Scavenger hunt!
on New Adventures in Ethiopia (Ethiopia), 13/Feb/2009 03:43, 34 days ago
This morning at breakfast I got a very nice phone call which caused me to be happier than I was before. And then, during our language lesson, I got a phone call from the airport stating my luggage had arrived. YAY!Since the African Union Summit is going on in Addis Ababa at the moment, all the African presidents are here with their entourages so often, the roads are blocked and its mayhem so we left immediately for the airport and managed to avoid that. I got my luggage and came back and joined my Amharic class.I can’t even stress how helpful and supportive the VSO staff are here. They really do everything within reasonable means to make the volunteers feel as assured and taken care of as possible.In the afternoon, we all went to the Program Office. It is a beautiful three storey building and each level houses the various VSO Ethiopia staff. We got to see the volunteer resource rooms that have ancient dinosaur computers, a small library of books that we can borrow and pigeon holes for any mail we might get.Most of the people in our group went to their respective embassies and they got to meet embassy staff as well as the resident VSO doctor for medical advice and just to know who to go to and what to do in the event that we might get ill. I was in the group that will go today. After everyone got back we had the MOST FUN part of the day! We were split off into groups of three or four and given a list of tasks to complete in the city. This was probably the BEST introduction. We had to grab a taxi, buy a half kilo of bananas, get our shoes shined, buy a newspaper, find out how much it would cost to send an email, go to a restaurant and find another VSO volunteer, go to a hotel and find out how much it is to swim there and a few other things…so we got to ride on the line taxis which are communal taxis and use our Amharic skills to get around. It was really fun. They threw us in at the deep end and we were basically on foot, had to cross the big streets, talk to people…I loved it. We were also followed by a little street girl all the way…until we got to the posh hotel where she couldn’t enter. That was good practice too. The scavenger hunt ended with all volunteers meeting at a pub near the program office. We all had drinks and talked then headed back to the Red Cross center for dinner.At dinner, Seble, one of our extremely beautiful VSO staff taught me how to write my name and I talked to her about the Amharic alphabet and managed to understand how it works so I’m looking forward to learning how to write.I pretty much went to bed after that and I feel much much happier that I will attend training looking nicer than I have for the past 4 days! Oh I forgot to mention that at lunch we sat at region-specific tables so all the people going to Awassa like me got to sit with a very nice Ugandan volunteer who has been there for a year already to give us an introduction on what to expect.