Thursday 12 February 2009

Rain! (and CPD Booklets, the ever continuing story)

Like round about this time last year, we had a few spots of rain on Monday night. It really was a short few plops, but the last rain we had in Gilgel was on 18th November, so it was quite an event! Maybe it will trigger a few insects to invade!

I did my talk to another 200ish teachers on Monday. It went without a hitch (except for a faulty power adapter that was quick to fix), and the teachers all seemed enthusiastic about using number fans and some of the other ideas.

Next on my schedule is to introduce the CPD course to the remaining four schools in our cluster.

Additional (written two days later)

The day after the rain was pretty horrible, weather-wise. It felt much hotter than before. My logger shows that the average temperature over the 24 hours after the rain was 3-4°C hotter than the running average for the last few weeks, and the maximum temperature in the shade hit an all time high of 36°C at around 14:30 in the afternoon. (How’s the snow in the UK?)

Checking up on my CPD manuals that one of the vice deans had promised to re-print (as he sold* lots of my other stock about two months ago.) The print-room guy had stopped because he was out of toner and master sheets.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong but in the UK, if someone is in-charge of the print room, they firstly make sure there is spare toner and other printing related consumables. Also, should the said UK print-room person run out of the aforementioned supplies, he would arrange for replacements PDQ.

Not here in Ethiopia. It’s like: “I’ve run out of toner. FULL STOP.”

I’m already dangerously close to not having enough time for the schools to do the CPD course before the summer vacation because it takes 15 weeks and I have had so many delays with printing, bureaucracy, fuel shortages etc that we are about one week away from that deadline.

I have been promised that the new manuals will be finished ready for the introduction of the course which we plan to do in the four remaining schools next week. (Yeah, like that’ll happen. Why didn’t I realise when I said ok to the Vice Dean to sell them two months ago that the manuals would not be replaced.)

Well, as ever, I’ll believe it when I see it!

* it's OK, the CCU did get the money for them.

No comments: