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Published: September 27th 2009
The donkeys head for shelter...
...while Mary Poppins takes a tea"Ta-fa?" (or "Ta-fash?" if you are good friends or female)
Rough Translation: where have you been?
I've been in Addis, helping train the 36 new volunteers (well, 33 volunteers and 3 accompanying partners), though that's another story 😊
For now I'll stick to non-ICT (In-Country Training) news only.
Holy Light, Batman! Before I flew to Addis, we had been enjoying the extra power in Assosa. Instead of being off all day and night on no-power days, it was coming back at 8.30pm which is great for charging batteries, boiling water and an hour or so of not blundering around the house by torchlight.
Plus everyone had been promised power on Sundays, regardless of the schedule!
Maybe the churches were having a good whinge about the cost of diesel for their generators and rattled a few cages? The mosques were less concerned as their call to prayers only last 10 minutes.
We had the pleasure of power coming back on Friday night at 8.30pm and then continuous power until Tuesday morning (Saturday & Monday "on" days and Sunday on as promised).
Holy Water, Batman! The rainy season is well and truly underway,
The rain is over - so let's find the secret path
(To the left of the church and say the magic words - "birr yellum") both in Assosa and Addis. The mornings are either cold and wet; then the sun comes out to bake the mud dry. Or the mornings are bright and sunny; but it rains all afternoon.
Sara and I take it in turns to sprint home when the rain starts to get the washing in off the line, which gives the locals a good laugh. I did the 5 minute desk to door trip in about 45 seconds recently; zig-zagging around the women jogging home to do the same.
The rain has once again turned the town green and overgrown. Bushes shake and bleat, then out pops a goat.
Every journey takes twice as long as you slip and slide or sink ankle deep into the brown, muddy morass.
Entry into any building is preceeded by 5 minutes of foot-tapping, heel-scraping and stomping-on-the-spot to shake off the clingy red clay.
Holy Education, Batman! Mulatu, our professional shopper, has had his grade 10 (O-level) results back. Six 'A' and three 'B' grades and second in his class.
Yet again he did better in English than Amharic! I guess that's what comes of working for volunteers for
the last 5+ years 😊
He now heads into the 6th form or '10+1' as they seem to call it here. He drops history and geography and starts technical drawing and IT.
Hopefully his good work in studying the ICDL (International Computer Driving Licence) course on my laptop will help him out. He has been coming round twice a week in the mornings to run the interactive course.
His brother Kidanu has also passed Grade 12 (A-Level) with a score of 225. I'm not really familiar with the scoring system; I think it is out of 400 or 500. The pass is about 125, which seems kind of low. If you pass you get to go to University, though the quality of the pass decides your course and ultimate destination.
Kidanu tells us that the secret is to put your first choice University 3rd on the list on the assumption you might not pass high enough to get your number one!
We have since found out that he got his number one choice - Gondar University - but he hasn't been called yet so he may start in October. Or he may start in January.
So do we head upstream?
J.R. Hartley fly-fishing on the left To celebrate we took both boys out to the best hotel in Assosa - the Bamboo Paradise - to eat as much meat as they could. Unfortunately Mulatu was late - just for a change 😉 - and ended up waiting outside for 30 minutes while we sat inside waiting for him...
Holy Articles, Batman! The big news in the office was the article about Matthewos's football teams - The Assosa Quick Boys and Assosa Strikers - which appeared in the quarterly government bureau magazine for Beneshangul-Gumuz.
One of Matthewos' friends edits the paper - a guy called Andualem - and I have met him a few times around the town. He had interviewed Matthewos and I had supplied some photographs for the 3 page article for the back page (of course) of the latest magazine.
The magazine came out about a week before I left for Addis and everyone in the Bureau was coming by to show me and ask about the teams (see www.assosa-soccer.com for more information).
I have even had the pop-star treatment walking to the Post Office.
Some guy getting his shoes shined outside the Municipal Building gave me
Or downstream?
Burt Reynolds' canoe just rounded the spur a double-take then a cheer as he was reading the article as I walked past; and on the way back I was struggling with some parcels and a Red Cross car stopped, picked me up and gave me a lift. I didn't know the guy from Adam, but he shook my hands and I guess he had read the article too.
Such exposure is somewhat of a mixed blessing. For Matthewos it is great. People are already asking why the local Sports & Culture Bureau are not more involved with the team. However people are already asking Matthewos if he can get me to help their teams too.
And I've been stopped in the street by a guy asking me to sponsor his sport. He said it was "circus dancing" but I think - according to the card he gave me - he meant akido?
It's kind of hard to say no, but whereas I play, watch, enjoy and all my friends like football; I have never had anything to do with akido.
Holy Smoke, Batman! So what replaced Dexter as TV Show of choice?
Weeds!
Episodes are a munchy-sized 30 minutes and
Maybe uphill?
Uh, looks a bit too blair witch for me :0 what good fun it is too..
To Addis, Robin Off to Addis on Saturday 5th, I had a day in hand before preparation for ICT started on the Monday. Here was a great chance to catch up with Jonathan - a fellow VSO who came out with us in Feb '08 and is one of the few remaining volunteers left from our intake.
Our plan was to walk up from his house, actually the back-garden flat of Patricia (the Country Director's) house in Arat Kilo, up to Siddist Kilo and on to find the mysterious waterfall amongst the Entoto Hills.
The day before Sara and I had a really nice pancake breakfast with Andreas - the German SIL linguist who has lived in BG region for 12 years, though now splits his time between here and Addis, where his family live.
He had just returned from 2 months in Germany and came bearing a gift. A full-monty, uber-smelly wooden box containing camembert cheese!
So our waterfall excursion would include a picnic of fresh bread rolls and camembert cheese. A taste sensation beckoned...
Unfortunately the rainy season was in full effect in Addis too.
Another turning point?
A fork stuck in the road The morning had been hot and dry, so I had packed my raincoat but no fleece. The afternoon changed to torrential rain and the temperature dropped to uncomfortably cold.
Just before we reached the church where we were supposed to "take the path to the left and head down to a bridge" the skies opened and we were forced to hole up in a shai-bet (tea house) for 30 minutes to let the worst of the weather pass.
It gave us a good opportunity to break open the bread and cheese and introduce some young Ethiopian lads to the joys of soft French cheese and fresh bread.
Once the weather cleared we headed off and after several circuits of the church compound (I was told there is a certain way you walk around an Ethiopian Orthodox church, maybe anti-clockwise?) we agreed the path must be alongside the church, rather than through the church.
You can follow the rest of the story in pictures.
The heavy rain gave us an added bonus in that it filled up the river and created a raging torrent of muddy water and the waterfall was quite spectacular. Even in
I see no waterfall?
Just a kid with a lazy eye and a banjo... the 20 minutes after we reached the place you could see the volume of water falling and the waterfall reverting to more sedate pace.
It was amazing to walk for maybe 45 minutes from Jonathan's house and be out amongst trees and greenery with very little evidence of a bustling African capital a short walk away.
Holy Fasting, Batman! Ramamdan - the muslim period of fasting - had started while we were in Assosa. Although we work alongside Ethiopian muslims and have been visited both Hamid and Mustapha's house (many times in fact - "Mustaph-ology" was our favourite hang-out during no-power nights), it seems that the muslim festivals are a bit low key, compared to the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian festivals.
We had been to see fireworks and burning bonfires at Meskel square, as well as processions of holy tablets and armies of people in all-white dresses and traditional garb. Though we had been to celebrate one of the lesser Eid festivals at Mustaphas, there seemed to be no town-wide processions, mass slaughter of small fluffy quadrapeds or piles of things being burned?
It was very nice therefore to be asked to visit Samira (Mustapha's wife's)
Aha!
The Entoto Hills waterfall, at last family house in Addis, along with Sara - who had arrived on the flight from Assosa the following Tuesday.
As it was Ramadan muslims will not eat until it is dark. We arrived around 7.30pm, just after the first set of evening prayers were ending. We were served with dates and a thin wheat soup which is apparently the traditional way of breaking the fast.
Samira's father, mother and son arrived later when prayers had finished - they ate lightly then returned to the mosque, while we ate a second round of more typical injera and wot dishes.
Mustapha explained that the younger family members no longer attend the mosque for every set of prayers; but the older ones do. I guess this is kind of true of religions in the UK. The typical church-going population (maybe Evangelical churches excepted) have an aging clientele.
We were made really welcome and although the language barrier hindered our full participation, we really enjoyed the evening. Once thing I have noticed is that in muslim households you sit on mats on the floor, rather than chairs and the houses and compounds are usually spotless.
Even given the ravages
of the rainy season, the place was spick and span. No litter, no discarded bits and pieces. Sara was clearly ecstatic at such orderly house-keeping 😊
Once the room had cleared and we were left with Samira's youngest sister we found out that she spoke good English and was an Arsenal fan. Robin Van Persie was her favourite player! Good girl. Clearly very intelligent and will go a long way, I'm sure...
To Assosa, Robin Neatly sidestepping ICT, it's back to Assosa where it is still raining! In Addis it stopped 2 weeks ago (well, more or less).
The news here is that all the cats are alive and well, albeit a bit skinny as Mulatu is not the earliest to rise in the morning (he is a 17 year old boy) so he confessed that he had not been buying the 2 birr scabby meat for our feline buddies.
Nibblah, however, is certainly not skinny. She clearly has a posse of small furry ankle-biters on the way.
Her recent smelliness and night-clubbing antics have resulted in - by the size of it - about 3 or 4 buns in the oven.
It's
Let's get a bit closer...
Wow! Even more spectacular after the rainstorm quite amusing. She is too fat to jump up onto the window sills to whinge through the window at us anymore! And when she sits down she kind of collapses like an overweight bambi, legs splayed in four directions.
Bekema has opened his new DSTV house at last. I visited for the Fulham-Arsenal game last night, but it was pouring down and the roof was leaking. It was a case of dodge the rivulets of water to try and find a dry spot. But the result made up for it. Arsenal were lucky and Fulham deserved a point. I guess sneaking games you should have drawn (or lost) is good news and Man U have been doing it for years.
Holy Crosses, Batman! This weekend it has been the festival of Meskel, where crowds congregate at the local Meskel Square and watch the local church officials process by, before burning big piles of wood and setting off fireworks.
I went last year to Meskel Square in Addis and Sara had been to the festival in Assosa (I had seen the pictures) so I was kind of a bit lazy and just answered my many emails and
Secret rock pool
Mermaids taking a fag break did bits and pieces that I had no chance to do because of ICT commitments in Addis.
You can tell I'm getting to be an old timer now. This time last year I'd have been out with the camera!
The festival celebrates the finding of the true cross of the crucifixion by the 4th century Empress called Helena.
Hard to believe that this time last year I was in Addis with Paul and Courtney from the USA; who have subsequently left Ethiopia, split up and are now gone their separate ways.
So that's it. Time to unmask, remove the tight lycra outfits, and
, and riddle my way to bed...
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Pablo (yo)
non-member comment
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