Settling in
Alex September 18th, 2008
All is still going well, have now got rid of my tiredness from the travelling and a little bit of altitude sickness. We’ve been having language training for couple of hours every morning and then been out trying to practice it in the market and shops around – with a fairly good success rate, haven’t been over charged too much yet. Most things are very cheap here, about 12p for kilo of bananas, 30p for bottle of beer and a ride in a line taxi (local bus) is about 4-7p. The roads are appalling (Ethiopia has one of the highest fatality rates in the world), potholed and muddy (due to loads of rain recently) – so there’s no chance of wanting to get a bike – we found a goats head in the road yesterday and various other animal remnants.
We had a scavenger hunt around Addis yesterday, sent off with long list of places to get to and things to find out and buy (with a little bartering). We’ve another couple of days on our in country training, then an IT workshop, before heading up to Mekelle at the end of next week – when I’ll be able to start settling in properly. I’ll be sharing a house with a guy, Marcel, from Tasmania, who is also working at the university.
This afternoon I had a meeting with Belay, my programme manager, so have a much better idea now of the work that I’ll be doing. Apparently the university had funding from the World Bank to set up a distance learning programme and the website for this is almost ready to launch. Some other towns in the Tigray area are in the process of setting up computer rooms which students can use to access the materials, so I’ll probably be helping out with this.
Thanks for all the messages from my last posting 
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Alex Little. Licensed under
Good to read that you’re still in one piece. Watch those roads, though, eh?!
A belay for me is the person and ropes etc. that keep you safe rock climbing so sounds a good name for your programme manager!
I like the beer prices!
Enjoy!
Cheers, Martyn