Wat’s Ethiopian food

alex December 11th, 2008

“Wat’s Ethiopian food”
That is my rubbish attempt at a joke - here’s the explanation (must be a good joke if it needs an explanation??!)… wat is the Ethiopian stew eaten with injera.

Rather than just repeat what already on Wikipedia about Ethiopian food, here are my experiences so far… people seem to have a marmite-style love/hate relationship with injera - all Ethiopians love injera (well I’ve not yet found anyone who doesn’t like it) and consider that a meal (breakfast, lunch or dinner) isn’t complete without it. Our maid said that she gets through nearly 50kgs of teff flour per month making injera for her family, another couple who live near us said they get through 20kgs per month. I’m not quite so enthusiastic about injera, I’m happy to eat it occasionally, but given the choice I’d usually pick something else - but I’m not as adverse to it as some - “injera is like eating carpet underlay but without the taste” - is one quote.

Being in Mekelle we can get lots of ferenji food in the supermarkets here - though the choice can be a little limited - and the prices can be high - e.g. 60birr (about 4 GBP) for box of cornflakes (not even a large box) - essentially anything that’s imported is expensive. Pork is almost totally unavailable due to religious beliefs, we did hear about a village nearby where you could by pork, but unfortunately you need to buy the whole pig. Very, very occasionally we get bacon, but that’s sent up from Addis.

Meat is quite a big thing here - most meals consist of goat or beef with injera and very few vegetables. As my Mum pointed out we seem to be eating goats quicker than Oxfam Unwrapped can sell them as Christmas presents.

Drink-wise the juice houses in Mekelle are great, an avacado & mango smoothie, made completely fresh to order, is about 7 birr (50p).

Hyaena watching…

alex December 11th, 2008

After playing volleyball for the first time in my life on Monday afternoon, we went up to rubbish dump to watch hyaenas…

- a not-very-great photo of 2 hyaenas - my zoom isn’t great and I didn’t want to get too much closer!

- as the sun sets so quickly here every other time I’ve seen a decent sunset by the time I’ve gone to get my camera it’s gone dark!

Have since played volleyball again, though no one seemed the realise that me asking what the rules were would indicate that I might not be a very good!

Is it Christmas yet?

alex December 9th, 2008

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.

In case you’re wondering where I am…

alex December 9th, 2008

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

Mylomin Goat BBQ

alex December 8th, 2008


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!

Different World

alex December 3rd, 2008

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 Great Ethiopian Man-Flu

alex December 1st, 2008

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!

Parcel Post

alex November 21st, 2008

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!!

  • VSO
  • Comments Off
  • 103 views

Workshop No. 1

alex November 21st, 2008

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.

Open, closed or ajar?

alex November 18th, 2008

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 ;-)

« Prev - Next »