Alex Little

Now back at work in Mekelle after spending a few days in Addis catching up. It doesn’t feel as if I’ve been away very long, even though I spent 3 months back in the UK. I arrived in Addis at about 3am last Thursday morning and immediately knew I’d arrived back when I had to help jump start the taxi out of the airport car park. At the hotel they’d forgotten about my reservation, but they found another room for me at the back of the hotel. I suspect it was actually one of the rooms used for staff. Woke the next morning to find the power off and didn’t come back on until the evening. Apparently the daytime power is still rationed to alternate days – though there is plenty of rain so the hydro electric dams should get working properly again soon. What I call power rationing is officially termed ‘power-sharing’ – in the same way that the loan given to students here to help them through University is called ‘cost-sharing’.

Had a couple of days at home getting everything unpacked, restocking the food cupboards and catching up with a few people, then back to work. The first day at work was strange, meeting everyone again. My office had been broken into whilst I was away, but fortunately nothig had been taken of mine. Wondwossen, who I share the office with, said two students had broken into our office and another to steal exam papers, but they were caught. Both have been now thrown out of the university, but also put in prison for couple of months.

Wondwossen, plus about 20 of the other computer science lecturers are all leavng this year as they have got scholarships to do masters courses, in Addis, US & Europe. That is out of a total staff of less than 30, so almost all the staff teaching next semester will be new. Apparently 5 or 6 new staff are coming from India and the rest will be made up from last years graduate students.

Afer spending some time in Madrid the other week working out a training programme and to get the labs up and running, assuming the new semester will start in mid to late October as it did last year, I’ve now found out that the next semester actually starts mid September, with staff training for a few weeks before. This means the elearning training we were hoping to start at beginning of September probably can’t now start until October. So we may already need to rethink our training schedule, as we were hoping that we’d have time to train tutors and for them to prepare activities for their students before the semester starts.

The reason for the change of semester date is due to the Ministry of Education wanting all universities and colleges to have the same semester dates across the whole country and to finish the second semester before the elections in May next year.

So guess things are all back to their normal uncertainty, but at least I have plenty of work to be getting on with.