“Illness” is definitely the theme of the past few days. After I recovered from my dose of diarrhoea on Thursday, Gill became ill again. We spent Saturday feeling drained and sorry for ourselves. Sunday was my turn to feel crap, again. This time I experienced a miraculous improvement around mid-afternoon. At the same time the weather freshened, the wind started, the temperature dropped and a storm rumbled in the distance. Coincidence?

My HDP group spent the Monday session considering the topic of “disadvantage”. Our sessions are two hours, and the emphasis is on modelling active learning methods the teacher educators could use with their students by using the methods to explore educational issues. At home, special educational needs (SEN) is an important topic which has become more and more prominent. Here SEN has barely featured in the educational system. Given that less than 50% of children even go to primary school (less than 30% of girls receive any education) then it’s not surprising SEN is not really on the agenda. What struck me was the acceptance of institutional failures without any apparent anger or sense of injustice. The college has no SEN policy and does nothing to identify or support disadvantaged students, or support the staff that might have to teach them. The teacher educators I work with are aware that they will have disadvantaged students in their classes, but feel unable to push the college into helping them work more effectively with them.

One of the Higher Diploma moderators arrived today to spend two days checking that our work conforms to national standards, moderate our marking, discuss the course with our candidates, etc. The moderator is a VSO vol based in Addis, although in future moderation will be handed over to Ethiopians based in regional universities.

I conducted my first English lesson with my HDP candidate with poor English skills. I have no training or experience in TEFL teaching but with a bit of improvisation we made some progress. Despite my ad hoc approach, he seemed to enjoy it and actually improved his pronunciation of a range of words. I now need to do some homework and figure out a work scheme that will help him in the time I have left at the college.

Just when we thought we had become used to the wildlife, something new arrived. Yesterday morning Gill found a moth on the doorframe of the bathroom. I thought I’d seen large moths at home (and I admit to not liking them) but this was LARGE. It was almost black, and so big we thought it might be some kind of bat. Its wingspan was about the same as a CD. After grabbing a pillow case and agreeing a plan to gather it up and release it outside, it fluttered out of the bathroom window. Given I am many times bigger than it and I’ve never heard of anyone being savaged by a moth, my level of squeamishness was way over the top.