Alex Little

It’s quite hard to believe that I’ve been here for nearly 3 months already – time seems to have absolutely flown by, even though it feels like an age ago that I was in the UK. Plus it’s almost Christmas – well western Christmas anyway – the Ethiopian Orthodox Christmas won’t be until 7th January.

It certainly doesn’t feel like being near to Christmas, and not just because of the weather – it is still quite warm during the day (about 20c), but gets cold in the evenings (I sometimes wear a jumper). I’ve yet to hear Slade’s Christmas song, or seen any shops displays/adverts encouraging me to go out and spend – although having said that the local pizza restaurant has been playing a Christmas carol CD on continuous loop since I first went there in September.

We’re planning a Christmas dinner over at Mike and Raf’s house for all the volunteers around – and starting to look like there may be quite a few of us – we’re ordering 2 turkeys from the agricultural college (if they can get them) and buying a sheep – so if nothing else there ought to be enough meat.

Here’s a Google map with my house and office in Mekelle marked

This weekend saw the demise of yet another goat in the name of us having a party and bonfire over at Mylomin. Andy and Chris at the Abi Adi teacher training college had organized the party for all the staff at the college and had invited me along too. So chance to have a 6am start on a Saturday morning – early enough to help jump start the bus out of the bus station.

I arrived in Abi Adi just in time for Andy to have finished negotiating buying the goat – quite a lot more expensive (420 birr) than the kid we had a few weeks ago – but there were going to be many more of us this time, so we needed the extra meat!

Mylomin is a natural spring (you can buy Mylomin bottled water in most places here), but (fortunately) there is also a bar, owned by Andreas, who works part time at the college. Andreas insisted on showing me around and taking me over to the tej house just down the road. Tej is a local alcoholic drink made from honey, traditionally drunk from oversized Orangina shaped bottles and, like the tella, it’s a bit of an acquired taste!

Anyway here are some photos:

A happy healthy goat:

A now ex-goat – not a photo for vegetarians!

Final notable event of the evening was Vicky going to hospital at about 1am after being stung several times on the foot by a scorpion – but all was fine after she had a couple of injections!

The rest of my week in Addis (when I wasn’t being ill!) was taken up with a workshop for EFFORT, this is an organisation which represents the main big businesses in Tigray. They are setting up a management training institute with assistance from the OU Business School. Before I came out to Ethiopia I’d already been in contact with Professor Graeme Salaman (from OUBS) and he invited me along to the workshop to help out with advising EFFORT on what IT support and systems they will need for the institute. The workshop seemed to go very well, I spent most of my time helping out the head of their IT support.

We were staying at the Addis Hilton, one of the best hotels in the country, although the workshop was in Debre Zeit (about hours drive south of Addis) at the Ethiopian Management Institute training centre. The Hilton was great, although very expensive and way out of reach for all but the Ethiopian elite! My room cost 2 months of my current salary per night. We also went out to a very good restaurant, where the bill for 3 of us to have dinner and a bottle of wine was around 1000 birr (around 70 GBP). The restaurant was full of who I can assume must be staff from various embassies and NGOs, all of which makes you start to wonder where all the money put into development actually ends up – especially seeing all the brand new land cruisers being driven around…

The beginning of this week hasn’t really been off to a great start, firstly, I’m still feeling pretty run down and tired, secondly our water has been off for last couple of days and thirdly my external hard drive seems to have failed. I can still read it (just incredibly slowly) when in Ubuntu, but can’t read it at all in XP. I’ve attempted to run disk repair tools on it, but no luck so far. There is a huge amount of data on the drive (too much to be able to back up onto DVD or even onto my desktop PCs drive) and although I have backups of the critical data, I’d still like to be able to recover the rest of it (programs, ebooks, mp3s etc). My plan is just to get another external hard drive and copy the data off – I’m hoping to get one sent over soon.

Computer hardware is more expensive here than in the UK, due to high import taxes. In applying a 100% import duty, not only does Ethiopia receive the equipment (often paid for by development organisations), but the government receives a matching amount of money to spend as it likes. If I was being very cynical I’d suggest this may be why there is so much new computer equipment sat around unused or at least under-used.

The title of this post was due to be ‘The Great Ethiopian Run’ and the accompanying photo would be showing me finishing the 10km run through Addis along with thirty thousand other people.

The race still took place, but unfortunately I wasn’t part of it. I flew down to Addis on Saturday morning to spend the weekend getting together with other VSO volunteers, run (or maybe just fast walk!) the Great Ethiopian Run on Sunday morning, then come along to a workshop run by the OU for the rest of the week.

Instead, as soon as I landed in Addis I started to feel quite rough (achy and temperature), thinking a couple of hours kip and some paracetamol would sort me out. Didn’t quite turn out like that, and felt worse as the day wore on. Andy and Ben took me down to the hospital on Sunday lunchtime for blood test as it could’ve been malaria. The good news was that it wasn’t malaria, but I’d been coughing a lot so the doc sent me for chest x-ray (all clear too).

The Hayat hospital was really efficient and clean, I was in and out within 2 hours – this included the time for them to take blood tests (and get the results), give me an x-ray, Ben to have lunch in the cafe (the food was good & cheap) and for me to see the doc a couple of times.

I’m starting to think now that although there are 80m Ethiopians, it’s actually a very small place! The doctor was asking me where I was working, and knows some of my colleagues up at Mekelle Uni. Also whilst walking down the road in central Addis (I wasn’t quite sure of where I was going). I bumped into a couple of teachers I’d met in the staff lounge at work, very fortunate as they got me on the right line taxi and even paid the fare for me!