Alex Little

I’ve been waiting for the server room to be cleaned up and reorganised so we can put the Moodle server down there – as it’s been sat under my desk since I arrived and only rarely plugged on, let alone connected to the network.

I came back from lunch on Friday to find 5 or 6 cleaners, 2 porters and several staff moving everything out of the server room. It was great to get this finished and the room looks far better than it was before – unfortunately I didn’t have my camera with me, it would’ve been good to get before and after photos. The amount of dust we moved around was quite incredible – I use the word ‘moved’ deliberately, we didn’t have a hoover, only an electric blower, so we took the servers outside and, with the casings off, gave then a quick blast with the blower to create large dust clouds, crossing our fingers that it wouldn’t just land back inside the servers before we got the casings back on. One of the cleaners tried to help with a wet towel, but we managed to stop her filling the servers with water just in time!

In other news, on Thursday night we had an English guy (Dr John Painter) over for dinner, he’s been working in the Uni ICT department for the last 5 years, and before that spent 5 or 6 years working in Bahir Dar – so he’s fluent in both Amharic and Tigrinya, plus he knows most people working at the Uni and how to get things done!

We’ve had the first rains since we arrived in Mekelle (a month ago now) – a downpour for about an hour, followed by a rainbow. The fresh smell makes a great change from the usually dusty dry air, humidity inside is normally around 30-40%, but the rain as brought this up to 60%. Trying to make the most of it as it’s unlikely to rain much (if at all) until next May or June.

Unfortunately the rain coincided with the time our night guard (Tsegay) was moving out. As he’s a teacher and will be taking evening extension classes, he couldn’t continue being our guard. A couple of weeks ago we arranged for a new night guard to come and told Tsegay that’s he’d need to move out. This was a couple of weeks ago, and we reminded him about moving on Thursday. Come Saturday and the new guard arrives, Tsegay is very unhappy about moving out saying that he doesn’t have anywhere else to go and that we owe him 5 months pay. We just managed to persuade him to go, given that we’ve paid him for the month he’s worked for us and that fact he’s known about the dates etc for a month, and then the rain started. He went away saying he was very unhappy about not being paid for 5 months, even though we know he was paid until end of July by the previous VSO volunteer living in or house and the house had been empty over summer. Was all eerily similar to our experiences with paying the guides up at Chele Anka waterfall last weekend.

Though our new guard can’t speak any English, he did give me a demonstration of his ‘guarding stick’ – a 2 foot stick with a curved blade, similar to a billhook. We’re just hoping he doesn’t need to make any use of it!