Wednesday 13 February 2008

Mid-February Update


Personal space


Just as I was heading for the pit of despair re: personal space and privacy, I now, suddenly, find myself on my own in the house.


The man of the family is in Addis Ababa for three months at the Ministry of education on some kind of long, drawn out training. Last week, the sister of his wife, a young girl who is basically used as a servant to look after the baby, make breakfast etc, and also who was always watching me and seeing what I was doing (very un-nerving) went back to her mother for the semester. That left the wife and their 10 month old baby. Then yesterday she announced they were going to Addis to visit husband/dad. I asked how long (well actually I asked “what time?” in Amharic and she said 05:30 in the morning.) Once I had communicated the length of time, she said “und wer” which means a month, Hopefully I will be on my own here for a month.


It started well this morning when the water came on and I could hear the tap in their kitchen, on full. She’d left it on the other day and I turned it off to stop the kitchen flooding. Well today, now that she was gone, she had locked all the doors so I couldn’t get into the kitchen. Luckily I remembered the stop-cock tap outside and luckily x 2, it only turned off the kitchen tap and not the toilet etc.


At lunch time I had a sudden urge to clean and got the “Vim” powder out and cleaned the outside cement bucket sink and tiles which had months of food/washing debris caked all round it. It’s a Samaritan-effect thing. When we’re all there, nobody does it, now that it’s just me and will be mine for a month…


It was so nice tonight, coming in to my own house without baby noises, people following me around etc. I can get to the sink when I want (when the water’s on of course) the toilet will be clean with only me using it (and flushing it after). Bliss!


Other news:


The water was off for two days last week – now I have two big bowls and a bucket, I was doing ok. The electricity has also been off quite a bit. I did more cooking by siddist shama (six candles)!


I have been fully immersing myself in computer programming. I love the way you have to solve problems (that all have logical reasons, however obscure it seems at first (e.g. putting a colon instead of a comma in a global variable statement at the beginning of a program and wondering why everything was defaulting to 0 later on in a function calling that variable.) I also like thinking about new features I can add. At the moment I have written a 2D and 3D liquid simulation. You can design a river, and then make water flow down it. I even added rain and erosion. I don’t program the water where to go, I just tell the computer the rules for each droplet (e.g. if you are next to another droplet, move away, move down if you can with gravity – that sort of thing) and when the computer runs the program very fast with a lot of drops (about 15,000 drops updating 30 times a second) it looks like water. I added the ability to zoom in, show cross-sections etc. I am currently working on a Gundan (ant) simulation. They collect food and return it to the queen ant who lays eggs which hatch into more ants. They also collect sand grains to build a nest. I am working on having more than one colony and having them battle for food etc. The logical “in the present” state of mind that programming puts me in, is very good at blocking any worries about the past or future and it’s got me a through some hard times in the last couple of weeks.


There is a satellite TV in college cafĂ©, which is often on Nat Geo Animal channel in English which is interesting – today it was a guy dressing up as a crocodile in a protective cage to get closer to them!


There is not a lot happening at work at the moment as the schools have been on mid-semester break. We are trying to book up training sessions in the eight schools, but it’s taken a long time to get colleagues to write the letters in Amharic. I have also been making count sticks. On Friday I was doing a lot of sanding and today I painted them (with some very smelly, probably carcinogenic) paint. My English class has been cancelled for two weeks (I didn’t know there wasn’t one today) and although I knew about the primary school being closed for two weeks, I was told they would be back last week, but I turned up and “Yellum lijotch” – no children. Hopefully Friday I can continue “One two, tie my shoe” etc. I’ve been saving all my tin cans for some drums!!!


Post:


I did get a whole lot of post after the last entry, but it has dried up again. Please write me something and tell me what’s going on in your life – whoever you are and however seemingly uninteresting what you’re doing seems – it’s the regular everyday UK life news I miss. It’s really good to get letters out here, so if you’re reading this and haven’t written to me yet, now’s the time – especially if you’re someone I don’t know is reading this. Even if it’s really short. Thanks very much. I have started a photo wall in my room so if there’re pictures of you doing anything unusual, I can add it there. I have some photos sent from someone who was on the London-Brighton Vintage Car Rally and lots of my niece and nephew at Christmas so far.


My address is:


Mark Sidey

PO Box 47

Gilgel Beles

Metekel Zone

Benishangul Gumuz

Ethiopia


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