Alex Little

Over the last few days I’ve been having an email conversation with a US Peace Corps volunteer who’s based in the University Hospital in Gondar, Ethiopia, doing similar IT work that I’ll be doing when I get to Mekelle. He’s sent me some long emails with loads and loads of excellent advice and info about what to take with me, the state of their IT infrastructure, and other general advice about living in Ethiopia. It’s exactly the types of thing that I needed to know, quite odd things like the general dress code at work (do I take a suit with me?) and other similarly random (but also useful) stuff  like that. Another example… learn how to make cheese from powdered milk and vinegar :-/ I never ever knew you could make cheese this way, though I’m not sure how the end result would compare to a nice bit of cheddar!

One thing he did mention, which I knew a little about anyway, was the fact that computer viruses are completely rampant throughout Ethiopia, mainly due to the low bandwidth meaning that virus checkers aren’t reliably kept up to date, plus the use of flash disks spreading the viruses around. His advice was not to let on that you know how to clean viruses off a computer, as if you do, you’ll end up spending the whole time doing just that.  Much better would be to teach a group of people how to do it themselves and show them how to keep their machines virus free in the first place- this, of course, is exactly the sort of thing we (as volunteers from overseas) should be doing, training people how do to these types of jobs for themselves.

Another comment he made about the state of the internet bandwidth was that it’s usually quicker to have someone back home download them for you, burn onto CDs/DVDs and post them.

When I get chance I’ll try to post up a summary of all his advice in case it’s useful for others too.

I had some very sad news today from Irene (the lady in Mekelle who I’ll be taking over from). One of the VSO volunteers currently in Ethiopia, David Evans, was killed in a traffic accident a few days ago  (news story) and I pass on my condolences to his family.