelling for a few days during an inter-semester break at theuniversity.  We came to Addis on thepublic bus which is always an interesting experience.  You have to get to the bus station before6 amwhen the gates are opened to allow the huge throngof expectant travellers to burst through, with screams and shouts, in search oftickets and seats.  No mercy or quarterare given; it’s every man and woman for himself.  All the courtesies of which the Ethiopiansare justifiably proud (“It’s our culture”, they say) are foregone wheretransport is concerned.  There are ticketsalesmen who shout out destinations and write you a ticket.  If you are a foreigner they ask“Where areyou go?” and point you in the direction of the buses concerned.  This apparent chaos in the dark is disconcertingto those not in the know.  If you are thelast ones onto a bus you get the worst seats on the bench at the back whichgoes the width of the bus.  I actuallyenvy sardines in a tin, except that they’re dead.  Six of you have to squeeze your bums togetherso tightly that you all have to stand up together to get free.  Only Emilie or I could lean back on the backrest at a time while the other one leaned forward as there wasn’t room for usboth to do so.  A departure time of 6does not mean the bus leaves at 6 as it will wait to fill up and if it has toleave before being full will pick up people who flag it down along theway.  While the bus is waiting, traderstake advantage of their captive market to sell nuts, chewing gum, biscuits,pineapples, coffee beans and other items essential for a long trip, beggars geton to seek monetary consolation for their woes and preachers may appear wavingbibles or charging to kiss a cross they carry to guarantee our safearrival.  The bus exhibits a sign whichreads:“ Arrive alive-wear a seatbelt”, even though there is not a seatbelt tobe seen.  Perhaps kissing the cross makesthem redundant.Whenthe bus eventually goes, the joys of blaring Ethiopian pop music are providedover the rattling speaker system to entertain the travellers.  The buses hoot their powerful horns almostconstantly, 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 tocontort would astound Houdini.  The busmay only make a pee stop every three or more hours when mostly only men get offand stand in a line at the side of the road peeing into a field; what the womendo, I have no idea but they don’t usually get off to disappear behind trees onthese occasions.  There is also a phobiaabout opening the windows of the bus.  Isit fear of catching cold or of ruffling their hair?  If we ask to open a window there are murmursof 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 arugby scrum at school.   When the busstops for lunch in a town, there is the same rush of salesmen, usually pushychildren, 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 tohave to start all over again, contorting ourselves into collective taxis to getfrom one extreme of the town to the other. Aftera shower and a night in a hotel, we got the new luxury Sky Bus (“Germantechnology-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 loowas out of action and there were only two pee stops on the 9 hour journey socrossed legs or Buddhist mind over matter control were required.  Dire Dawa, nowEthiopia’s second largest city, is beautifully laid-outwith tree-lined avenues radiating out from the now disused railway stationwhich was the town’s original ‘raison d’etre’, an appropriate expression as itwas built by the French.   The town wasfounded in 1902 to service the Franco-Ethiopian railway which ran from Addis toDjibouti.  The tracksstill do, but the trains don’t.  Thetown’s importance got a major boost from the Eritrean-Ethiopian conflict and borderclosure which leftDjiboutiasEthiopia’s only access to the sea.  Why the railway has fallen into disuse is amystery, but it is supposed to be undergoing repairs, though we didn’t see anyevidence of that.  As in all frontierareas, smuggling is rife and I can imagine that the smugglers talk of theirDjib-booty.   On our return to Addis, thebus 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, presumablyconfiscated pending further investigation.Downin the Rift Valley, Dire Dawa is fiercely hot and that, along with the herds ofcamels, which we haven’t seen anywhere else, and the arid, sandy landscape,made it seem more part of theMiddle East.  The vast market, in the Muslim area describedin the guidebook as being more‘organic’, with colourfully dressed Oromo andAfar women doing all the work, had the flavour of an Arab ‘souq’, though in theArab world it’s usually the men manning the stalls. Afterone night there, we climbed the Rift Valley wall’s serpentine road in acollective taxi driven by a lunatic who drove with one hand and who thought itwould 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 anEthiopian who talked to us put it, probably to deaden the panic that anynormal, undrugged, person would feel travelling with that driver.  We were, after all, heading for the‘chat’capital of the world, Harar, from where it is exported all over theMiddle Eastand, we were told even toEuropeto comfort Horn of Africaémigrés. I had really looked forward to visiting the ancient walled city ofHarar, considered by many Muslims to be the fourthholiest city ofIslam, afterMecca,MedinaandJerusalem.  Myromantic image of it had been inspired by reading of the travels of Sir RichardBurton who became the first non-Muslim to get inside the walls, albeitdisguised as an Arab, in 1855.  The townwas only absorbed into the Ethiopian empire, by conquest, in 1887, HaileSelassie’s father being appointed Governor. Though the old town has 90 mosques, the main square is dominated by anOrthodox church and there is a lovely, hidden, stone-built Roman Catholicchurch with its own boarding school in a clean, neat, tranquil compound (toomany adjectives are proof of bad writing!). The town has been recognized for its religious tolerance by UNESCO and aplaque commemorating that is set into the arch over the main gate.  I was disappointed with the town, though, asit was dreadfully seedy and rundown with the shocking sight of men liningalmost every street totally bombed on‘chat’ and those who were still consciousdaring to stick out their hands at the sight of us foreigners to beg, whiletheir womenfolk bustled around buying and selling in the markets and generallyleading a useful, if poor, life.  We weredisgusted and incredulous to be told that there were no campaigns against thisvice, neither from the government, nor from the churches because, it iscynically believed, they all do it too and benefit financially from the tradein the product.  So, these men spendtheir probably short lives in a stupour, not only being incapable of work ofany kind, but also living off everyone else.Westayed in a dilapidated old government hotel which had a certain down-at-heelcharm where you could imagine famous writers and travellers staying in itsheyday, with waiters and waitresses who had been around to see them stillwearing the same fraying uniforms.  Theywere friendly and helpful enough.  Theone concession to modernity was a big screen in the lounge showing satellitesports TV enabling us to catch a bit of the men’s Australian Open tennis finaland the Arsenal-Man U premiership football match whilst drinking Harar’s ownexcellent beer.Weheaded back to Addis and got another public bus to Awassa to the south, againdown in the Rift Valley.  This town waslaid out 50 years ago, next to a huge lake of the same name, in grid fashionand 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 seedollar signs when a foreigner flags them down and ask what, for us, are absurdfares. Though lacking any character or old town centre, we found a crumblingoldish hotel next to the lake with an abundance of bird and monkeylife in thetrees and at the water’s edge.  A monkeyjumped onto our table, grabbed a bag of old bread that Emilie was going to useto feed the birds and joyfully scampered up a tree to enjoy his loot.  Was it the same monkey who approached ourtable the next day, was shooed away by Emilie and who ran up the tree over ourheads and peeed and pooped on her?Nowwe’re back in Addis for Emilie to attend a workshop relating to her work andI’m using the VSO office to plan a workshop for when we get back to Nekemte, atrip which will enable us once again to savour the joys of public bus travel.February,2010What does it mean for acountry to be poor in modern times?  Thetitle of a novel by the Nigerian writer Achebe captures it:¨Things FallApart¨. Systems and supplies do not reliably meet people´s needs orexpectations.  The grip on basicmodernity is tenuous. To give you an idea, here we may have electricity for awhile, and/or water, sometimes internet, the scheduled university bus for teacherssometimes doesn’t show up with no explanation or warning, we go for ourmacchiato coffee but they can´t give it to us because there is no water, or noelectricity, or no milk.  A really badday is when none of these is available. I came home from work today wanting ashower and was delighted that we had electricity, but there was no water.  Last Monday we invited the other two VSOs fordinner and to play cards.  There was noelectricity so we couldn’t cook on our one electric ring.  Luckily, we have a little backup kerosenestove and were able to put some food on the table and eat and play bycandlelight.  Internet may fail becausethere is a fault somewhere in the internet provision chain or simply becausethere is no electricity.  There is an obvious lack oftechnicians, and the botched, careless way most jobs are done, be it painting,installing sockets, putting up a blackboard, even the non-technological hangingout of washing on a line, makes you either laugh or cry, but the motormechanics must be superb, judging by the age of many of the vehicles stillapparently reliably plying the roads. Harar, where we were recently, must be the Peugeot 404 capital of theworld 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 efficientMRIscan on myknee, even though it cost our medical insurance the equivalent of my month’ssalary.  We asked the President of theuniversity what his priority would be if he were Prime Minister of the countryand 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 and they will often runout before being replaced, processed foodstuffs, beer (which is serious) andsoft drinks being examples. Of course, in their present form these are allmodern phenomena and depend on technology, but other types of systems fail fordifferent, more human, reasons.There is a fear ofcorruption.  Indeed, it is assumed thateveryone who can be, is corrupt.  Theytell us frankly: ¨We Ethiopians willalways cheat or use deceit if we can, it´s the way we think¨.   This is a gross exaggeration, of course, asthere is a high degree of honesty in personal dealings, as there is almosteverywhere.  What they are referring tois where institutions, which are seen as fair game, are involved.  So, systems have been put in place todiscourage this type of corruption, but the effect is to stymie action andimpede the achievement of the goals of the organisation.  To give a couple of examples, we havecomputers with internet in the library, only for use by the staff.  They are not attached to printers and toprevent viruses (i.e. corruption) no flash drives or CDs may be used to copydocuments.  Thus, nothing from internetcan be downloaded and copied for use in the class, surely one of the objects ofgiving teachers access to internet. To prevent corruption a system isestablished which prevents useful action. A second case is that of money. There is a budget with detailed descriptions of what the money can bespent on.  Anyone wishing to spend moneyfor their department from the budget for their department must obtain threeestimates from three different establishments for the item, but it must beexactly 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 beingdifferent shops to stamp your official forms. So, again, the system either invites the corruption it is designed toprevent, or prevents the action it is designed to foster.The result of all this is afatalism about what can be achieved and how. Talent is wasted  and good peoplebecome disenchanted time-servers who lose the ambition to make thingshappen.  When plans are made for meetingsor classes, everyone knows it might not happen because of some systembreakdown, so meetings are held spontaneously without prior arrangement to ensurethat it does happen, thus spoiling the plans of many of those who attend whomay have been expected to teach a class or fulfil some other commitment.  This is a bugbear of my work as teachers areforever missing my methodology classes because they had a spontaneousmeeting.  Often their students aren´tinformed, either, and are standing waiting to be taught, not knowing why theirteacher hasn´t shown up.We read a report onEthiopiabefore we camehere that said thatEthiopiais poor, but atleast it is equally poor.  This isobviously not completely true and we were sent a report by a Spanish newspaperthat quoted the Spanish Prime Minister, Zapatero, as being surprised, whilevisitingAddis Ababa, at how modernthings were.  The report went on to saythat he only saw the tiny island of recent wealth that is surrounded by theancient sea of poverty.  Universityteachers can not only not aspire to luxuries such as cars, but can´t even besure of more mundane needs.  The head ofAmharic only gets water in her house twice a week, but the last month not atall.  My counterpart hasn´t gotelectricity in his new house yet, after several months.  Other systems fail them.  They both taught summer school for two monthslast summer during their official holiday and signed for extra pay.  The university has reneged on the amount ofpay they signed for and has not yet even paid them anything. We take the reliability ofsystems for granted and are greatly put out when there is a failure (¨leaves onthe line¨), but here the reverse is true and that attitude is a deterrent toentrepreneurship or ambition.  How canyou run a modern business, manufacturing for export, say, if you can´t count ona 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 usconsiderable recently as we have been writing materials for various workshopswe are putting together.  One is forEnglish teachers in the ten local primary schools which we are running onSaturday mornings, team teaching the sessions with our two VSO colleagues whowork at theTeacherTrainingCollegein Nekemte. Iam running the teaching methodology side of it and Emilie the English languageimprovement. We started it last week and were delighted at the attendance of 40teachers and the enthusiasm with which they received it.  I even took my guitar and got them to sing achildren´s song to use in class.  We havealso offered to run similar courses for third-year English majorundergraduates, who will be teachers themselves next year, and those universityteachers who have never done a pedagogy course. All this has involved hours of material writing on the computer andendless annoyance that the electricity has been going on and off for variableperiods of time.  It is heartening toread, 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 personalaccess to an improving quality of life than education.¨ (page195 in‘Key Issues in Development’ Damien Kingsburyet.al.)At least the supply oftraditional products is not affected by anything I have said.  Women still struggle into town with firewoodor sacks of charcoal on their backs and the same few fruits, vegetables andcoffee beans find their way into the markets. There doesn’t seem to be any danger of plastic shoes fromChinarunning out, inthe metaphorical sense, either.  Cows andgoats still roam around guaranteeing the supply of meat to those who eatit.  And the postal system still bringsus occasional parcels of goodies that would never otherwise appear here,allowing us briefly and delightedly to escape from our dependence on what thenational supply chains bring to our door.March 30th, 2010One of our greatest joyshere is to sit on the little terrace in front of our house drinking tea orcoffee and reading.  We live in abungalow built in more modern style, of concrete, on what they call a compoundas we share the enclosed land, which has a corrugated fence and gate on thestreet side to give it great privacy, with another building.  The other building is built in a moretraditional way of‘adobe’ (mud and straw) and is just a single-storey row offive rooms with the corrugated metal roof that all buildings have.  The building runs along the side of ourhouse, around which we have a drainage channel as we are low, with steps and asloping grassy, garden area leading down to our front door.  In the first room lives Emebet who acts insome respects as our landlady as she speaks English reasonably well, havingstudied Law at a private“university”. Her boyfriend, Fikadu, is a lecturer at that university and usuallystays over on Saturday nights.  Nextalong comes a tallish erect young woman who dresses smartly in a skirt andjacket to go to work during the week. She works as a secretary or something similar.  The next room is occupied by Selamawit aplumpish, jolly-faced young woman who is fromBakuand who studieselectrical 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 andfestivals groomed and wearing the traditional´shamma´ shawl.  Emebet is nominally Roman Catholic, thoughher boyfriend is Protestant.  In the nextroom lives Emebet´s mother with a 3-year-old boy called Lombi, one of her otherdaughter´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 ofthe family, and finally there is a store room where the nightguard, Yadissa,sleeps.  He’s a young man who studies Lawin one of the private colleges so we can communicate with him to some extent inEnglish. He´s a very soft, sweet man who always wants to help and we gladly usehim to go to the bus station and grab seats for us at6 amand to stop the bus nearer our house for us to jumpaboard.  It sounds colonial, but iscommonly done here and we pay him extra for his troubles.We´ve been really lazyabout learning any local languages, by the way, as English is the language ofthe 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 themore national language, Amharic.  So,this presents a dilemma about which to learn. We do know a few greetings and expressions in Oromifa, but littlemore.   English is so widely understood that,though we could not engage in a discussion about the finer points of quantummechanics with them, we can manage to buy vegetables perfectly well from theladies in the market.We sit watching the cockstrut about imperiously and the hen clucks after her two remaining chicks, theother eight having survived only a few days and died one way or another.  It´s not surprising their life was brief asLombi would grossly mishandle them and anyone could step on them as theytwittered around. One got its head trapped under a wire fence and Emebet´smother shook it about and blew on it to revive it which, unsurprisingly, didnot work.  The remaining members of thefamily wander in and out of the rooms proprietorially if the doors areopen.  Occasional‘wild’ dogs wander inand out of our compound.  They seem toknow how to open the gate, provided it´s not locked with a key, which is a bitmore tricky for them.  The main onerecently has been a mother who must have had pups not too long ago, judging bythe size of her teats, but has been attacked and has a flesh wound on one ofher hind legs.  It´s healing well,though.  I say wild dogs, but they’re notwild in the sense of attacking people only in the sense that no one owns themand they live in the street where they feed themselves quite well to judge bytheir reasonable appearance and the plentiful bones of various other animalsstrewn around the streets.  They don´tpay much attention to people being far too engrossed in their own battles andamorous escapades. They’re quiet in theday and whole families can be seen sleeping in a huddle, but are cacophonous atnight 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 thatare conducted in the various doorways over charcoal.  Sometimes the smoke is overpowering anddrives us away, though the worst smoke of all comes from the neighbours on aseparate compound next door.  We don´tknow what on earth they cook, or burn, but when they do we have to close theshutters on that side of the house.  Whenthey roast coffee beans, the smell is delicious and gets our mouthswatering.   Lombi and Bontu play around,though they´ve been well-trained not to bother us or come to close unless invited.  They have no manufactured toys and have to bevery creative with bottle tops, scraps of paper, cast off bits of chalk whichthey use to play at teacher and student, flowers which they break off and makea mini flower shop on a cloth on the ground. In the absence of television, they are at play all day and never seembored.  Lombi is a singer and never stopssinging scraps of the songs we have taught them at the orphans´ classes: ‘This is the Way’ and ‘Old MacDonald had aFarm’. ‘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 Lombijust says‘Yes’ to whatever we ask, except ‘How are you?’ to which he perfectlyreplies I’m fine, thanks. ‘Goodbye, seeyou later’  comes very easily to both ofthem when we leave.  Hair is a constantsource of activity and we see the various tasks associated with it, thewashing, the brushing, the combing into elaborate styles, and that´s justLombi.   We don´t even know for surewhere our neighbours go to the toilet, though there are a couple of out-houses,one of which we do know is used for cooking ‘injera’, the round, flatbread-like substance that accompanies all meals.  It´s a rubbery, light-brown-greyish substancewhich has been likened to carpet liner. There’s also a well which they throw half a tyre inner tube on the endof a long rope into, though usually they just use the tap on the side wall ofour house.  The garden at the back isquite extensive, with coffee plants among other trees from which they get theodd foodstuff.  Emebet has talked ofgetting a cow, which the neighbouring house has, to supply various needs.  That would give us another animal to watch,though we already see plenty roaming the streets.  Though valuable creatures, they very oftenseem to be unattended as well as being intelligent enough to know where togo.  Lombi and I are the only permanent maleshere in a very female-orientated little world. The public, outdoor world, is very much more dominated by males whogather in groups at the shoe-shining posts or just hang around, apparentlyidly.Both male and femalecircumcision are common inEthiopia.  Emilie saw Lombi looking upset in hisgrandma’s arms one day and was shown that his little willy had been done.  She made some suggestions, not fromexperience of this particular event, about how the wound should be treated anda few days later was shown that all was well. The female variety is rightly known as female genital mutilation, beingvery different than the harmless male version, and seems to have been performedon an estimated 75% of the female population ofEthiopia.  It’s a fallacy to think it is uniquely aMuslim religious ritual and, in fact, the main focus of the activity here isamong the Orthodox Christian northern regions. We worry about Bontu, especially when we saw her all dressed up beingtaken off to some unspecified event the other day, and hope that the practice isless common in the cities. There certainly is opposition to FGM and we visiteda primary school in Addis that had a woman teacher who was a real campaignereven to the extent of visiting families who planned to perform the ritual ontheir daughters, if she got to hear of it, to dissuade them.  She didn’t mind telling us that it had beendone to her.  One of the dangers, as shesaw it, was that a husband would seek his pleasures elsewhere if he had anunresponsive wife.Changing the subjectcompletely, at work, we have run two workshops on methodology for youngteachers who have had no previous pedagogical training.  One was Friday-Saturday, the otherMonday-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 justcopy the teacher’s lectured notes.  Theturnout 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 ingreat haste with very little notice and the teachers had to hurriedly rearrangeclasses in order to attend.  They aresurprised by this new approach to teaching and tend to make excuses for why itwill not work with the large classes that they have to teach and with the lackof resources at their disposal.  We triedto show them how many of the methods could work, explaining that we havevisited many classes in progress and are fully aware of the difficulties.  We got further insight into some of theproblems faced by anyone trying to achieve anything here with people who aresupposed to be professionals showing up late, up to half an hour sometimes, ormissing odd sessions with lame excuses. Many, though, were seriously interested and resolved to try out oursuggestions as well as being