18 08 07
on J and M in Assosa (Ethiopia), 12/Aug/2007 10:16, 34 days ago
Blog 18 08 07This week has probably been a bit of an anti climax following the visit of VSO CEO last week.However the MI own training of the 10 day‘Project Planning’ course only finished on Thursday and continued to provide many challenges. For every course here the trainees get certificates of attendance which are meaningless but seem to be important to them. However we are not going to give 2 trainees a certificate as they have missed more than 2 days. One of them obviously has it down to a fine art – attend for 3 days at the beginning and 3 days at the end and have the other 4 days to yourself.The evaluation forms will be interesting and hopefully useful.Next week for some time there has been a workshop arranged on the 5 year Strategic plan for the MI. About 3 years ago a consultant was employed from Addis to complete his assessment and present this to the region with his recommendations. As he says he took this on as 3 months project but 3 years later…..Next week’s final workshop has been planned for many months and the date was set by the President himself. On Thursday we learnt that some Bureau Heads want it postponed as they are not available. This when the consultant has his flight booked as has the Director of the Ethiopian MI in Addis and 2 other Regional MI Managers. Fortunately the President and our Manager directed that the workshop should still go ahead next week.Then on Friday we learnt that all the hotels in Assosa are booked out and at least 5 important people coming to our Workshop from outside the Region. Monday morning should be interesting.The hotels are booked because the town is hosting a bazaar and exhibition for the week and a concert with artists from Addis. We were sent home an hour early on Friday as our bus had been ordered to travel half way to Addis to collect these artists on their journey from Addis. There was a terrific storm with loud thunder and lightening (even Ethiopians were frightened) on Friday pm so probably the transport out of Addis did not want to cover the rest of the journey.I have mentioned inflation before but it really is beginning to hit the very poor when beri beri, a mixture of crushed spices (chilli, garlic, ginger, basil, cloves, cinnamon and cardamom) unique to Ethiopian cooking and used by all in their cooking, has risen from16 birr to 42 birr a kilo. This is something that everyone uses, Mulatu has been grinding the small very hot peppers but he says this is not the same. I gave him some cooked chard and he commented that would make his shiro (ground chick peas or in his case ground beans) tasty. Shiro without spice must be like eating flour and water. Our breakfast on Saturday mornings has risen from 3 birr to 4 birr but this only affects people who can already afford to eat out for breakfast.I saw an interesting UN statistic this week which states that 80% of Ethiopians live on less than $2 a day. We did a few sums and found that if we take out what we pay Mulatu and Martha and our holidays and trips to Addis we probably live on $2 a day. This is a rather meaningless statistic taken away from the context of the country it is covering. I would suggest that the majority of the people in this region live on less than $1 a day. Mulatu is probably better off than most and survives on about an eight of the income we have and probably buys goods eg coffee for his Mother.