Alex Little

Over the last few weeks I’ve found (or they’ve found me) a number of people who are going to be heading out to Ethiopia on IT VSO placements in September, plus a guy from US Peace Corps who’s already over in Gondar. This set me thinking about how we’d keep in touch/discuss things once we’re all on placement (we’ll be spread all over Ethiopia), and how we’d introduce new contacts to each other.

Using the VSO forums site didn’t really seem appropriate, as it’s only accessible to VSO volunteers, so people from other NGOs wouldn’t be able to join in. So… I’ve set up a new Google Group ‘IT Volunteers in Ethiopia’ that we can all join to keep in touch – anyone else is free to join too!

Not sure if this is the best way to achieve this, but have a discussion area like this seemed to be the most appropriate. Will also have to see if we get internet connections reliable enough to actually check for new messages!

… well, on page 7 of my local paper anyway…

… is one of the phrases in my new Amharic phrasebook that hopefully I won’t have any need for whilst I’m away. Hopefully it shouldn’t be too hard for me to pick up some useful phrases, though I think it’ll be harder to get to grips with the Ethiopian alphabet (syllabary)… 33 basic characters, with extra strokes depending on which of the 7 vowels follows, so by my maths that’s 231 characters. Wikipedia has a table showing them, well, I assume it does, my browser only displays ‘?’ for each one – seems a font needs to be installed to display.

In terms of other progress… this evening I had a photographer from the local paper (Northampton Chronicle and Echo) come to take a few pics of me in my VSO t-shirt, for an article that should be in the paper in the next few days. This came about as a result of VSO writing a press release (see below) for me and sending to the local paper – hopefully it might encourage a few people to have a look at my blog and make a donation.

Local man heads to Ethiopia to share IT Skills

Alex Little, 34, of Northampton is about to head off to Ethiopia to volunteer with international development agency VSO. The organisation, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, sends skilled and experienced professionals like Alex to help in countries where their skills are most needed.

Alex first heard about VSO through some friends who had volunteered and were hugely enthusiastic about their experiences. It wasn’t until he did some voluntary environmental conservation work in Romania last year that he decided to apply. “There were two people from the US Peace Corps coordinating the work there for two years,” says Alex, “it was their work that really inspired me to apply.”

The placement will run at Mekelle University in northern Ethiopia for a year initially, with the option to stay on for another year, either in Mekelle or another similar placement in Ethiopia. Alex will be working as an IT advisor and trainer in the computing faculty of the university, and he is relishing the chance to use his skills to help others, “I will be helping to train teachers and trainee teachers in various aspects of IT, but also helping to maintain and improve their IT infrastructure. This fits well with my current job in the UK where I work for the IT team in a faculty at the Open University.”

It’s an exciting time for the 34 year old who has always wanted to spend time living abroad, not just as a traveller, but as someone with the opportunity to experience a different way of life. “I’m most looking forward to living and working in a completely different environment and experiencing their culture and way of life,” says Alex.

Volunteering for Alex seems to run in the family: “All my friends and family have been very supportive, my brother is currently doing voluntary work in the Philippines, and my parents (both now retired) are looking forward to having an adventurous holiday when they visit!”

Though it’s not without apprehension that he Alex heads into his new role. “As with any new job,” says Alex “I’ve thought about how I will I fit in, whether or not I’ll get by with the language and how easy it will be to make new friends.” Luckily for him, he has a strong network of friends and family to support him whilst he is away, “hopefully some will make the trip to come and visit me. I’ll miss cups of tea, cheese and Yorkshire puddings. I certainly won’t be missing the daily commute down the M1 though!”

Alex is also keeping a blog at: http://alexlittle.net/vso and a justgiving page at: http://www.justgiving.com/alex-vso where he is raising money to help support the work that VSO does and to ensure volunteers like Alex can continue to do so.

VSO is an international development charity, which works through volunteers. Using the skills and experience of volunteers it helps tackle poverty in nearly 34 of the world’s poorest countries. Currently celebrating its 50th Anniversary, VSO is now the largest organisation of its kind in the world and has 1,500 volunteers working overseas at any one time.

VSO is currently looking for new volunteers. For recruitment information and details on how to support fundraising initiatives, phone VSO on 020 8780 7500 or email: enquiry@vso.org.uk or visit www.vso.org.uk

I’ve long been involved with the environmental conservation charity BTCV, and have always been surprised that they haven’t tried to get more from the willingness of companies to spend money on team-building type days…

Well, it appears they are now, with their Employee Volunteering scheme. I’m not sure how long this has been running – so I may be a little behind the times!. Groups can spend a day (or more) on a practical conservation task (similar to the day some of us from KMi spent at the Greensands Trust in Leighton Buzzard helping to build a new boardwalk). It’s all good fun so will see if we can get a group from KMi out again…

Many of you probably now know that I’ve been accepted a placement with VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) to go and work at Mekelle University (http://www.mu.edu.et/ – though the website availability seems a little erratic!) in Northern Ethiopia, starting Aug/Sept ’08, initially for a year. I’ll be working as an IT advisor, trainer and web developer, helping to train teachers in IT, support their IT infrastructure and developing their elearning programme.

This weekend I’ve just been on my first VSO training course ‘Preparing to Volunteer’, which was excellent fun, though extremely mentally exhausting – very long days, with loads of information about the reasons for development work, why it matters and how it can best be achieved, plus how to prepare ourselves for the culture shock that all VSO volunteers will inevitably suffer!! Loads of group work exploring our reasons for volunteering and coping strategies. Played some fun games, including the ‘trading game’, where the 20 of us were split into 5 different countries (UK, US, Thailand, Bangladesh and Tanzania – I was in Tanzania), each given different resources and tools (paper, scissors, compass, rulers etc) to make paper shapes to sell to the bank. We’d set up a deal with the US so we could use their tools (compass & scissors) to make the shapes with our resources (paper), though we had to give a ridiculous percentage of our output as payment for use of their tools. In the end we thought we’d done pretty well, especially with how skewed the rules and bank were in favour of UK & US, though admittedly we did use some underhand tactics – stealing another pair of scissors and not declaring much of our actual output – the US team wasn’t watching us closely enough!

Over the last couple of months, in my spare time, I’ve been volunteering doing some programming work for the BTCV (British Trust for Conservation Volunteers) on their Volunteer Involvement Team to develop a “Volunteer Passport”. I’ve been volunteering with BTCV for a number of years, but always on their conservation work projects, so doing programming for them was a little more like my normal day job

What they needed from the Volunteer Passport system was somewhere their key volunteers could record their learning experiences/objectives, skills, courses etc… so essentially an ePortfolio system. So rather than building something from scratch, I’ve adapted ELGG to add in the extra functionality required for the Volunteer Passport – this mainly involved updating the edit profile section to allow for skills and courses entry.

The system is now live on the BTCV servers at: http://passport.btcv.org.uk and we’re presenting it at the BTCV volunteers conference this weekend. It’s still not fully complete, there is plenty more functionality that we’d like to add, as well as getting it more closely integrated with existing BTCV IT systems, but it is a working system, so feel free to sign up and have a play We’ve created a forum for feedback, so if you have comments, queries or suggestions please post them there.

For those interested I’ve used Google Code as the source code repository for the work I’ve done (see: http://code.google.com/p/volunteer-passport/). I know there are other (voluntary) organisations who are very interested in what we’re doing, with a view to creating their own, so all the code I’ve written is open source and freely available to anyone who wants to use it