I’ve been in Adwa for six months and I walk through the town almost every day. Yet it’s still a rare event to not have children, or even teenagers and adults, yell “Money”, “Ferenji” or “China” (a lot of Chinese road builders means that any non-Ethiopian is Chinese), or just to give a really long stare. It still really drives me crazy, even when it’s done in a friendly or innocent way. I think mostly it reminds me that no matter how long I stay here I will always be an outsider.

Often adults I don’t know will greet me, in English or Tigrigna. This drives me crazy too, although it really shouldn’t. I complain about how unfriendly Toronto and western society are, but I’m a product of that society (rather an exemplary one, at that). I rather like walking down the street in anonymity, without people noticing my every move. Of course, I also like the warm greetings of the people I do know. I have one shop that I often go to, and the owner is always friendly and welcoming. Last time she invited me to have coffee in the back. It actually wasn't the best coffee, and it was a tight squeeze for three people in the tiny space behind the counter, and our conversation was limited to what we could say in my broken Tigrigna and their broken English, but still, it was nice. And now, we greet each other by name and more warmly than before.

My landlady’s servant is divorced. This is not as rare as you might think. Divorced men can remarry, but women are on their own. She has one son already, and her husband has remarried. However, he led her to believe there was a potential reconciliation... She is still alone, but now she is pregnant. When the baby comes in July, she will have to stop working and go back to the village where she will live with her mother and son.

Today was Adwa Victory Day, a holiday to celebrate the Ethiopian defeat over the Italians in 1896, which made Ethiopia the “only” African country not to be colonized by Europe. It’s a relatively small holiday in most parts of the country, not having any direct religious connection, but if one happens to be in Adwa, of course it’s quite a big deal. Yesterday afternoon, there was a public celebration at the town stadium, with children from all the schools and all workers from the various local institutions (the college, the hospital, the textile factory). It was quite a big crowd. I brought Mickey with me and we joined the college contingent. It was very hot so we were lucky to be able to go in the college car. Unfortunately Mickey, being a ferenji-influenced child, is not very well behaved compared to many Ethiopian children, and drove my colleagues crazy with putting his head out the window and what not.

Today, the actual day, started with Adwa’s Great Run for Victory and Development. As this is the millennium year in the Ethiopian calendar, and the 111^th anniversary of Adwa Victory it was rather a big deal (any excuse for a celebration). This is the first time Adwa has had a run, and it got off to a rather bumpy start. I woke up at 5:15 to be on time for a 6:00 start at the stadium, and found instead a 7:30 start downtown, in part because many people had been told to go to the stadium and needed to be herded to the right place, and in part, I don’t really know why. The run was public, for anyone who had 7 birr to spare, and well turned out with the fast and the slow, like me. After the run I went home and showered and ate, and made it to the 8:00 ceremony by 10:00ish when it was just getting started. It was by invitation only, and most of the college staff had received invitations. I ended up getting a good seat, thanks to the UNMEE people, close to the official guests, Regional leaders and the Orthodox Christian priests from Addis.

The Cluster programme has gotten our funding back, although the direction of the college is still not decided. This happened quite suddenly, just before I had to go to Addis for a cluster meeting. So I’ve been really busy since then catching up on the workshops that had been postponed, as well as doing school visits and an action research project with some of the teachers and writing funding reports.

I spoke to the Regional Education Director. Apparently there were a lot of teachers from Tigray region working in other parts of the country, and during the upheavals after the election a year and a half ago there were threats against them. There was doubt about the fairness of the election. Since the government is mainly Tigrayan, there was some negative feeling towards Tigrayans. Many people fled back to Tigray region, creating a surplus of teachers.

So no new students have been admitted to any of the teachers’ colleges in Tigray and a commission has finally been launched to explore what should be done with each of the teachers’ colleges. To me, it seems a little short-sighted to shut them down, but we’ll see what happens.

Meanwhile, whether or not I can stay in Adwa for a second year depends on this decision, which has been two weeks away ever since I arrived in October.

Although education is improving in the country as a whole, much of this progress is led by improvements in Tigray, Amhara, Oromiya and even SNNPR regions, where probably the majority of children get some education.

But in the so-called “emerging” regions of Afar, Somali, Beneshangul-Gumuz and Gambella, around 30% - sometimes less - of school-age children are attending school. Partly this is because people live a nomadic lifestyle that makes regular education difficult. In the south. Last year’s continuing famine has meant that many people have been forced to move, and schools have been shut down. In Somali region, there are security issues. In Gambella, near the border with Sudan, there has been ongoing conflict, which I think is starting to improve. VSO (and many other aid organizations) doesn’t operate in Afar, Somali or Gambella. In some ways this makes sense, because international volunteers and workers expect a degree of security and pre-existing infrastructure, yet it’s disturbing to think that the areas where the need is greatest are not getting the same attention as places like Tigray. At the same time, a nomadic culture is so different from that in which the traditional education system works that it is a huge challenge to implement an effective education system that works with the society and doesn’t destroy what is positive about that culture. There are some informal education programmes whereby teachers move along with everyone else.

* * * * *

I know it's been quite some time since my last blog. My apologies.

Part of the reason for my hesitation is that in practice I have been sharing my personal reflections on all that is right and wrong about Ethiopia, and to a lesser degree about the personal lives of some of my associates. I wonder whether a public forum such as this blog is an appropriate venue, especially when many of those views seem to be changing constantly. Whenever I start to write something I find myself second-guessing it.

I'm open to the thoughts of my readers on this issue.

I’ve started tutoring my landlady's cousin (servant) in English every evening. She is in grade 9, and struggling. In Grades 9 to 12, all subjects except Amharic and Tigrigna are taught in English. For someone who still doesn’t know all the letters and can barely read a sentence, let alone understand what she reads, this means the heavy load of Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Geography, History courses is nearly impossible. On top of that, the classes are large, the teacher is only present for 10 out of the 40 minutes (the notorious video lessons) and the textbooks are poorly written and organized.

Recently, I've become better acquainted with ferenjis in Adwa. The ferenjis themselves are interesting, but even more is the general thrill of finally meeting other foreigners living in Adwa after about four months of relative isolation.

About two weeks ago, I met an Italian woman who with her husband has started an orphanage here. They’re about my age, and have basically committed their lives to running the orphanage here, with regular visits back to Italy. On Friday, a holiday, I visited the orphanage. Although I only had a fairly short visit. I will write more about it, as I know the babies will draw me back.

On Saturday at the market I met the wife of the new manager of the road construction project. And on Saturday afternoon I met the Chinese engineers who are constructing the road. I walk past their building all the time but almost never see them. After getting inside the building, I finally know why: each person has office, bedroom and bathroom all in one room. And they have their own Chinese cook. There’s no need to step out into Ethiopia if you don’t want to.

On Monday I was invited with Furwaini to a wedding in the rural area outside of Adwa. We waited for a long time for a line taxi and finally happened to meet the car belonging to Medecins du Monde (not to be confused with the better known Medecins Sans Frontiers), a team of French doctors formerly based in Adwa but unfortunately now in Axum. We got a ride in the car: the driver was picking up from school a little girl from Sri Lanka who has been adopted by one of the French doctors.

On Monday afternoon, after we returned from the wedding (they danced till midnight but I missed all that), Furwaini’s brother came with some visiting philanthropists who have been funding several projects in Ethiopia. Go to www.aglimmerofhope.org and www.clintonfoundation.org to see more.

And that’s it for now.

"Looking back at our own educational experience" was the topic of a recent ELIP (English Language Improvement Programme) session I’m running.

The rate of enrolment in education in Ethiopia is 85% as of October 2006. This compares to 27% in 1991, which of course is when the current government came into power. It’s clear from my discussions with teachers and others that progress has been made in recent years.

Many teachers recalled classes conducted under trees, and walking several hours to school.

Now, although there are some dass (temporary structures) and many dark and dingy classrooms, and classrooms without desks, there are also many quite decent school buildings. I have never seen a class under a tree. I could be wrong, but I would guess that they don’t exist any more in Tigray region, at least not in the formal education system.

Work is still needed on access to education: 15% is not a small number, and in some regions the figure is much higher. But quality of education is now a big focus, through programmes such as cluster and higher diploma (training for teacher educators).

For me as a shyish person, there are some things about life here that are easier than at home. I sometimes wonder if this is a good thing. As the only foreigner at the college and one of very few in the town, I stand out and get attention and recognition without really earning it. For social events like holidays I’m assured of an invitation. Of course, Ethiopians always greet each other warmly; I'm included in this too. I have wonderful colleagues in the Cluster Unit, and as we’re going out regularly on school visits we’re getting to know each other well. And when my social calendar is empty, as it is many evenings, I can always rationalize, completely legitimately, that I’m a stranger in a strange land with a strange language, all the volunteers in isolated placements experience the same phenomenon, and few women here go out at night anyway.

Another happy day on the rural school visit circuit. We saw a very nice measurement lesson, which added fuel to my theory that there’s an inverse relationship between the quality of the teaching and the condition of the school building, as this was another classroom sans-desks where the students sit on dried mud platforms.

I always feel uplifted when we watch a good teacher – it’s inspiring and reassuring, and also a great break from watching students do NOTHING for 20 minutes while the teacher checks everybody’s book, or listening to teachers and students scream “This is a cat. This is a cat. This is a cat.” (The drill approach is very popular in all subjects, but especially English.) Anyway, we saw this wonderful teacher and Meressa, my lesson-observing partner, called some students up to read in Tigrigna (very few Grade 2 students can read in English) and they were all able to read. This was a stark contrast with the previous Grade 2 class where only one out the four students we called was able to stumble through what she had copied into her notebook. As a teacher, I shouldn’t be surprised that there’s a connection between good teaching and good learning, but it is rather gratifying to see.

Furwaini’s brother is visiting from Canada where he has been living for the past three years. He’s complaining about the backwards way people live here: cooking food on coal stoves outside and washing their laundry in basins (even though, as Furwaini says, he doesn’t have to do any of this work himself). Furwaini herself doesn’t mind, and she has brought me into it as a Canadian who doesn’t mind the traditional ways either, although I think with my electric burner and my running water I’d really better stay out of the discussion.

I have no intention of idealizing poverty. Even Furwaini’s life is much easier than that of many people, who have to collect their own water, or go to the river to wash, or who don’t have servants to help them. And there is nothing romantic about water-borne infections, or protein-starved children, or walking three hours a day with a load of wood on your back, or futures disappearing under a bad education system. Yet there is still something about a group of women cooking together, and preparing food from start to finish with their own hands, that I love. There’s something about children playing together on the street with homemade balls and games. People dropping in and coffee being prepared. People walking (or taking the bus) everywhere they go. These are things I love and I wish that I could bring a little bit of them back with me when I go home.

When we visit classes to observe teachers, we always ask the teacher to talk with us afterwards so we can give her or him some feedback on the lesson we saw. So we step outside the classroom, find a rock or something to sit on, and talk. Meanwhile, the 40 or 50 children are left inside the class (no supply teacher coverage!). At first I was quite resistant to this. It goes against my ingrained sense of responsibility and liability to leave children alone in the classroom. Yet after a few occasions it became very clear that the children were perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. Sometimes the teacher leaves a particular child in charge to lead a lesson. Other times the students are just expected to work independently. I don’t know how much work gets done, but the behaviour is always excellent. Once we spoke with a teacher for about fifteen minutes while her class conducted their own Physical Education class outside, playing a game together without any problems. To be fair, I sometimes wonder whether a fear of punishment plays a role in the good behaviour. But I also think there’s a sense of cooperation among the children, and also an independence and self-sufficiency from both the children and the adults’ expectations that I admire and would like to bring back with me.

This morning, I went with the college staff to the funeral for Fesseha’s uncle. It was the first funeral I have been to, and there are many things I don’t understand about the ceremony, yet there were of course many similarities with western Christian funerals. Funerals, like baptisms and births and other milestones, are very public events with all the family and neighbours and colleagues participating. Everyone assembled outside the uncle’s house and followed the coffin and the priests to the church. The men and women were separate – men at the front and women at the back, even the wife and the close female relatives were at the back. I was only able to identify the wife because she was the one being held up and consoled by other women. Many of the women were crying and wailing in a way that I think is ceremonial as well as sincere, and that is strange for me from a slightly less explicit emotional culture. Yesterday was Ethiopian Orthodox Christmas (December 29^th in the Ethiopian calendar, which falls on January 7^th in the western calendar). It was a rather quiet day with everyone celebrating with their own families. Many people have been fasting (eating a vegan diet) for the 35 days leading up to Christmas, so there was much enthusiasm about killing the goat or hen or sheep for Christmas. Haile Michael, one of the college staff, who takes very seriously the responsibility of ensuring my entertainment, invited me to his house, and provided me with shiro (vegetarian food) and I also joined Furwaini (my landlady)’s family. Her brother who lives in Ottawa is visiting and it was nice to have a little feeling of Canada. There are pictures of both family celebrations on flickr.

This afternoon, some of the teachers who come to ELIP and cluster workshops invited me to have porridge for one of the teachers who had just had a baby. I was a bit mystified as I had never been invited for porridge before. Four days after a baby is born, the family invites people over for porridge.

(I can’t remember the name in Tigrigna, but in English it’s called porridge, which is a bit misleading – if you’re familiar with West African fufu it’s actually rather similar to that although it’s made of flour instead of cassava).

The mother and baby (a boy, number 6) were comfortably ensconced on a bed, and the cooking and serving were done by other women – friends and relatives. I like and envy the way people take care of each other and celebrate together. All the women in the neighbourhood were invited, as well as the teachers and other friends and family, and the house was full of women, in small clusters sharing huge mounds of porridge topped with berberi (peppery sauce). Another group of women helped cook more porridge in a huge pot outside. This is not a food I’d had or even heard of before (a meal without injera? oh my!) The women told me that although it’s eaten sometimes for breakfast, porridge is mainly eaten when celebrating the birth of a baby, and is considered very nutritious and fattening in a good way. It was quite nice, very comfort-foody. When everyone had had enough, each woman in the group picked up the plate and kissed it in thanks for the food and everyone ululated (is that the word for a throaty, yodeling kind of singing?). There was a lot of celebratory ululating going on throughout, as new guests came and left and food was served. Hopefully at some point I’ll have the chance to take pictures, but sometimes I feel like taking pictures is disruptive and underlines my foreignness, and I’d rather just enjoy the experience.

It must be baby week, because on Saturday I went to a baptism party for another baby. In Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, boys are baptized after 40 days and girls after 80 days (I don’t know why) and the church is quite strict about baptisms happening on time. The whole neighbourhood is invited and people come in and out as in an open house. The grandmother and aunts were busy serving the food (the usual – injera and wot) while the mother and baby rested.

What of this business of not doing any weekend workshops? Well, most of the Cluster Unit’s budget comes from an NGO called TDP (Teacher Development Programme, funded by several EU countries). As I wrote a few weeks ago, some uncertainty has arisen about the direction of the college, and therefore TDP has frozen their budget until this is sorted out, which means that the only part of the college which is actually active is now facing something of an obstacle.

(The college staff themselves are paid by the government and so are still being paid even though there are no students and there’s very little to do. This seems a bit odd, but the thing is that as there’s no social security net, if the college staff were not to be paid, Adwa’s fledgling middle class would practically vanish. So they keep themselves busy running workshops for each other and planning classes, but they are started to be quite frustrated.)

The cluster unit still has small allocations of money, like the BESO funding for videotaping and for such specific things as a Computer workshop for teachers (oh, the waste of time!), but the bulk of our money is frozen. So workshops that require paying a per diem to the teachers are really impossible. I’ve just started doing ELIP (English Language Improvement Programme) with the Adwa Town teachers two half days a week and it is difficult to get them to come, purportedly because we’re not paying a per diem, even though it’s only half a day and they don’t have that far to travel. (I also think that the first session was not very smooth and this has turned them off coming, but my colleagues are very attached to the per diem explanation. Anyway, today was a lot better, so we’ll see if attendance improves or not.)

I’m sure people will disagree with me about computer training being a waste of time. BESO certainly thinks it’s worth getting on the IT bandwagon. Although I definitely find computers useful, and I couldn’t manage without email, I’ve never been a fan of computers in the classroom. I certainly don’t think they’re essential to effective teaching. As none of our schools have computers, and little prospect of acquiring computers in the near future (many of them have no electricity), I’d rather see the money go to something more useful rather than computer training for a mere 16 teachers (8 teachers and 8 directors). But there’s no point in arguing, so yesterday I and the college’s IT person were thrown into computer training (every evening for three weeks straight as the BESO budget reporting period is very short). It was actually quite interesting to watch and work with the teachers, who had rarely seen and never touched a computer before: a mouse is a very tricky tool to get used to. Still, I wasn’t upset to find that there was no electricity today.

My dad has asked for a clarification on why we go out into the rural areas to visit schools. This is a very good question, as it certainly would be easier not to spend hours driving across bumpy roads spewing diesel fuel into the air, and sitting in freezing - in - the - morning and boiling - in - the - afternoon classrooms, and rationing water consumption in order to avoid the yucky (or more often, nonexistent) toilets. And whether the lesson is good or not, it can be quite tedious to watch other people teach when you’re used to teaching yourself. So, why do we do it? About a month and a half ago, we had an experiencing sharing visit from the cluster unit at Abi Adi CTE, which included VSO volunteer Jenny, who has been in Abi Adi since last February, and the Ethiopian cluster coordinator Yikono. Having been busy planning workshops and whatnot, I hadn’t spent much time in the schools since the first weeks of being here and had kind of forgotten or not realized how important it was to be on top of what’s happening in the schools. We went out to show Jenny and Yikono some of the schools in Adwa town, and sat and watched a couple of lessons. Now that I wasn’t quite as freshly arrived, I think I was a bit more ready to critically observe the lessons. As I took in the enormity of the task ahead of me, instead of crying, I thought to myself that it would be very helpful to provide ongoing support and mentoring to the teachers on an individual basis. Soon afterward, Jenny described how in Abi Adi they have just started spending two full days visiting the schools, and since this was so closely aligned with what I was thinking, I immediately proposed it to my fellow co-ordinator Tigistu, who agreed with surprising ease, and we proposed it to Feseha, the dean.

There are no rules for exactly what needs to be done by each cluster unit, and there’s a lot of variation from one to another, which leads to flexibility, but can also leave you floundering a bit if you don’t have enough support or direction. Fortunately, that’s not the case here.

The original plan was to spend one day a week, but now that we are not doing weekend workshops (see below), it has gone up to two days and occasionally. We’ve finished our first set of workshops, on active learning / setting up your classroom for active learning, and it’s very interesting to see to what extent the teachers are using the strategies taught in the workshop. For the most part they are using them, but often need a little bit of guidance to use them properly, which we give as part of our feedback. For example, it’s great to use stones to model addition, but the students themselves need to use them as manipulatives, not just the teacher.

Another benefit of visiting the schools is that it allows us to identify good teachers. We have some money from BESO (Basic Education System Overhaul, under USAID) to videotape five good teachers, so as we visit schools right now we’re looking for those teachers. But also as we identify teachers who are strong in various areas we are able to advise other teachers to visit and observe them, and begin to contribute to an informal system of mentoring and support among the teachers in the various geographic clusters. Although not impossible. this is difficult for teachers to set up on their own because of the lack of communication infrastructure. I don’t think any of the rural schools have phones, the distances between schools can often be quite large, and of course the teachers don’t have access to vehicles other than the odd bicycle. For the young teachers at the rural schools, it can be a very isolating life. They generally live in a teachers’ residence at the school or they rent space in a nearby farmer’s home. Some schools are in villages or very small clusters of homes but others are completely on their own, away from their families and a long walk from markets, shops and amenities and entertainment. In addition to their low salary, these are some of the reasons why few people want to stay in teaching. When they do, as they accumulate years of service they select out of the rural areas. This is why Adwa Town has almost only teachers in their forties and fifties and the rural areas have almost only teachers in their early twenties.

There are 62 schools under our cluster programme, which is a lot. Eight schools are in Adwa town itself and the rest are in the rural areas, which means we’re spending a lot of time on those bumpy roads. Some are reachable by car but others are not, and of course the harder to reach schools are the ones in the worst shape, at least in terms of materials and the conditions of the buildings. We walked about a kilometer or so after the road ended to get to one school a few weeks ago. One of the classes had desks but the others didn’t so the children sat on stone stools on the floor. This was the easiest of the hard to reach schools though and my colleagues seem to think that the other ones are too much for my ferenji feet. Unfortunately, they’re probably right, but I hope to work on getting there at some point.

I'm sorry I haven't been keeping this blog up to date the past few weeks.  Some of the time I've been away from easy internet access, the cluster team has spent several days away visiting rural schools, and last week I was in Addis and Sodere for VSO's Annual Volunteer Conference.  But apart from that, I'm afraid I've been experiencing some writer's block, so tonight I'm exercising a little discipline and settling down to write a short update before I go to bed.

The trouble is that my workdays are really very routine, and although I like and get along well with my colleagues, it's not really the done thing for women to go out much at night.  Not being one to do what's not done, I spend most of my evenings alone at home with very little social life (which isn't that much of a change).

The other trouble is that those things that might be of interest to you, and which weigh most heavily on me, I haven't quite figured out how to write about in a way that accurately reflects the reality.

Corporal punishment (if you can even call it that, as the term implies to me a greater degree of organization and forethought than that which often seems to exist in the treatment I'm observing) is very common in Ethiopia, at home and school. I find it difficult sometimes to interact with people in a friendly way after seeing them treat their children in a way that would certainly have merited a call to CAS at home.  It's difficult to always give advice about alternative methods of discipline, especially as a childless person from Canada, the country where all children are well-fed, well-dressed and infinitely well-behaved.

A sick little girl I didn't know how to help.  The constant waste of money and time. Sexual exploitation of women. These are the things that are touching me right now, and that I haven't quite figured out how to write about, let alone deal with.

The situation with Somalia seems relatively stable at the moment, at least from where I am in northern Ethiopia.  The changes for me are that instead of being alone in the computer room at the college, it's full of people checking the latest news on the internet, and the conversation of my colleagues in the car to Werieleke this morning was atypically political.

Christmas in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is not for another two weeks. I celebrated ferenji (foreign) Christmas on Monday by inviting some of my colleagues over to my house for lunch cooked by me and mostly my maid (I have a maid who comes three mornings a week mostly to do laundry, but it was very convenient to have her help cooking Christmas dinner).  It was vegetarian Ethiopian food.  Of course I'm vegetarian but also it is the tradition of many Orthodox Christians here to "fast" for the thirty five days leading up to Christmas, and the fifty days leading up to Easter, and every Wednesday and Friday as well.  "Fasting" generally means eating a vegan diet - no meat or animal products, although some people also don't eat in the mornings.  Anyway, it was very nice, the food was good and I managed to download some Christmas music from the internet.  As Ethiopia is home to a particular species of evergreen tree, I was able to decorate my home in a surprisingly homey, seasonal way.

I also had the help of my wonderful colleagues Abebe and Meresa who spent hours making Christmas decorations for my house.

The cluster team has decided to dedicate one to three days a week to visiting schools (in part because this is simply good practice, and in part because with our recent funding squeeze our trainings are postponed and we need to work with the teachers in some way).  So we went to Werieleke today, and I'm tired but actually quite uplifted as most of the teachers we saw were the best we've seen so far, extremely motivated and hardworking, and effectively using many strategies to encourage active learning and real group work.  They've taken things they've learned
from the workshop and added them to their existing skills. It was quite exciting to see, and a great start as we now have good teachers to videotape and send other teachers to observe.

I'll end on that happy note.  Tomorrow night I'll try to battle the writer's block and fight the urge to play Freecell or curl up with Jane Austen's Emma (which I picked up from VSO's library after a lengthy deprivation of anything literary) and instead write some more, as there is more to write.

I wrote some time ago that there are no students at the College, but that fortunately this does not affect me as I am working with the inservice teachers in the school cluster programme. Unfortunately, it seems I spoke too soon. The absence of students has turned out to be a symptom of a greater reorganization at the Regional Education Bureau of Tigray – that institution which decides not only where grade ten finishers will go for teacher training, but also what each institute of higher education will teach. At present, although we are several months into what should be the current school year, it seems that the REB is trying to decide whether Adwa CTE should continue to be a teacher training college, and if so whether it should be First or Second Cycle, or whether we should instead become a campus under the new Axum University, due to open in January, or whether we should become a tourism and hospitality industry college.

Institutional disorganization is one of the most frustrating things about working in Ethiopia. Even before this problem became clear, I was beginning to dread running into Feseha (the dean), knowing that he would tell me that the BESO budget or TDP budget (aid agencies) for the cluster programme had changed and we had to do this, or couldn’t do that, or needed to plan for something new. Now, the bulk of our budget is frozen, as apparently the REB has not released any of the money that I think we were counting on, and won’t release it until they decide what to do with Adwa CTE. So when next weekend’s Model Classroom training is finished, our activities will be on hold – no more training. I don’t know what will happen if we become a tourism college; I don’t relish the thought of our beautiful model classroom being turned into a model hotel room. I am a bit worried that my one year or two debate may have become moot (indeed, I am a bit worried that it may not even be one year in Adwa, but I will wait and see what decisions the REB makes over the next few weeks before I panic).

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.

One year or two? The decision doesn’t have to be made till around February but it is a constant question. Here are my pros and cons.

For staying:

Training weekends

School visits

I want to really know Ethiopia, and Adwa, and I’ll need more time to do this, and to adjust more fully

Coffee ceremony invitations, which always seem to include lunch

Children I barely know coming up to hold my hand

Mountain scenery

For going:

Being alone every night

A diet of white bread and shiro

Having to have a translator for all my workshops

Children I don’t know yelling “Money, money” at me

Not seeing Nicholas (my nephew) growing up

Training weekends / 7 day workweeks

Ethiopian English

Cockroaches and fleas (while my populations are more or less under control, there’s the constant fear of a resurgence)

Last weekend I was certain I would stay for two years, and this week I’ve been pulled towards one year. Nothing bad has happened; I just seem to be struck by a rather strong feeling of homesickness and tiredness. I know I’ll continue to bounce the decision round right up until it has to be made… Onto other news… macchiato and goiter.

The College has purchased two large espresso/macchiato machines, one for the Staff Lounge and one for the Student Lounge (we still have no students). Much of the College budget comes from aid programmes (USAID and TDP-Teacher Development Programme- from several EU countries), so I find it quite difficult not to question this purchase, especially when we can’t afford decent books for the cluster schools and we’ve just been told to scale down our English training for teachers. Maybe this isn’t fair, but I think an aid budget is different from a gift: it needs to have strings and responsibilities attached. Of course, I say this from the comfort of my shiny indoor bathroom home, rent paid by the College. Anyway, my conscience has yet to be tested on the macchiato issue, as nobody knows how to work the machine or read the instructions, so we’re still enjoying traditional coffee.

At the Ahferom workshop, I noticed that most of the women have a goiter. Apparently, soil erosion is contributing to iodine deficiency. The problem mostly affects rural people, and more so even in the south of Ethiopia than in Tigray. Goiter itself is essentially a cosmetic problem, but I understand that iodine deficiency is the number one cause of preventable mental retardation in children. There is iodized salt available in Adwa but in the rural areas it’s not usually accessible and people often don’t know the connection.

I had my first real training session on the weekend. It took place at Enticho Elementary School in the village of Enticho, for all the key teachers in the woreda of Ahferom. Many of the schools are very rural and very hard to get to. I realized what a skewed perspective I’ve gotten from the Adwa Town schools and even the more accessible rural schools that we’ve visited so far. In Enticho School, the walls of the classrooms are practically bare, although both key teachers do have charts of the Tigrigna alphabet which is good; the more rural schools have far less. The problem in Adwa Town is almost the opposite: they have received so much inappropriate material, and misdirected training, that the walls of some of the classrooms are covered in useless, confusing and misspelled charts.

The official class size limit for grades 1-4 is 50 children, and so far in Adwa Town I haven’t seen any class above 50 (at least not in grade 1 or 2, at which training is focused). So I was a bit surprised to find that at Enticho there are 70 children in grade 2 (51 in grade 1). As they were planning and sketching their classes I asked one of the teachers from one of the rural schools how many desks he had, and the answer was none. Apparently, some of the schools that don’t have desks have built raised benches out of clay right on the floor (like at the library at Bete Yohanis School, but in the classrooms), but not at this particular school… in some ways, it does make it a lot easier to set up your classroom when you have no furniture.

In Adwa Town, the problem is more that the teachers think they are doing active learning when they’re not, and they have all their tables in groups but some of the groups have 12 or 13 children in them, and they don’t do any group work anyway. In the rural areas, the teachers are fresh (as my Ethiopian colleagues would say), and although they seemed to struggle with some concepts, I think they enjoyed the training and are interested in trying out active learning strategies. The training we’re doing is called Model Classroom and it’s a topic that most Cluster programmes cover as standard; it’s basically about how to set up your classroom with materials that promote active learning. After visiting the Adwa Town schools I realized that we would have to focus on active learning strategies rather than materials, so that the teachers would really understand, and then hopefully be able to make informed decisions about what materials they need. This is especially important for the rural areas where there are very few materials provided at the schools. Teachers also need to recognize the simple materials around them and let students use these materials. While some teachers use bottle tops in their classes as counters, they’re only for the teacher to hold up to demonstrate. So one of the key points of the training is that in model classrooms you need simple locally available materials such as bottle tops and stones for students to use. The need for active learning, or some kind of improvement to mathematics teaching and understanding is obvious: although basic multiplication is on the grade 2 curriculum (children are 8 in grade 2), many teachers had a lot of trouble with the multiplication lesson I demonstrated. They may know their multiplication facts (although many don’t), but they don’t know what it means: one example of many is that several teachers at the Ahferom workshop, one of my training colleagues, and a Grade 8 Physics teacher have all used bottle tops to demonstrate multiplication as if it’s addition, eg.: 2 x 5 as (the asterisks represent bottle tops) ** x ***** .

Although teachers of grade 1 to 4 are expected to teach English (which is a very questionable expectation), most of the teachers at this training had extremely limited English (some probably about as much English as I have Tigrigna). Again, my expectations were based on the Adwa Town teachers, but after about the first five minutes it became very clear that I’d have to have one of my colleagues to translate everything I said. This certainly makes things a bit bumpier, but it was manageable.

There are a lot of complaints among administrators and college staff about the unmotivated teachers who won’t come to trainings unless you pay them a perdiem. And I was quite frustrated about this at first. However, what I’ve found at both the Pedagogical Centre Training and the Model Classroom Training is that there is perfect attendance (this is for 2 or 3 day workshops away from home!) – whether this is because of the perdiem or fear of consequences if you don’t attend or genuine interest I don’t know – the teachers are always enthusiastic and hard working, asking questions and spending their breaks visiting our model classroom and writing down ideas. Many of the teachers are quite young (probably all the men are very young, because they tend to climb the ranks as they get older; there are some older women, but the majority are probably under 25 and even under 20). The starting salary for a Grade 1 to 4 teacher is 400 Birr/month, and I think the maximum is about 900 Birr (compare this to my “volunteer” salary of 1200 Birr plus accommodation with no one to support other than myself).

We’re reducing the perdiem by providing most of the trainings for teachers at four different sites, like Enticho, instead of at the College, so that the teachers don’t have as far to come. This was the first Model Classroom Training so there are three more to go. I quite enjoyed it, and am looking forward to the one next weekend. It will be for Adwa Town and Geter Adwa teachers, so I think the level of experience and English will be a bit different than Ahferom, and than the last two training groups, so that will be interesting.

Probably the most frustrating part of the training was working with my two colleagues who are supposed to be Cluster trainers. Although I did most of the workshop, they did a couple of sessions and it was very obvious, not that I was surprised, that they had a lot of difficulty understanding active learning and how to plan a lesson that would help the teachers understand active learning. My problem is I had been tending to forget that part of my job is to train these colleagues, and I was becoming quite frustrated that they weren’t doing it properly. And my fear was that they would not be open to feedback. But today we spent most of the day together revising and replanning their parts of next week’s workshop, and although I’m not expecting perfection (I certainly can’t expect it from myself), I do think it was time well spent, and I think we all felt happier afterwards. (Unfortunately I have so much paper work and training manuals that I’m expected to write that spending a whole day away from my computer was a little unsettling, especially as I got so little work done last week because we had visitors from Abi Adi: both Jenny, VSO volunteer, and her habesha (Ethiopian) colleague were here to “experience share” about the Cluster Programme, which was actually extremely useful and it was nice to have a houseguest, but no Continuous Assessment Manual, or any other concrete product, was produced.)

Books and Money for Ethiopia!

The question has been asked, I think after I posted a picture of one of the school libraries, about whether you should send books. As the Christmas season is coming, and many people like to share their wealth at this time, I thought I would answer this question, and as usual, it’s in my complicated way.

If you’re interested in making a very large donation, it’s better not to send books because of the high cost of shipping. There are some organizations that will accept donations of money and will then buy books internally or in bulk for Ethiopia, including books in Amharic and other local languages, and I encourage you to explore such organizations.

If you would like to make a donation more generally, I continue to believe (perhaps it’s just that I read Stephen Lewis every night before I go to bed) that UNICEF is the organization most poised to make significant structural and systemic change for children in Africa. Finally, although I think I have pretty much reached the $2000 mark, you are certainly still welcome and encouraged to make donations to VSO, which I do believe is supporting good work in Ethiopia and the other countries in which volunteers work.

Finally, however, I came here with only three children’s books (Eric Carle) and I would like to have more books to share both with the children on my street and with my colleagues as samples of the kinds of materials we should seek out and promote. So if you’d like to send two or three books to Ethiopia, I will happily put them to use. In Adwa Town, we already have stacks of books - many of them never opened - about snowmen and other materials that are completely inappropriate and inaccessible for Ethiopian primary school children, so I’ve been trying to think of books I know that are likely to be interesting and relevant to young children in Adwa. Here are a few. You can probably think of more.

The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch

Swimmy by Leo Lionni

Something from Nothing by Phoebe Gilman

Planting a Rainbow and Growing Vegetable Soup by Lois Ehlert

Aesop’s Fables

Ten Black Dots by Donald Crews

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin Jr.

The Lorax and other books by Dr. Seuss

Counting books and math themed books

Children’s picture dictionary or word books

Children’s atlas

Nonfiction (there are some good books by Claire Llewellyn, especially those with an environmental theme)

Postscript: I’m sending this on Tuesday afternoon. We’ve just received some money to buy books for the satellite schools, and although it was surprisingly easy to convince my colleagues that we need to buy story books and information books rather than grammar books, our problem is that we can’t find any place that sells such books (in English or Tigrigna), and our funds are rather limited. I’ve just spent the whole afternoon visiting Adwa’s single bookstore and (slowly) scouring the internet, with limited success.

I’m writing this at lunch time and I have to rush to get back to work (I do get a 2 hour lunch break, which balances out my 7 day work week). I thought my laptop wasn’t working because the battery wouldn’t charge, but I think it was a problem with insufficient electrical current rather than the computer, as it’s okay now. I had to write Friday’s entry by hand and then type it in. The problem was that my stabilizer started to smoke last week and so I’m understandably afraid to use it. It happened as I was ironing my sheets. Ironing your sheets, you ask? Yes, since coming to this house, I’ve been engaged in an ongoing battle with fleas. I’ve been trying to outdo them through ironing (sheets, underwear, my mattress, my clothes ..... ) and very frequent laundry washing. However, shortly after the smoking stabilizer incident, I finally gave in and used bug spray. I’m not happy about it, but I believe I have had a few flea free nights since then, and it’s very nice (it’s hard to say for sure though, because flea bites seem to last for quite a while, not to mention the new bites that I get whenever I’m outside in the evening, or in my office, or Furwaini’s cat rubbing up against me ..... Anyway, if anyone has any insight into environmentally friendly solutions to the flea problem, I’d be happy to hear them, because although the battle may be won, I think this will be an ongoing problem.

We had the Pedagogical Centre Workers training on the weekend for teachers who also work in the pedagogical centre – making teaching aids and instructional materials for the school as there is no catalogue from which to order such things. Again, it was very frustrating to see that a lot of teachers had a lot of trouble recognizing what’s useful for active learning. Part of this is Abebe and Meresa’s problem too. What is the point of spending two hours carving fruit out of Styrofoam (granted, you’re reusing materials) to make a chart of healthy food when you could just draw them or have students bring in fruit and vegetables? So, this is my challenge.

I spent most of the week working on setting up the model classroom (a room at the College that’s supposed to look like a Primary classroom, more or less, where we do most of the teacher training). I enjoy this, and I do think it’s a very important training tool. Yet I feel a bit like it’s part of an imaginary model world that doesn’t have a lot of bearing on real people’s lives ..... I go to buy mats for the model classroom and we drive past a little boy who looks like he can hardly stay upright, pushing a cartload of something, and I do nothing. Was there anything I could do? I don’t know.

Most of the rural schools have shut down till early next week as all the children are helping their parents bring in the teff crop before it rains.

Anyway, the model classroom is now up and running. Even for the College instructors I think it will be useful in terms of building understanding of active learning, a term that’s much used but little understood. Working with Abebe and Meresa this week has been nice but frustrating. I don’t know how much they’re understanding when I say instructional materials need to be produced that can be used by students and for multiple purposes. They seem quite keen, but then the manual for the Pedagogical Centre Workers Training contains more of the same. So much material, time, money and learning opportunities have been wasted by Pedagogical Centre workers making useless materials, or things that the students could be making themselves.

In one of my brief forays onto the internet, I was reading on All Africa News that Ethiopia is expected to be one of the African countries hard hit by climate change – in fact it already is. You can’t escape climate change and environmental degradation anywhere you go. Even before I read the article I was thinking about it – the unseasonable rains that are wreaking havoc with farmers, the floods in the south of the country that have killed thousands, the soil erosion that even I can see on the drive to Mekelle. And as Western technologies and values and materials become more common here, the lack of infrastructure to support them is evident – there are batteries but no safe disposal system (although Abebe and Meresa tell me that they will take them apart and use the carbon (?) inside to make blackboard paint), same problem with the aerosol cans, and of course there’s no recycling of any kind for paper or other materials, although most people are a little more innovative about reusing them than we are in the west ( and pop is only sold in refillable glass bottles). There’s no system of composting so for those who live in cities and towns all those great vegetable scraps end up in the garbage.

It is very worrying that Ethiopia is building up many of the same practices that in the west have already led to global climate change and overuse of resources. And yet in the model classroom and in so much of teacher training, although the focus is on using locally available materials, it’s still on using materials: using more, having more paper, more things in your classroom. It’s only fair that children in developing countries should have as much access to teaching aids (and quality teaching) as elsewhere, and yet ..... there needs to be attention to the environment and to resources at the same time ..... probably in western schools as much or more than here.

Allen, one of the VSOs from Abi Adi is visiting Adwa TTC this week to provide some training in writing newsletters on the computer. Abi Adi, Adwa and Mekelle are the three places in Tigray Region where there are currently VSO volunteers. Although Abi Adi is only a little more than half the size of Adwa, there are 3 (soon to be 4, then 3 again, then 2) VSOs at the Teachers’ College there. (I’m the only one in Adwa, although the TTC has submitted a request for an IT volunteer, who is desperately needed.) I haven’t visited Abi Adi yet. Allen says that there is no electricity until 5:00 in the afternoon. Again, I feel like I’m living a life of luxury here in Adwa.

It’s not that there’s not poverty, there is. But increasingly there are improvements to basic infrastructure like electricity. But relatedly, and most importantly, if you have enough money, which even as a volunteer I do, there’s decent housing to be had, and the food, although somewhat limited in variety, is nutritious and delicious (so much so that I’m becoming very worried that I’ll gain more weight in Ethiopia rather than lose it). The problem of course is that the majority of people in Adwa and especially in the rural areas don’t have the security of a decent, stable income. Some NGOs, especially the Catholic missions, as well as government programmes, provide food aid to people in and around Adwa, like both my maid and my guard. I don’t know whether people in the isolated rural areas receive food aid. Lately, there have been some heavy rains that were unexpected as the rainy season ended over a month ago and it’s now the time of harvesting teff. Almost everyone has been saying that this is very bad for the farmers as their harvested crops are likely to be ruined.

Whenever I introduce myself as being from Canada, invariably someone will tell me that they have a brother or sister there, usually in Ottawa or Toronto. In the case of Furwaini’s sisters, and I think in many cases, they have lived in Canada for a long time and are Canadian citizens, having left Ethiopia as refugees during the time of the Derg.

I apologize in advance for any inaccuracies in this brief summary of recent Ethiopian history. The Derg was the communist government that deposed Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 and held power until 1991. I believe the same Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, has been in power ever since then.

In general the Derg regime was not a pleasant time. In Tigray Region and Eritrea (which was then part of Ethiopia) there was unrest and agitation for independence, which the government responded to with military repression and, during the droughts of the early 1980s, with the withholding of food aid. The effect was the infamous Ethiopian famines of 1984.

The current government is relatively and generally stable (except for the 100 000 soldiers killed in the war with Eritrea, ongoing conflict in Beneshangul Gumuz and Gambella Regions, repression of Somalis in Somali Region and last year’s protests over election irregularities; still all these issues have remained isolated and contained and Ethiopia as a whole is enjoying relatively stability, compared to its history and compared to many African countries). However, it has taken people some time to adjust to the stability and freedom: for example, during the Derg Regime, people could not travel within the country, and it’s only in recent years that people are starting to feel comfortable enough to travel and visit historical sites within Ethiopia.

In Canada, U.S., Australia, England, and many Arab countries, there are significant populations of Ethiopians who left as refugees during the Derg Regime, and because Tigray was one of the areas most badly treated by the Derg, many of them are from the Tigray region. The positive (I think) effect that’s been felt in the past few years is that now that things are stable in Ethiopia, some of these people are returning to places like Adwa and Mekelle to invest their money and build high-end homes.

Today I was invited to my colleague Tigistu’s house for lunch and coffee ceremony. I’m starting to get used to it, but it is still awkward and a bit unsettling: at least every time I’ve been invited to someone’s house so far, the wife serves the food and then prepares coffee while the husband and the guests eat, and she doesn’t eat until the guests have left. Men and women are always saying, as if it’s some kind of religious exhortation, that only women can prepare food.

People recognize that girls don’t do as well at school because they have so many responsibilities at home, and yet, even among those who recognize this, it doesn’t seem as if much is done to change it even within their own homes.

Our first training took place yesterday for school directors (principals) and woreda supervisors. Again, on the subject of gender, there were seven women out of about 80 directors and supervisors. Although low, this was more than I had expected based on my school visits; it seems that the women directors are all in the rural areas. Tomorrow we will meet to evaluate how the training went, which should be interesting as I am recognizing that my definition of active learning and the definition that Tigistu is following are quite different.

I’m finding that it’s a constant struggle between expressing my opinion and holding back in the recognition that this isn’t my country or my culture, I don’t understand everything and millions of successes have been achieved before me. This morning, I participated in a workshop on setting standards for primary teachers, and I was constantly struggling with this. I tried to just watch and let my group do their thing, but somehow my mouth just kept opening.

I’m afraid that sometimes people think I’m right and they’re wrong simply because I’m ferenji from a developed country, which I think does more harm than anything else, but sometimes I do feel like I’m right. In fact, the worst thing is that sometimes I think I’m right and they’re wrong.

Other times, I think people just pretend to agree with me to be polite to the ferenji, but then they go ahead and do what they want to do anyway.

There were two other workshops at the college yesterday in addition to the supervision training. This was the busiest the college has been since I’ve been here, and from the smell of things, it was a bit of a strain on the latrines. The college has not been too busy so far, because there are no students. What? you say. Yes, students are assigned to colleges centrally by the Regional Education Office in Mekelle, and for some reason, although the school year should have started about a month ago, students have not yet been assigned. At other colleges, the second and third year students have already started, but because Adwa TTC used to be a one-year certificate institution for First Cycle teachers it doesn’t have any second and third years. If the new students ever arrive, which I keep hearing will be “next week”, Adwa will be changing over to a three-year diploma programme for Second Cycle teachers. Fortunately for me, my job involves in-service teachers so I am not really affected by any of this.

Anyway I know this blog/journal has been a little bit scattered and rambly. So I will take it as a sign and put myself to bed.

Yesterday we visited Tsion Elementary School. I walked into the classroom and wondered if I had landed in the wrong country. There was a carpet on the floor and children were sitting on it. This was the first class I had seen with such a thing. We stayed to observe the lesson. With each student-centred moment, I was in a constant state of anxiety – would the teacher suddenly break into a lecture? But the entire lesson, albeit a rather simple Tigrinya alphabet identification and printing lesson, was student-centred active learning. (Words which I’ve heard more times here than ever at home, but this was the first time I’d seen them truly put into practice.) There was teacher modeling, group work, whole class practice, individual practice and ongoing assessment and correction. The teacher was patient and thorough, the children were engaged and talkative. And for us who complain about class sizes, it seems you can use a student-centred approach in a class of 45 grade ones!

The principal of this school had visited the town of Dessie last year, and brought back these great ideas and has begun to put them into practice. The cluster training programme at Dessie is about 6 years old, and it has been extremely successful, acting as a centre of excellence for primary education in Ethiopia. Would that we can be as successful here!

Many of you have asked about how the actual teacher training is going, and the disappointing answer is that it has not really started yet. … My actual title is Cluster Coordinator (not Trainer as I was told before I arrived), and while some training did take place last year, there were some difficulties with the organization and implementation. So myself and my co-coordinator, Tigistu, have been spending a fair bit of time visiting schools and conducting needs assessments and preparing and revising the annual plan. The first training, for school directors (principals) and woreda supervisors (woredas are like districts) will be this weekend, but Tigistu will be leading most of this training and my role is relatively minor. I will be doing Model Classroom trainings for teachers in a few weeks – how to set up your classroom for active learning, followed by trainings on Planning and Assessing and various subject-specific trainings. I will also be doing ELIP (English Language Improvement Programme) for teachers from Adwa Town schools every week starting in a couple of weeks. Right now, I’m keeping busy preparing for these things, and also providing ELIP for the academic staff at the TTC. It really seems like it takes a lot of time to do every little thing, and it’s also taken Tigistu and me a long time to get on the same page, which has been a bit trying for both of us.

In Ethiopia, the class size for First Cycle (grades 1 to 4) is meant to be under 50, and in most cases, especially in the urban/semi-urban places like Adwa, this seems to be respected. In rural areas, it’s a little bit more difficult. First Cycle teachers have had a Grade 10 education plus one year of teacher training. For Second Cycle (grades 5 to 8) teachers have Grade 10 plus 3 years and for secondary school, teachers have Grade 12 plus additional training. There is some flexibility here because there’s a shortage of teachers, so, for example, a teacher only trained for First Cycle may end up teaching Second Cycle. Teachers are generally not well-respected and of course, the First Cycle teachers are at the bottom of the barrel; most of them are teachers because they did not do well enough in the Grade 10 exams to go on to Grade 11; the best ones are trying to upgrade so they can move up and out of the First Cycle. When I tell people that I teach Grade One at home, I always feel like I have to add that primary school teachers are respected in Canada and that all teachers have a university degree.

One of the curious things about the education system here is that despite having a serious lack of respect for teachers, the expectations for them are, sometimes, unreasonably high. First Cycle teachers are expected to teach all the subjects, including Tigrinya (or the local language for the region), Amharic and English. This means that while many teachers can hardly speak English themselves, they are expected to teach it… well enough that by Grade 9 students are supposed to be so proficient in English that all subjects are taught in it. As if this wasn’t unreasonable enough (I’ve talked to Adwa teenagers and adults in English…it’s unreasonable!), the high schools have now been taken over by plasma.

What is plasma? Plasma underlines the fact that poverty in Ethiopia, and Africa in general, has far less to do with lack of money than with the way it is spent. In the past couple of years, millions of dollars have been spent equipping every high school classroom with a giant television screen (they call this plasma) and preparing video lessons for every single day of every class. Except for the screen the classrooms are practically bare. In theory, plasma might sound promising, high-tech, multi-media. In actual fact, teachers leave the classroom while the plasma is on, don’t use the teacher’s guide, don’t have the teacher’s guide, play three lessons at once, and provide no feedback or support for students.

And again, while in some ways the expectations are high for teachers, they’re so unreasonable that I think there is no real expectation that teachers will actually achieve them. A big example of this is that although all teachers are paid to teach a full day, they teach in shifts and only actually stay at school for their shift. It is very difficult to get teachers to work in any capacity or even engage in training outside of their shift, even though they are paid to be at work for the whole day. Granted, their working conditions are difficult and their pay is low, but it seems strange to have institutionalized a system where teachers are not doing what they are paid to do.

This is one of the difficulties that the cluster programme faces in providing training. Many teachers are resistant to coming to trainings unless they are paid a per diem, even if there are no real expenses for the per diem to cover, or if the training is taking place during their free shift, when they should be working. In Dessie, they have managed to overcome this but it has taken several years to create a culture where learning is recognized as a purpose in itself. In addition, for the rural schools, it is necessary to conduct trainings on the weekends as it is impossible for teachers to get to a training centre school and back to their school within a day because the schools are so isolated and far apart, and most teachers are traveling several hours by foot.

I’m in a perpetual time and date fog, and it’s a very good thing the computer knows the date. The Ethiopian calendar is not the same as the calendar used in much of the western world. In the Ethiopian calendar it’s the 14^th of Timkut, 1999. The system of telling time is also unique with 6:00 am being 12:00 in the morning, noon being 6:00, and the system starting again in the evening with 6:00 pm being 12:00 and 7:00 pm being 1:00. It’s relatively easy to get used to adding or subtracting 6 to tell the time. The trouble is in remembering to check whether it is Ethiopian time or European time, as some people, especially those who spend a lot of time with westerners like me, tend to switch between the two. It’s very easy to be invited for a meal at 6:00 and then wonder if you’re supposed to show up at lunchtime or dinnertime.

I went to Mekelle over the weekend. It was a holiday on Monday for Eid. It was strange to me that everyone took the day off even though hardly anyone here is Muslim; although the country as a whole is at least 30% Muslim. Ethiopians pride themselves of recognizing and honouring each others’ religious practices.

The bus ride to Mekelle takes about 7 hours, which is all about the condition of the roads and of the buses, as you could probably do it in less than four hours. I stayed with Jane and Geoff, a British VSO couple a bit younger than my parents. Mekelle is the regional capital of Tigray and it’s a very different place than Adwa. After beginning to think that Adwa is reasonably advanced, it was a shock to compare it to Mekelle. With only about double the population, it has all the amenities that Adwa doesn’t have: paved roads, bakeries, an incredible number of stores selling everything you’ll need – kitchen supplies, electronics, jewelry, that cheese wrapped in tinfoil – elegant hotels, cultural restaurants, sidewalks, and a bit of a European flavour; also a university (with 60 international professors), a hospital, and a school for the blind (apparently NOT a pleasant place).

There are 7 VSOs in Mekelle, as well as several volunteers through other organizations. We met an American family with four children. The husband is teaching Veterinary Science at the university and the wife is home-schooling the children, aged 5 to 11, one of whom is an Ethiopian boy they adopted. There’s a relatively large handful of expats that I’ve run into or heard about who have children with them.

One of the many difficulties in accessing the internet
in Ethiopia is that dial-up here is way too slow for
the Blog programme I had planned to use, and for many
reasons it's taken me a long time to sort something
else out. At last, I'm halfway there! To see my
pictures, please go to
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rebeccainethiopia/

I'll try to send or upload my blogs in the next few
days.
If you've emailed me and I haven't gotten back to you
yet, I'm sorry. I will try to do so soon. It's just
that it can take up to half an hour to access and
reply to one email, and that's when the internet is
working at all. But I'd still love to hear from you.

Thanks for your patience,
Rebecca