Here’s what I have to say for this week. It feels as though it’s been a fairly eventful few days.
21/10/2006
I am writing now after just having gotten off a 3 ½ hour bus ride. More about that later though.
Yesterday was Tania’s birthday and we had a big party for her with the Tarma Cultural Band. They’re a community youth group who, amongst other things sing and dance. There was lots of music and fun. Afterwards we went to the Tinsae, which is a local hotel/restaurant where we had cake with some friends. Someone got the cake brought in from a nearby town. IT was really good, but very odd; it was basically layers of bread and icing.
Today we got up very early to get the bus to Debre Birhan. We wanted to go to the market there and just do something different for the day, and Tania was going through there on the way to Addis for a few days. We left at 6am and got on the bus, but it didn’t actually end up leaving town until 7. It took us about 2 hours to go 50km. We were on the very back bench of an extremely overcrowded bus and I was smushed up against the side. My feet were dangling over the back stairs of the bus and whenever we’d hit a bump (very frequently) I would go flying into the air. The guy sitting in front of Natalia kept puking out the window. On top of that, we were driving along an extremely narrow road and although I may be being a bit dramatic here, truly felt as though we were going to go plummeting over the side of a cliff on numerous occasions.
So we finally got there and met with some of the EDA staff in the area who were there for a training session. Everyone thought we were staying overnight and going back with one of the staff members tomorrow, however Tania had told us the day before there were no hotels available so we hadn’t brought any overnight stuff. Anyways, after a whole bunch of confusion we headed out to what we thought was the market to do some shopping for the morning. We later figured out it wasn’t actually the market (it seemed rather small) so we missed all the good stuff. The streets are so incredibly crowded! We were constantly navigating trying not to be run over by a donkey or a horse cart. I very literally came within 1 inch of being run over by a bus while trying to avoid getting run over by some sort of animal.
We went for lunch with the EDA staff and actually had the opportunity to have some non-traditional food, which was a really nice break. Afterwards we had to go back to catch the bus, as the last one going to Debre Sina leaves at 3pm. We again ended up sitting on the bus for about an hour before we left. This time we got a smaller bus with apparently no shock absorbers and a gas leak directly into the bus. It took us until 6:30 to get back to Debre Sina at which point Pam, who gets motion sickness, literally crawled off the bus. We are all pretty much exhausted and are planning on going to bed pretty much immediately.
I don’t mean to sound super negative, but it was definitely an experience. I highly recommend never taking African public transit if left with any other possible options (potentially including riding a donkey). It does make me appreciate Canadian public transit though. And not just Montreal transit which I already appreciate, but even the Lantzville bus. It doesn’t come often, but when it does come it doesn’t sit at the stop for an hour in the hopes of getting another passenger. We did get to see a group of baboons (Geladas) on the way back into town that I hadn’t gotten the opportunity to see yet. That was really neat and all the people on the bus were laughing at us for being so excited about it. This is all for today, but I will add more later.
23/10/2006
Today I learned some very interesting information from one of my students. We were having a discussion about different values and about conformity. We were doing an exercise where students went to different sides of the room based on whether or not they agreed on whether or not they agreed on certain statements. One of the statements was “It is necessary to wait until marriage to have sex”. I asked one of the students to explain why he said he agreed with this statement. He said that he would wait to have sex with the woman he married to respect for and that a married woman should not have had sex. He then added though that once a boy turns 17, it is biologically necessary for them to start having sex and they cannot avoid doing this. He also said it is necessary for them to have experience. He added that he had a girlfriend, but she was only there to fulfill his sexual needs as he is a student now. It is somewhat difficult not to judge or have an opinion; I just told him he should probably move to the “disagree” side of the class. Actually, I’m not even so sure this is different from what Canadian guys think. At least he was being honest.
24/10/2006
Yesterday was the end of Ramadan. Why is this particularly notable? There is not a particularly large Muslim community here (someone told me 20 people) or any major celebration. It is notable because it marked the end of middle of the night prayers on loudspeakers broadcast to the entire community every single night at approximately 3am. This is a wonderful, wonderful day.
Today I had another rather interesting youth language class. I wanted to follow up on the discussion we had begun previously, so I decided to have a discussion about relationships. We talked about different types of relationships (i.e.: familial, colleagues, etc...) and I then asked them to describe different types of “romantic” relationships. After about 5 minutes of trying to explain this, a good half the class for some reason didn’t seem to understand what I meant. As no one would volunteer to translate for me, ended up making hugging and kissing motions on myself and although it got a good laugh, it worked. I think I have lost pretty much all sense of shame. In one of our previous workshops, I ended up doing motions to indicate what body parts could be used for sex. Hey, it worked.
My class today was actually surprisingly open to discussion. I asked them if they thought it was possible to have a loving relationship without sex. Our coordinator Fitsum, who was assisting me, and I got a little embarrassed at one of the students’ descriptions of male biological urges and what exactly would happen if he did not engage in regular sexual activity. Given that discussing sex is relatively taboo here, I was thrilled at how honest people were being. Even the two girls in my class got in on the discussion (although I had to tell off one of the boys for asking them a rather rude question). I am finding it rather rewarding. Translation and accents inevitably render each class interesting (I once spent several minutes questioning a student on why he thought “Terrorist” was a good career option when he had really said he wanted to be a merchant).
Tomorrow, I will be spending a good part of the day planning for the workshop we are holding this weekend. It is the first Women only workshop being held here. On Saturday we will be discussing HIV/AIDS and on Sunday we will be discussing FGM. On Sunday I am responsible for explaining what the parts of the female genitalia are and their various functions, as well as giving a description of each of the types of FGM. I am going to spend tomorrow afternoon constructing a rather interesting poster to use as a visual aid. Needless to say, I had to do some interesting Google searches to come up with appropriate images.
If anyone is interested in learning some more on the topic, I found an interesting article on the Unicef website. It is only 4 pages and very well written. I don’t have the link, but the title of the article is Fighting Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting in Ethiopia’s Somali Region. If you Google it you should find it pretty easily.