This is what my week has been like so far:
12/10/2006: I have been lying around reading and feeling sick. I have a bit of a cold. Plus it’s been raining on and off and when it rains here you really don’t want to be outside. Other than the main road, nothing is paved, so you are navigating your way through big rocks and mud. It’s difficult on a dry day. I did go out briefly to the “post office” and ended up getting poured on. At least my hair got washed though!
The post office is a tiny little building about the size of a bathroom. I have been trying to mail a bunch of postcards for about a week, and every time I go, it’s closed. The guy who works there takes like a 2 1/12 hour lunch break and is not there reliably outside of that. Pam and Nat had gone earlier today and asked him when he’d be there and I guess he just laughed. Anyways, I did manage to get them sent, so they should be there sometime in the next month!!! The mail goes out of here once a week, then goes through Addis, then to Europe, then gets sent to Canada/The US.
The kids here are just hilarious. We’re really starting to develop relationships with them. It must be difficult for them to have this cycle of Canadian volunteers throughout the year. We try and establish programs that will be sustainable, but you can’t really do anything about the relationships you forge. There’s this one little boy who always comes by to say hi. He’s 3 or 4 and speaks no English whatsoever so we sort of get by with hand signals. He has an extra thumb and spent pretty much the entire first week we were here pointing it out to us. They all just provide such joy to our day. I will have a million funny stories to tell about them when I get back.
13/10/06
I just about knocked over our guard out of joy. I had put my pyjamas and a bunch of my clothes out on the laundry line to try and get the fleas out of them and we went out to do some work stuff. It started raining while we were gone and I only have one pair of PJ’s with me so I was rather worried I would have to sleep naked, exposing myself to many fleas. Anyways, Barletto took them all off the line and put them under cover. I wish I could bake the man a pie.
14/10/2006
Today I saw a goat get castrated. I thought they were killing it, but no, only maiming. We also saw a babboon with giant blue and red testicles. It tried to attack Natalia.
We were on a day trip to Armanya, which is a community about 15km from here where we are going to be having a rural outreach workshop in a few weeks. We just needed to post advertising etc… We spent some time doing this, and then tried to get a bus home. There are no bus schedules or anything, they just sort of come by every once in a while. Right when a bus stopped for us, it decided to have mechanical problems. We ended up sitting around for about 2 hours while it got fixed and not a single other bus came by in that time. There were about 50 going in the other direction, but none for us. We decided to make the best of the situation and ended up having a sing along with a bunch of the community kids. All in all it was a fun day and I got lots of great pictures.
16/10/2006
There is a cow that lives across the street that sounds like Chewbacka from Star Wars. It makes noise way too early in the morning.
17/10/2006
Some sort of insane robber came and used our latrine, left it extremely filthy and stole all our toilet paper. Seriously, who does that?
We went to a birthday party for our friend Solomon. One of the customs I find strange is drinking very dry red wine, but mixing it with coke. It is actually surprisingly good, but I still find it odd.
18/10/2006
My Youth Language classes are going a lot better. I have a better idea of what the general level of English is, so I know where to work from. The students are generally just eager to practice their spoken English and discuss issues they see as being important to the community’s youth. I guess there aren’t a lot of venues for them to discuss issues that can be controversial to a lot of people. A lot of what I’m doing is just acting as a facilitator and giving them the opportunity to discuss things. I’m helping them find the right words in English and arrange their sentences properly, but most of the information is coming from them.
Pam and I are attempting to start a “discussion club”. Some of my students have asked me for suggestions of how they can practice their English outside of the classroom and I am hoping this will help them out. If we can get a club going with some structure, we can train a couple of the older youth to run it themselves when we are gone. The basic idea is that we will take kids 12-25 and have them discuss a predetermined topic. They will be divided in two and one group will discuss one side, the other group will discuss the other. It will sort of be a group informal debate where each side will get points for making relevant statements. It is still very much in the planning stages, but we are hoping to have an initial meeting next week. I’m not sure if this is particularly interesting to anyone else, but we are really hoping it works out.
I had a really interesting class tonight. We were discussing diversity and the difference between Ethiopia and Canada. We were talking about the fact that Ethiopian civilization has been around for thousands of years, whereas Canada is relatively new. We were also discussing colonization and as I basically said “and then we killed all the natives”… Tania came in and said class dismissed. It was an interesting end to the week!