Alex Little

I’ve been caving in quite a few places in the UK, but never in the Peak District, until this weekend. I went up there with a few friends from Winchester for a long weekend to do the round trip route in Giants Hole – was a fun trip, but was very pleased the water level in the Giants Windpipe section wasn’t too high.

Here’s a video showing some of the more interesting sections (Giants Windpipe starts just after 6mins):

Will need to sort out getting a robust & waterproof camera to take down when I go next time, otherwise I just end up with a photo of us all standing outside the entrance, a bit like this…

Rob, Steve, Paul, me and Steve outside entrance to Giants Hole

Havana Club, Mekelle

Have now been back in Mekelle for a few days – I arrived on Monday evening, and got back into life here amazingly quickly when I think how strange it all seemed when I first arrived in Sept 2008.

I’m staying back at my old house, even have my old room back for the next month. Meeting up with everyone again has been great, it feels as if I’ve been away for such a long time, even though it’s only been around 2 months and I had expected more changes, but then I guess things don’t change here that quickly. The road that had been dug up near the house is still unfinished, in fact in an even worse state than before. Almost everyone has mentioned how fat I’ve become being back in the UK, but with the amount of eating out I’ve been doing the past few days seems unlikely I’ll lose any weight whilst here

I got straight back into work at the Uni on Tuesday morning, Jaime had been here for the week before I’d arrived and we’re ran the third of our face to face training weeks with our tutors. On Friday evening we had another meal out at the Axum hotel and had a short presentation of the tutors certificates (Basic Certificate in Online Education, accredited by Alcala University).

My to-do list for this visit seems to be getting longer by the minute, there are still a large number of technical and management issues that we need to get resolved. There is still confusion over who is responsible for the opening of one of the labs and there needs to be better coordination and management from the university. At the moment it seems that no-one at the university has overall responsibility.

On the plus side, the Engineering College (now an independent Institute of Technology), has employed 3 new staff as elearning specialists, so I will spend some time training them over the coming weeks. As they’re part of the IoT rather than the university generally, we can’t get them to support the Health Sciences college. So I can see a big divide opening between the IoT and the rest of the university in elearning infrastructure, capacity and capability.

I can see my time here flying past, I’ve already been here a week and only have 3 left, so will be back in the UK before I know it!

Giraffes at Chaminuka Game Reserve

Another really good day at the conference, most of the presentations and discussions I attended today revolved around the use of open source software. There are some particular issues with using open source software in Africa, for example the fact that although there is huge amount of help available to support people when trying to implement software, much of the help and documentation is online only – which can make it difficult to access. In one of the presentations some of the audience were still a little sceptical about how you can get something for free – surely there is a catch?

Late in the afternoon, I gave my presentation about the Digital Campus project. All went well and I was really pleased with the response and how many people had questions about the project. I finally met more people from Ethiopia, the Head of ICT from Jimma University and the Curriculum Expert and Pedagogical Editor from the Ethiopia Civil Service College in Addis. I’ve also been approached about setting up some study/tutor partnerships with universities in UK and Canada, so the tutors and students in Mekelle can pair up with tutors and students abroad to share teaching and learning experiences.

Overall the conference has been well worth attending, it’s the first conference I’ve been to for a long time and differs somewhat from the much more technical and programming focussed conferences and workshops I used to attend whilst at the OU. Now need to make sure I get another presentation accepted for the eLearning Africa 2011 in Tanzania.

Saturday was a day free for me, so after being at the conference much of the week, I headed out to a game reserve (Chaminuka) about 30km from Lusaka and had a relaxing day there, by coincidence I met several other people there who had also attended the conference – but we managed to avoid talking too much work.

Auditorium at the Mulungushi Conference Centre

After 24 hours travel (London – Addis – Harare – Lusaka), yesterday afternoon I arrived in Lusaka, Zambia for the eLearning Africa conference, where I’ll be presenting the Digital Campus project later this week. The conference starts properly tomorrow and today I attended one of the pre-conference workshops, on policies for successful elearning programmes.

My impressions so far have been very good, having Ethiopia as the only other sub-Saharan Africa country that I’ve visited, Lusaka couldn’t be more different to Addis, everything appears much more up together and organised. The roads and traffic seem far less chaotic, lined with advertisements for various mobile operators. We were even given free sim cards when we were waiting for our baggage – such a contrast to Ethiopia when getting a sim card is quite a tedious process and certainly not cheap.

The conference is huge, but show how small the world is when one of the first people I met here is a PhD student at the OU Business School. I’m going to have a tricky job of deciding which presentations to go to, as there are 10 parallel sessions. The contrast with Ethiopia is made even more pronounced talking to some of the other participants from other African countries where they seem to be much further down the road than Ethiopia in terms of elearning implementation and technologies.

Assuming the wireless stays up and running well I hope I’ll be blogging regularly. For anyone reading this who is at the conference, my presentation is on Friday afternoon (track 56A1).

Now that I’m back in the UK and have access to a reliable fast internet connection, I’ve uploaded some of the videos I’ve taken over the last 18 months. They’re almost all unedited (except the Debre Damo one – except I didn’t do the editing) although I may try to edit some of these clips together…

Sulphur Springs in the Danakil:

Juggler at orphanage Christmas show:

Visiting the Debre Damo Monastery:

There are plenty more short videos that I’ve uploaded too.

Me and Getachew

After 18 months, I finally managed a visit down to Maychew – less than 3 hours by bus south of Mekelle. There have been VSO volunteers working at the Technical College there all this time, but usually I see them fairly regularly as they come up to Mekelle on way to airport or just for shopping in the ‘big city’.

Apart from the fact I’d never been before, the other reason to visit was to climb one of the hills around the town. So Mike, Getachew and I ll got up far too early for a Sunday morning (6am) for the walk up Bekura.

View of Maychew from Bekura

It took us about two and a half hours to get to the top (around 3100m), making our own path up. There is a path but its very long so we decided to take the short steep route instead.

Maychew is known for being where the Italians finally defeated the Ethiopians in 1936 and there was lots of fighting in the hills around here during the TPLF fight against the Derg in the 70′s and 80′s. Because of this you still need to be a little careful where you go walking around Maychew, there are still mines and other unexploded munitions – we saw plenty of (used) shell casings on our walk up, where the farmers had ploughed, but Bekura is considered free from mines unlike some of the other nearby hills.

Whilst in Maychew I was hoping that I’d be able to get shower – we haven’t had any running water at home for more than two weeks – our water meter was taken away by the water board for repair and still hasn’t been returned. Our enormous collection of buckets and water bottles have kept us going, but now we’re even starting to empty these out. Unfortunately, no luck getting a shower in Maychew, the water pressure was too low during the my stay – so looks like I may have to wait until I’m in Addis next week. I will make sure I definitely get a shower before I fly home

At the cave entrance

The other weekend, I had a great trip down to the Bale mountains. Fortunately we were able to borrow car (4×4) for a few days from a friends work in Addis. Bale is known for it’s trekking and horseriding, but fortunately, given that it rained almost the entire time, we hadn’t planned to do either of these activities and spent most of the time driving – our shortest days drive being about 7 hours.

The roads to and around Bale were far worse that we had expected- mainly because most them are in the process of being asphalted, so the ‘road’ that you can use is actually a track next to where the road is going to be. At one point it took us over 3 hours to do less than 100km.

Basing ourselves in Robe, we had a day up to the Sanetti Plateau (over 4000m high) to watch Ethiopian Wolves and then on to the Harenna Forest. The landscape is completely the opposite to that around Tigray – with real forest and greenery- as a result of all the rain. The next day we headed another 120km east to the Sof Omar caves. These were fantastic (see photos below), fortunately we picked up a guy from the local village who happened to be a history teacher at the local high school, so he was able to translate what the guide was telling us. Due to the rain we couldn’t get as far in to the caves as we would have liked – since crossing the river inside the cave would have been too dangerous. The teacher also had a map of the cave system (below) – 17km long – if anyone is interested I have higher quality copies of the images than I’ve uploaded below. Fortunately I’d remembered to take along my little tripod so was able to get some reasonable photos once we were inside the caves.

The next night was spent at the Dinsho lodge which the guide book describes as being like an abandoned ski lodge. It was a little tricky to find, the road builders had removed the signpost so we ended up taking someone from town to show us where to go, on arrival all was dark and locked up (living up to the guides book’s description) , so we went back into town to track down the warden.

The next morning the warden too us out for a walk to watch see Nyala (photos below again!), then back in the car for a drive to Shashemene (home of Rastafarianism apparently) for lunch and up to Lake Langano for an overnight stay by the lake, and few drinks and a swim – my camera battery had long since died by this point.

The highlight for me was certainly getting to the caves, it would have been difficult to get there without our own transport and now that I’ve seen a small part of the Bale national park, I’d certainly like to go back during a drier period for a trekking holiday.

Wolf on Sanetti Plateau

View from top of Sanetti Plateau

Harenna Forest (and a short stretch of flat road)

Inside the cave

Inside the cave

Cave system map (page 1)

Cave system map (page 2)

Nyala in the morning

Nyala in daylight

Happy New Year! (Although in the Ethiopian calendar it’s still 2002, 2010 won’t be reached until Sept 2017)

We celebrated with meal out with some friends from work, letting some fireworks off in the street a little early as our friends children were getting tired and needed to go to bed. We were little concerned to start with about letting fireworks off in the street, we were quite near the military communications facility, plus all week there’s been the Ethio-Sudan Joint Border Commission Conference, so there’s been a high police and security presence in town with all the visiting ministers and Sudanese Ambassador. We didn’t think that some loud explosions late at night in the centre of town would go down very well, but we had been reassured that all would be fine and fortunately it was.

After the fireworks, we celebrated midnight at a local bar with a flaming sambuka and despite Thashika’s best efforts at burning the place down after dropping hers on the floor, we had a fun night. Not a single attempt at singing Auld Lang Syne was made.

One the way home, with the blue moon I got a few decent photos of our house and street just lit by moonlight. But the photos look a lot brighter on my camera screen than they do on my laptop screen… see how this looks on your screen:

If anyone feel like a challenge, work out when the next blue moon will be in the Ethiopian calendar. The Ethiopian calendar starts on 12 Sept with 12 months of exactly 30 days each, then a month of 5 or 6 days depending on whether it’s a leap year or not. Post your answers below.

A belated Happy Christmas to everyone!

Despite being quite a long way from the cold snowy weather in the UK, we still managed a reasonable attempt at a (vaguely) traditional Christmas. This year we invited people over to our house for dinner, drinks and games. A few volunteers from nearby (well, Mike had a 2 day bus trip to reach us) towns and other friends and colleagues from Mekelle joined us. Everyone contributed to the food and drink, Mike (a different one) made some great roast beef and Daan and Anita brought roast potatoes and lots more, then we had meat and veggie chillis plus veggie curry. Our drink of choice was mulled wine – it’s one of the only ways to make the local wine drinkable, and dessert was a selection of cake, panna cotta, jelly and angel delight.

After a bloated afternoon we were ready to play a few games in the evening. Pass the parcel was first, though no-one seemed too keen on the forfeits we’d put in between some of layers. Then we played the chocolate game (the one where you roll a die, if you get a 6 you put on hat, gloves and scarf then eat as much chocolate with knife and fork as you can before someone else rolls a 6), our improvised die may have accounted for the high number of sixes that came up.

So in true Christmas fashion, two days later we’re still working our way through the leftover food and drink.

roast beef and potatoes

Mike, Martin and Mike

Marcel

For the weekend after the training week the university lent us a driver and car to head over to Axum, so I could show Mike and Jaime some of the tourist attractions in Tigray. On Saturday morning we drove over to Axum and spent the afternoon seeing a few of the sights there – although I’ve now been several times, I’m still not a very good guide and have to make up most of the history (though I’m sure this is what most of the local guides do too!)

On Sunday morning we set off relatively early to go to the Debre Damo monastery, famous for being only accessible by climbing up a 20 metre rope and for only allowing male visitors, women (and female animals) are banned from the monastery and neighbouring village.

We arrived shortly after 2 coaches had arrived from Addis for a funeral. One of their relatives had asked to be buried at Debre Damo, but as the ceremony was at the monastery all the women who had come had to sit around at the base to wait to be driven back to Addis. Everything needed by the village (of around 400 people), including food, is hauled up by rope, so we can only assume this was also the way the body had been taken up. Though fortunately we’d arrived too late to see this.

When it came to our turn for climbing up, we were given the option of having a safety rope, although many of the locals just climb straight up. The impression given by the safety rope is that several people are a the top pulling you up, or a winch. However actually arriving at the top, you find it’s an old priest and couple of small children using a leather rope, thin and stitched together in places, which is preventing a fall. This doesn’t exactly inspire confidence for the return trip, which must be done by the same route.

There is a video of my descent, I’ll post the YouTube link soon, in the meantime, here are a few pictures:

Debre Damo from a distance

View out over to Eritrea

Tsega, our driver

With no safety rope