Gilgel Beles - Schools and Children

I've had my first bout of sickness and diarrhoea - not sure why as I've been very careful with cleaning, not eating anything suspect, etc - and it didn't help that I haven't got a flushing toilet!
The Dean and everyone went extra cautious on me and took me to the medical centre where I was made to drink two big cups of dehydration liquid (water with salt and sugar - disgusting) and given 300mg of a strong antibiotic. I spent the rest of the day at home sleeping. I had many visitors from the College after they found out I was ill, which was very kind, but all I wanted to do was sleep. Other than being tired , feeling nauseous through the day and a little odd the next day, I didn't have any more S and D! (I'm still being asked a week later if I am OK!) Anyway, I'm settling in and going out to the schools to observe lessons. I still need to improve my Amharic so that I can understand more. I have taught myself 25 out of 33 Amharic characters and each one has seven vowel variations.

Gilgel Beles

I went to the Post Office (open 2-5pm four days a week) to send a DVD and was surprised to find I had four items (some letters and DVDs) in my PO Box - some had only taken 9 days to get from the UK. Anyone can send me letters now - please get writing!!!

Schools

The children at school are graded according to their abilities rather than age so, for instance, there are eight year olds with 14 year olds. With such big classes - on average 60 pupils - it is impossible to observe all the children and so when they are told something, if they don't understand, nothing can be done about it and the teacher just has to go on to the next thing. Also, Amharic is not the first language of all the children so it is more difficult for them. They have maths, Amharic, natural sciences, geography and history, etc. At the start of the Amharic lesson they sing a song to help them learn the Amharic sounds. Most lessons are from books and are very impersonal and not child centred. Something I have been asked to do is to suggest ways to make lessons more interactive. The children have just one exercise book for all the lessons and use biros (probably cheaper than pencils?). The children are well behaved and when they are at break in the playground, it could be a school anywhere in the world with the chatter and noise of them playing; you don't notice the language. Some children don't go to school and I see them carrying huge loads; bags of grain and sugar to the market. There is new accommodation being built and unlike in Britain when a lorry delivers a load and dumper trucks carry it around, it appears that mostly women move the breeze blocks and bricks around the site.

House

The family sharing the house with me seem to have an eleven-year old girl staying sometimes (I think the sister of the mother) and she makes the coffee and the breakfast for them in the morning, rushes off to school and then does household chores and looks after the baby, often carrying it on her back, in the afternoon. We can still only get water from a shared outside sink where we do the washing, and that is for two hours twice a day. On Saturdays, I have to choose between doing my washing while the water is on or going to the market early. I did my washing this week and there were no eggs left at the market, which is my main source of protein. I did buy a piece of meat but it was mainly fat and wasn't too tasty. Chickens are available but you have to buy them live and deal with them yourself, which I don't fancy. Also sharing the house with me have been a mouse, a toad, ants (that carried off a piece of biscuit I had dropped) and a variety of insects, including a cockroach which landed on my mosquito net. It bothered me at first but you actually get used to seeing them.

I'll update again as soon as I can.