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.