Friday 2 November 2007

Gilgel Beles - 3 weeks in

Work
I am now visiting a cluster of school and observing lessons. At the Gilgel Beles Elementary School, I was taken round all the classes and said "good morning" when all the children stood and "sit down please" and they reply "thank you teacher". There can be up to 100 children in a class, sitting on low benches. The classrooms are very basic and varied. Some have mud floors, some have concrete and there are others with bamboo walls. There was a combined school assembly outside for over 1,000 children, the teacher speaking to them with a megaphone! As you would expect, there is a lack of resources and I have been making counting sticks and number fans for a maths class. I took a group of children and taught them addition and subtraction using Amharic - went well and managed to communicate even though I have very little amharic. Now I've got to train the teachers!


With my GPS I've been asked to make a map of the local area, with the location of the schools as there is nothing like it available. Also asked to teach English to two trainee teachers at the college, which may have a two-way effect of also improving my Amharic.

House
I'm settling into a routine, which begins soon after 6am with the start of the water filtering process - in all it takes four hours during the day. The college working hours are 8am - 6pm. After working, most of the evening is spent cooking, cleaning and washing myself in a bowl. Still no working shower or water from the basin, only water from a shared sink - where water is only available for two hours in the morning and two in the evening.

A family has now moved into another part of the house with me. The father is an academic and speaks limited English and they have a five-month old baby so I'm really glad I have a supply of ear plugs! I was invited to lunch one day with them.

Gilgel Beles
The locals are very friendly and I'm often asked in for coffee. There is a local "market" twice a week selling eggs, meat, potatoes, oranges, and pulses and lentils. I eat out occasionally but always it's injera and stew available, so not much variety.

At the weekend I did a long walk and saw my first giant millipede (25 cms long). The vegetation is green with huge flowers on banana trees. From Gilgel Beles the mountain region can be seen in the distance. There are some amazing views.

Visitors
I had two surprise visitors knocking on my door one night (whilst cooking pasta in the middle of a power cut!). They were Canadians working in Ethiopia for a similar organisation to VSO. One of their fathers put Gilgel Beles in a search engine, found my blog and traced me. I went out for a meal with them.

I'm keeping a diary and hope to take a bus to Chagne soon where I might get better email facilities.

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