Sunday, December 03, 2006

You know you’re out your depth when… At the end of the workshop on how to set up a model classroom, I ask the teachers to sketch their plans for their classrooms. When we came to this point in this weekend’s workshop with the teachers of Lalay Maychew and Tahay Maychew woredas (districts), about a third of the teachers had a slight problem - they have no classrooms. They’re teaching in what’s called a dass - under a tarp or a roof of sticks and leaves. I knew that such schools existed, but I was a little surprised by how many of them there are, and how many students and teachers are involved. And as I sat there talking to these young teachers, with as many as 62 grade ones and no walls or desks or books, trying to figure out if there’s anything they can do to improve their classrooms, I felt incredibly powerless.

I do think the training is effectively geared towards teaching with very limited materials and locally available resources, but it does carry the assumption that teachers will have a wall on which to post an alphabet and hang the paper pocket chart we give them, and perhaps the comfort of not being open to the wind all day.

I feel a little bit guilty that it’s been two months and I still haven’t seen any of these schools without buildings. I don’t think my colleagues have been too keen on visiting them - given how difficult it is to get to the rural schools that do have buildings, I’m not looking forward to the trip to these more isolated schools. Anyway, it has now been moved to the top of the list.

Even though their teaching situations are difficult, I found this group of teachers quite keen, like the Ahferom group. Last week’s workshop was for Adwa town and Geter Adwa teachers, and those teachers were much older and seemed to be much more resistant to change. The last Model Classroom workshop is next weekend, and then I will have met all of the teachers in our cluster programme.

In recent years, the government has made an effort to make education more accessible, which means building more schools in the rural areas so that children don’t have as far to go. In most cases now, children in rural areas have up to a 4 km walk to school, whereas in the past it would have been 8 to 10 km or more to the nearest school, and this would have been prohibitive for most children, especially those in the younger grades. But it seems that the budget only goes so far. Thus there are many new schools that don’t have proper buildings yet.

I went to Mekelle on Tuesday to Thursday for VSO’s workshop on Mainstreaming HIV/AIDS. It was nice to see the other Tigray Region volunteers and get away to the big city. The hotel was ridiculously expensive (by Ethiopian standards) and not cockroach free, but it was still nice to eat out and have ferenji food and coffee for a change. Two College staff were invited so we took one of the college cars. The college has three cars (and three drivers) and unfortunately the best two were in use, so we had to take the oldest car and driver. Wehab, the vice administrative dean, in describing why we were so late arriving in Mekelle, said “The car is old, and the driver is old too.” It probably doesn’t sound funny to you, but when it’s 7:30 at night, and you should have arrived by 6:00; there’s no light; you’re on a rocky, curvy mountain road; the car is lurching along doubtfully; and it’s just made contact with a cow; the calm understatedness of this explanation is rather overwhelming.

Anyway, although I didn’t think I complained too much (granted, I did make a noise of some surprise when, just after dark, the driver maintained speed and didn’t honk his horn as we drove into a herd of cows, who managed to meander out of the way in time for one to be merely grazed by the car; and perhaps once we arrived in Mekelle and limped along at about 5kph I wondered aloud whether this old car would be able to get back to Adwa), Wehab decided that our car was not suitable for a ferenji for the trip back. So he generously arranged for me to go back as far as Abi Adi in their college car. (Abi Adi is halfway between Adwa and Mekelle.) There are four VSOs in Abi Adi and three of them had come to the Mainstreaming workshop, plus several of their college staff. So in the Abi Adi car, we were ten: three in the front, four ferenjis in the middle, and three more staff and our bags in the little back seat. It was just a little tight. Anyway, the idea was nice, and it would have worked well had we left when we said we would at 7:00 in the morning. Unfortunately, we didn’t take into account the Abi Adi sense of time, and although they picked us up at the hotel just after 7:00, by the time we had picked up 100kg of teff, purchased many new car parts, experienced and repaired a blown tire (okay, that couldn’t have been predicted) and done a number of other mysterious tasks, it was 10:00. We arrived in Abi Adi at noon to find that the Adwa people had been waiting for me for two and a half hours.

I’ve been to Mekelle twice now, once by car and once by bus, and both times I’ve been sick after getting home. I don’t know if it’s breathing the fumes or the dust or if it’s some kind of low grade whiplash from the constant bouncing around. The view is nice, at least for the most part, but otherwise it is not a pleasant trip, and the experience does not add to my enthusiasm about visiting the rural schools.

So what about this HIV/AIDS conference? Well, it’s basically to encourage the college and the volunteer to mainstream HIV/AIDS within the college’s activities. The most useful, although most frustrating, part of the conference was just finding out from Wehab and Gibretensail, the HIV/AIDS focal person, what the state of HIV/AIDS programming is at the college. I and my co-VSOs were a bit shocked to hear about the Virgin Award. Apparently, last year the college awarded a prize to the 200 female students who were virgins. Out of 500 female students, 210 agreed to be examined at the hospital, and of these, 200 passed, and received a prize. Of course, although the students “consented” to the examination, it’s a forced consent, because it’s implicit that those who do not agree are not virgins. Secondly, the perpetuation of exams of this kind has been found to lead many girls to choose anal sex in order to preserve their hymens, which is problematic for many reasons, including greater risk of HIV transmission. Thirdly, rape and sexual assault are relatively common, especially when girls are on isolated rural practicums; so not only are the girls assaulted but then they are blamed for not being a virgin. And it promotes gender roles that women are expected to be virgins, but men are allowed to get away with anything, and I’m sorry to say that from my line of sight, it’s the behaviour of men that is behind most of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Anyway, if we ever get students (yes, we still have no students), the plan is to conduct this award process again. And I need to find a nice way to say that I think that this is counterproductive if the goal is to reduce HIV/AIDS transmission.

The state of the HIV/AIDS situation in Adwa is not completely clear to me. One of the first things that we will do under HIV/AIDS mainstreaming is survey the staff to find out their knowledge and attitudes about HIV/AIDS. I don’t believe it’s an overwhelming problem here, but I do know that it exists. Every once in a while, a relative of someone at the college has died, and when I’ve asked what they died of, the answer has been very mysterious, usually just that they were sick for a long time. I don’t know if this always means AIDS but I do think it often does. A few days ago I met a cousin of Furwaini’s who works as a nurse in the ART (anti-retroviral therapy) clinic at Adwa Hospital. It’s only a couple of months old and it’s relatively small as many people from the Adwa area are continuing to go to Mekelle and Addis for treatment in order to maintain their privacy. He seems to think, as I’m beginning to conclude on my own, that the big problem is unfaithful husbands, which means that there’s a double burden on a woman who is diagnosed with HIV. According to his sources, the HIV infection rate is around 6% in Adwa and the surrounding areas.

No comments: