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!

I’ve been keeping the Ethiopian postal service busy – 3 parcels have arrived in 2 days. Firstly Chris Pegler very kindly sent me a copy of her and Allison Littlejohn’s book, ‘Preparing for blended elearning’ – probably should’ve arranged to have my blended learning workshop after I’ve had time to read it!

I’ve received five 8Gb DVDs, from Jenny and Richard on the OpenLearn team, containing all the current OpenLearn course content – so I’m very grateful to them for this! I’m hoping that I’ll be able promote our Moodle server by offering access to some of the OpenLearn courses and it’ll encourage staff and students to visit the site.

Finally a parcel from my parents arrived, containing a random selection of items (all of which I’d asked them to send)… new (decent) toothbrush, wooden fish slice (we can only find metal ones here which would wreck our non-stick pan), more cds/dvds (software, radio shows etc) and a bar of dark chocolate

I had to collect two of these parcels from the main post office in town. Well, I say in town, it’s actually stuck in some residential suburb, so a slightly odd location. Luckily I hadn’t left it too long to collect these as there’s a 1 birr per day per parcel ‘storage charge’ even for small parcels and the only way of avoiding the charge is by going to the post office the same day the parcels arrive, rather than waiting until the slip of paper arrives to tell you a parcel is waiting. I heard about someone being informed of a parcel 6 months after it had actually arrived and being charged 6 months storage fee!!

Quite relieved to have my first workshop delivered and out of the way. How did it go? Well, I’m not really sure!

The workshop content was the concepts behind blended learning, something I’ve never taught before. My main aim was to get across the fact that blended and elearning was far more than just putting content (course manuals) up on a website. 10 people attended, mainly lecturers from the computer science dept and they all seemed to take an active part in the activities I had planned, all were happy to give their thoughts when I asked questions and to share the results from their group activities.

The final activity didn’t go quite as I’d expected, which may be more to do with my explanation of the activity than anything else. What I wanted people to do was design an online learning activity for their students, which would be very specific for one of their courses. However the results were somewhat vaguer than I’d expected, and were more along the lines of ‘I’d use some online exercises, quizzes and forums’. So looking in the right direction, but not quite what I’d meant.

The main piece of feedback I’ve had is that it wasn’t practical enough, although to me the point of the workshop was just to get the concepts across and I was wary of repeating the Moodle training Wondwossen and Irene previously gave some of th attendees. Maybe I need to be more careful about people’s expectations next time and perhaps arrange for a follow up practical workshop. Perhaps my final activity would have worked better if it’d been followed up with a practical session using Moodle to create the learning activity.

In all I was pleased that (a) people had turned up at all and (b) they took part in the activities – plus it was a small enough group (of people I know anyway from the dept) for me to ‘test’ the workshop on, I’ve had some useful feedback, so I’ll be much happier next time it’s run with a bigger group.

Reading the recent discussions (here, here and here) regarding how much the OU ought to be promoting open source software (OSS), reminded me of discussions I’ve had here in Ethiopia about how much we (as IT volunteers) ought to be promoting OSS.

The arguments for and against the use of Windows and other proprietary software in each of these discussions are very similar. On the one hand, there’s the ‘Windows is standard’ argument (in one sense of the word standard) and that’s what everyone else uses, so that’s what I want to use. On the other, there’s the ‘free’ argument, and just because Windows is on so-many percent of PCs, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t use OSS. I realise I’m probably using the terms ‘Windows’ and ‘proprietary software’ interchangeably.

I feel quite stuck in the middle regarding all this (sat on the fence would be an alternative description!). In an ideal world, yes, everyone would use OSS, but I don’t think it’s practical to be so black and white. Here in Ethiopia, people generally want to learn about MS Windows and MS Office (including Publisher & FrontPage) as that’s what ‘everybody’ else uses and, more importantly, is what employers will be looking for. From the discussions I’ve had the only practical pro-OSS argument, that isn’t an academic/theoretical one in their eyes, is the fact they’re far less likely to suffer from viruses. Licensing costs aren’t really a factor taken into consideration where software piracy isn’t exactly unheard of. Even with this very strong argument (only last week the ex-dean from our faculty lost most of his documents to a virus), the people I’ve spoken to, although enthusiastic, don’t yet feel comfortable or confident enough to jump to using non-MS software.

I’ve heard similar sentiments from UK friends who work in MS-only environments, perhaps not believing that OSS would be as stable, secure, robust and reliable (!) as something you pay good money for.

In the computer science dept here, a few staff use Ubuntu and other OSS operating systems, but they’re the exception. I’m attempting to do my ‘promote OSS’ bit by lending people the Ubuntu CD after I’ve reinstalled Windows XP on their laptops (inevitably broken by some Windows virus). There are also signs that things are changing, for example, I know of non-techies who have heard of Ubuntu and are willing to give it a go and the Internet and Web Development course here in the computer science dept this year has shifted in focus from ASP to PHP (although still teaches FrontPage). I’m also hoping that we can change some of our computer lab PCs to be XP/Ubuntu dual boot, so students have the opportunity to get experience in using something other than Windows. At the end of the day I’m not going to force anyone to use any one particular system, I’ll give them the pros and cons of each side and let them make up their own mind, hoping that the no-virus argument will be the one that swings it

5am starts each morning aren’t usually my idea of a fun long weekend, but this weekend I’ve been trying out the Ethiopian local bus services.

Mekelle – Abi Adi
Slightly overestimated how long it would take to walk down to Mekelle bus station, so arrived just before its 5:30am opening time. Managed to get the first bus (actually a line taxi) out to Abi Adi, so things were off to a good 6am start, although we didn’t really get out of the town until we’d stopped for bottles of water, pumping the tyres up, getting petrol, collecting a passenger from their house and picking up lengths of hose. About halfway we stopped and I had my breakfast bought for me by one of the other passengers.

Abi Adi – Adwa
Andy and I arrived at Abi Adi bus station just in time to spend 3 hours sat on the bus before setting off. Well, we thought we were leaving at about 6:30, but turned out just to be short tour around town to try and drum up some more customers, before returning to the bus station to sit and wait until the bus filled up. None of the buses here will set off until every seat is full – resulting in some long waits on stationary buses. Although, on the plus side, apparently Ethiopia is one of only 2 African countries outlawing standing up on buses.

After a few more tours of town we got underway at 9:30, passing the college where Andy lives. Four hours after leaving his house we were back to where we started.

Had our only puncture of the weekend on this route, it was one of the double back tyres and I’m fairly sure all that happened was the 2 tyres were swapped over. As we were in a town a small crowd gathered to watch, though more interested in the 2 ferenjis than having the tyre fixed!

Adwa – Axum
A much more respectable start time for this journey. Adwa and Axum are an hour apart, so there’s a regular bus service through the day and had my only lie of the weekend (until 8am!!). We still managed to spend more time sat on the bus at the station than the actual length of the journey.

Axum – Mekelle
Longest journey of the weekend – 8 hours on the back seat on untarmaced road isn’t great fun. Even with little sleep the previous night and bit of a hangover, you’d be lucky to get any more than a few minutes sleep before the bus hit another pothole or swerves/breaks to avoid goats/donkeys/people.

Arrived at the bus station shortly before it opened and the only station we’ve seen the police searching people. Axum is quite near the Eritrean border, so they’re more security-conscious here. We can’t have fitted their ‘terrorist profile’, as we got straight through with no search.

Relatively uneventful journey until Abi Adi, we had stopped for short breaks in a few small towns, when children attempt to sell an unusual selection of snacks. The items on offer were roasted barley (nothing too strange about that), lemons and eggs (raw). The lemons sellers didn’t appear to be doing great business, but I managed to refrain from suggesting they might have better results selling less acidic fruit.

The bus dropped Andy off outside his college, then our ’10 minute’ break in Abi Adi bus station lasted over an hour, presumably to give the priests plenty of time to collect donations. Only a few km outside Abi Adi we stopped again for another hour or so, whilst we attempted to help another which had come off the road. It had only just come of the road and apparently no-one was hurt, but was stuck in the sand/dirt and couldn’t reverse back out. The plan appeared to be to just pull the bus back onto the road using ropes tied to the roof rack. Although a couple of policemen were there, the bus-rescue was quite hap-hazard. After a few attempts at hauling the bus, our bus passengers gave up and we were back on our way back to Mekelle.

On passing the cement factory on the edge of town the conductor started to collect all the tickets back in. I was sat at the back and watched as every passenger handed their tickets back, so I did likewise, only for the conductor to then rip them all up, open the window next to me and throw the confetti out. Next time I’ll hang onto my ticket.

In-between the bus trips we managed to squeeze in a few meals and drinks out with other volunteers. In Axum we saw a few of the tourist sites, the church where the arc of the covenant is allegedly held and the stelae fields – but will save all that for another posting

Took this photo in Axum on Saturday and sure it’s crying out for a caption:

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