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Published: March 6th 2008
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The UN Sunbathing Force
Dutch, International Brit, Filipino x2, Scot and Geordie The UN of VSO VSO certainly recruits its volunteers from all parts of the globe. A Dutch couple had arrived the week before our flight landed and a UK based volunteer serving in Kenya was also in country already. At least 3 Canadians had connected onto our flight at Heathrow, 4 Filipinos, 2 Kenyans and 2 Ugandans arrived the following night; and 5 Australians arrived during the day. A German couple were also due to arrive in Assosa for a short-term placement the week after we had finished ICT.
Not that this was a surprise to us - on P2V, SKWID and the other VSO courses at Harborne Hall we had met Dutch, French, Irish, Belgian, Ghanaian and Kiwi volunteers. VSO headquarters is in London and the organisation is mostly funded by DFID, a UK government development agency, but they clearly cast their net far and wide, particularly as the number of UK people choosing to volunteer has been falling over the last few years. I was also surprised that so many of the volunteers here in Ethiopia were only on one year placements, when we understood that unless there was a good reason not to, you volunteered for
Not a mosque...
..opposite the Management Institute. In fact it is an Orthodox Church. two. Granted that some placements are funded for set periods of time and that may only be for 6 or 12 months, with the option to extend if funding is successful.
In Country Training - continued So our motley crew of international volunteers, now armed (and probably dangerous) with a few words of Amharic, regrouped in the main hall for the post-language training sessions. This format of early morning language then specific briefing session’s pre and post lunch continued for the next 7 days.
Monday’s session included a current volunteer’s open forum for new volunteers to ask questions, as well as a few light-hearted observations from their time in country. Amusing but subsequently very useful was the presentation of the 11 different forms of greeting that they had come across so far. Ethiopians are a very sociable nation. There is none of this curt nod or “Hi” business. You greet someone with a big cheesy grin, and then a warm handshake, or three kisses, or shoulder bump, or respectful handshake, or the “dirty hands” handshake, or three shoulder bumps, or any combination of the above. This might also be followed up by holding hands to show friendship
Addis Hills
Alive with the sound of dogs, horns, prayers and people saying hello! for a period of time, if not holding hands for a short walk. Typically, and worryingly for us stiff upper lip Brits,
only between the same sex - i.e. you don’t hold a woman’s hand, you only hold men’s hands and vice versa!
Er, OK.
I guess we should have expected something to go, well, hand-in-hand, with the extended verbal greetings we were learning. “Hi” and “Hi” back is not usually on. In the morning you ask people how their night has been, they say something along the lines that thanks be to God everything is going well and how are you, to which you reply that God willing, you are well and then ask how their wife is, then their children and well, you get the picture.
The reality is that most Ethiopians recognise you as a ferenji and a quick “salaam” both ways is cool. Sometimes you get a few more words back and you wish you had paid more attention to your Amharic teachers, but the bottom line is a big smile does the trick and when you are in the middle of a group hand-shaking, shoulder-banging, kiss-fest it’s hard not to feel the
Addis VW Garage
Beetle lovers - Addis is the place 4U love and give it back with a beaming grin.
I have since explained to guys in Assosa that it is a sad fact that in the UK you could catch the tube to work and stand opposite the same guy for 20 years without saying hello or asking how his family were. In Ethiopia, if a stranger comes into a room it would be rude for people not to stop what they were doing and go and greet them properly.
There is a good practical reason behind all the extended greetings and verbal interaction. In the rural parts of Ethiopia, literacy rates are very low, generally below 20% and the communications infrastructure is just not there. There is no email, no IM, no mobile network, no land-lines, no TV or radio, no newspapers or postal system and even if there were, people can’t read. There may be a town radio at the regional centre for communicating with the next regional centre but by and large the only way you get your news is from talking to other people. As my counterpart put it; “if you are travelling one way and you meet a guy travelling the other way you
must talk. He is coming from where you are about to go and he is heading towards where you have just been”.
I guess it would be extremely handy to know if he’s just seen a hungry looking lion and he’d certainly be interested in to know how far it is until the next drink of water!
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