Postcripts: good news and bad news.
on Richard and Emilie VSO (Ethiopia), 07/Feb/2012 16:24, 34 days ago
We have had good news and bad news following on from our time inEthiopia. The good news is the setting up and initiation of the partnership betweenWollegaUniversityand theUniversityofUtrecht. Already the first four undergraduates from Wollega, two boys and two girls are inHollandand we hear they are settling in well. We played a small part in helping to get this partnership going, giving advice to both the Ethiopian as well as the Dutch parties to the agreement.The bad news is that a much hoped-for arrangement for a colleague of ours at Wollega to get a PhD place atLeidenUniversityinHollandhas fallen through for the strangest of reasons.Emilie's elder sister works in the administration in the Psychology Dept atLeidenUniversity, Emilie's alma mater. She heard that that department was sponsoring a number of Africans to do PhDs, in their own countries but supervised fromLeidenand with an annual visit there. She told Emilie about this and Emilie asked around among the Psychology lecturers at Wollega, most of whom we knew quite well as they came under the Education Faculty as did we. One, who seemed to us the keenest and most worthy, expressed great interest and Emilie contactedLeidenabout him to ask if he could be considered for one of their scholarships. The answer was a provisional 'yes', but they wanted him to help them with some research they were conducting worldwide on mother-child relationships in different cultures. He was asked to survey three tribes in the west ofEthiopiaand was given expenses money for the purpose. When we leftEthiopiaand were inLeiden, Emilie went to see the relevant professor to promote the case of our colleague and was told that they were inviting him toHollandto present his results and discuss the PhD place. We were inHollandfor Christmas but couldn't stay on until he arrived at the end of January. We did, however, hunt for a resident Ethiopian PhD student and invited him and his wife for dinner in order to ask them to look after our former colleague when he came. They were a lovely couple and promised to do so. Emilie worried herself to death making sure that all the arrangements were in place, that he had booked his flights, that he had a visa from the Dutch Embassy, that the university had booked accommodation for him in Leiden etc and when he arrived we phoned him from Spain to his hotel. It was early in the week he was there and he said he had spoken to the professor about his research but that there were some problems that had to be resolved later in the week. We phoned later in the week and heard that he had been sent packing by the university and would not be considered for a PhD. The garbled story we got from him was that he had had a research assistant who was supposed to have conducted the interviews but that he had not done so and had made up the answers. Our friend therefore implied that it wasn’t really his fault. Emilie emailed theLeidenprofessor and she confirmed that he had not carried out the research, had falsified the results, was guilty of academic fraud and that his superiors in Wollega would be informed. She told us not to feel responsible as it was in no way our fault as we had sponsored him in good faith. As you can imagine, we were horrified. He had seemed the loveliest of people, a hard-working, responsible man who, besides his academic duties, voluntarily came to classes Emilie ran for lecturers to improve their English and we knew him quite well. How could he have been so naive and/or stupid? We feel terrible towardsLeidenUniversitywhich paid for all his expenses, flight, accommodation etc all for nothing. We feel deceived ourselves, too. Is it due to a personality defect of this person or is it because he comes from a culture where dishonesty and corruption are deep-seated? How will he rationalise it back in Nekemte? Will he just blame his research assistant (if there really was one)? Even if he had used a research assistant, wouldn’t he have checked the work done before handing it in? Did he just take the money for the research and think he could get away with not even going at all to the regions he was supposed to cover? It all reminds me of what I wrote in my newsletter of February, 2010: “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¨ “. I went on to say that I didn’t believe this was true as we encountered much disinterested honesty, but we have been shaken by this recent event.