Sunday September 9, 2007
The rainy season: As pretty much all the precipitation Adwa gets is concentrated into three months, the rainy season is pretty intense. It rains almost every day, with great drama. In the space of a few minutes, the sun will be overtaken by heavy gray clouds, the wind will blow, and heavy thunder will rumble. Then the rain will begin to fall, becoming a fast and heavy downpour. Lightning will flash and thunder will crash. Almost every day, there is one of these intense storms, the type that at home is rare enough that you would remember it for weeks or months.
The rain has done its job. The river that was barely a trickle for much of my time here is alive again - people gather to do their washing and children swim and play. And paths which I used before I went to Sherkole have disappeared under a metre or more of grass and brush. Farmers are busy with their crops too. My guard is job-sharing with a friend so that he can spend one full day out of two on the farm.
Even with all the development in Adwa and Tigray region lately, unemployment is still high. There are two assistant positions at the Inclusive Kindergarten, in addition to the one being taken by Netsanet, and it wasn’t long before my colleagues on the Steering Committee started putting their wives’ names in for the jobs. Since this didn’t feel quite okay, we announced the positions in the town, and were quickly overwhelmed with applications. People don’t do resumes here, they just show up, so I soon had to put up a sign saying the position was closed – otherwise whenever I saw their eager faces I was compelled to let them come to the interview.