I suffered through the graduation of the summer programme students this morning. The students were very happy, but sitting through 1200 students graduating in a ceremony of more than three hours severely tested my endurance.

We are now packed and ready to head of trekking in Bale Mountains tomorrow. We have to travel by bus to the town of Dodola where we hire a guide and a horse to carry our kit, and also for carrying us if the altitude of more than 3000 m clobbers us. We return to Awassa on Saturday.

A dull week of admin and marking comes to an end. On Sunday we are hopefully heading off to go trekking in Bale Mountains for a week.

One of our lifelines is The Guardian Weekly newspaper which is posted to us from the UK. It’s a collection of articles from the UK issues of The Guardian and The Observer newspapers along with selected articles from other major newspapers e.g. Le Monde, The Washington Post, etc. In a recent issue I noticed a small article about many people in Ethiopia being killed in the floods in Dire Dawa and in the Omo Valley (which has also been reported on the BBC World Service), and that the Ethiopian government had requested disaster funds from other countries to help. The flooding in Dire Dawa (near the major city of Harar) was bad and killed many people, but I’ve met many people here, Ethiopians and well-travelled ferenjis, who claim that few people if any died in the Omo Valley. The people of the Omo Valley are nomads who understand the river well and simply move when it floods. Nobody here who is familiar with the region believes anyone died in the flooding. However, the government seems to be very quick to request money to help the “victims”, which is interesting…

I’ve talked with a few Ethiopians now who, if they feel safe enough, are willing to be very honest about their views on the government. There is general dissatisfaction and contempt for how the government is becoming less and less democratic. The government seems to be applying a divide-and-rule policy of emphasising ethnic groups (helped by a federal structure along ethnic lines) and the differences between them. A few people have claimed that the government has no real interest in improving literacy or becoming more democratic, as educated people are more likely to question and raise objections. Key positions in local government, colleges and big institutions are often filled by party loyalists who are not necessarily experienced or qualified. One person has said that the only way Ethiopia will change for the better is if there is an uprising to force out the government while another described the government as more unpopular than even during the time of Mengistu and the Derg Regime, and this from people who I would not describe as stereotypical revolutionaries. It’s hard to know how widespread these views are, although the reluctance of most people to voice any critical opinions about the government I think reveals a lot. I’m certainly a lot less naïve about these issues than I used to be. Talk to people here about Bob Geldof, Live Aid, etc and they tend to be politely amused or openly scornful. Periodic famine in certain parts of Ethiopia is a fact of life due to a combination of unpredictable weather, over-population, inefficient farming practices and governments willing to exploit famine to achieve political ends. I wonder what the effect would have been if the many people who gave money during the time of Live Aid, instead volunteered their time and skills directly to the government or to NGOs like VSO. I’ve met Ethiopians here who were involved in the disaster relief efforts during the famine in the early 1980s, who while recognising that people were starving to death, also knew that it was totally avoidable and felt that their people were being turned into beggars by well-meaning foreign intervention.

HDP in action


Mesfin and Mesfin!

Tabor Hill

Coffee at college this morning was spent with Bisrat. Bisrat is an ex-student who, as the top performing diploma student, was given a job in the Programme Office for a year (which is the office that organises teaching practice placements in schools for the college trainee teachers). We initially thought this was a bit strange, a bit like giving the top graduate from a degree course a job for a year in the college admin office as a clerk. His diploma was in English (i.e. he is now qualified to be a teacher in a 2^nd cycle primary school teaching Grades 5 to 8), and unlike a lot of English teachers his English is actually very good. He is articulate, confident and has a manner about him that makes me think he is somebody who could go places and make a difference. Over coffee he talked with me about a dilemma he is facing. He wants to continue his studies and do a degree. His heart is telling him to do his degree in English so he can be a High School teacher, but his friends and family are telling him to do a Business degree so he can earn more money and have a higher status in a business or finance job. His mother is absolutely adamant that he should study Business as she thinks being a teacher is shameful. Yet again, the low status of teachers raises it very ugly head. Bisrat actually wants to be a teacher, which makes him a bit unusual, and is not simply driven by wanting money. It’s hard to advise him. My immediate reaction is he should follow his heart and do what he is interested in (study to be a High School English teacher), but I also understand that choosing a subject he is not interested in (Business) because it will lead to status and better pay is not to be disregarded lightly, given life in Ethiopia. Ethiopia needs people like Bisrat who are interested in teaching and want to help their country: fewer than 45% of children even go to primary school, most teachers are teaching subjects they are not interested in, most teachers don’t even want to be teachers, teaching is poorly paid and is viewed as a very low-status job. He has to make his decision by the end of the week.

Gill left early on Tuesday morning to travel to Addis. She is the Awassa rep on the VSO volunteers committee which is meeting this week, and she will also be meeting the new intake of volunteers who arrived in Ethiopia on Sunday. So for most of this week I’m working here in the college on my own. Given my relatively light workload at the moment I’ve had some time to ponder on what it’s like to do VSO with my partner instead on my own. Is it easier to do this as a couple compared to on your own? In many ways it probably is. We have support from each other, somebody to do things with and somebody to share the effort in doing the many things which would be trivial and mundane in normal life at home, but here require effort and energy due to the language and culture barriers. I wonder though if in other ways we would have a richer experience is we were here as two unconnected individuals? I think staff at the college might find it a bit easier to approach us on a social basis if we were not here together. Also we work together, sharing the same office and doing the same work which is less than ideal, and can be boring. It’s not as if we can talk in the evening about how our day has been! I think if I was here on my own I might make a bit more of an effort socially with colleagues, although having said that, making friends with Ethiopians is difficult. As I’ve written before, Ethiopians are very friendly and hospitable, but there’s a cultural (and language) barrier that makes true friendship perhaps impossible. The English of most of our colleagues (and certainly my Amharic) simply isn’t good enough to share genuine humour and sarcasm, an important ingredient to me in establishing a meaningful friendship.

It’s not every day you have your portrait painted! Some time ago, Yohannes (one of my HDP candidates and art teacher) offered to paint my portrait and today was the day. After work I went to his house and within 50 minutes my portrait had been painted. The finished picture is amazing, but what really fascinated me was the process. He found it funny mixing paints to achieve the right colours for a ferenji face as he has only every painted Ethiopian faces! There’s something very intimate about being studied intently by somebody else. I was aware of him really looking at each part of my face and being totally absorbed by his task. As he finished off he started smiling a lot and muttering about how happy he felt as he had “captured” my character and his experience of me. This was very important to him, he wasn’t interested in just painting a picture of me, he wanted it to communicate something. One of the most difficult aspects of our role as HDP Leaders is helping the teacher educators to develop and express their ability to reflect on their teaching. Yohannes, despite his difficulties with English, has no problem with being aware of his feelings and thoughts and expressing them. While he was painting he really came alive and was completely in his element. To call it a “hobby” wouldn’t begin to do justice to the passion he has for making art. As for the portrait, there's something shockingly honest about it in a way that a posed photograph doesn't communicate. I don't know how flattering it is and I don't care. It means something to me and to Yohannes.

Some unfinished houses near the college


The usual afternoon storm about to engulf the college.

There are some aspects of Ethiopian culture I never stop admiring. One of them is the boundless and unconditional hospitality of Ethiopians. You can interrupt a meeting, a social gathering of friends or a lone person busy with a task and never be made to feel you are intruding. If I go to the staff lounge at college on my own I will either be invited to join somebody or I can sit at a table with other people and be instantly included in their conversation. I have never felt that people here tolerate my presence just to be polite. There is a deep and long established culture of hospitality towards visitors. All visitors are “guests” and are treated as if they were personally invited by each Ethiopian. Of course, as a ferenji I am treated with respect almost by default, but dropping in on people unannounced and being entertained is a normal part of life here, in a way that would be unacceptable to most people at home.

I wandered to the lounge this morning on my own, and joined Nigatu and Abayneh, who are both HDP candidates. We talked about the new degree courses, the recently announced news that the college will start evening classes, the weather (Ethiopians must think we are obsessed with the weather, which of course we are) and their knowledge of Gondar. After blethering for a while I tried to pay for our coffees. The custom here is that guests do not pay and are automatically considered to have been invited by the people you join and drink with. I always find this a wee bit embarrassing, as if they must be thinking “this bloody ferenji is free-loading on us again”, but Ethiopians are very proud of this custom and always insist on paying.

My colleague and HDP candidate, Mesfin, likes to talk a lot about any aspect of Ethiopian culture. Amongst many subjects, we have talked about religion here in Ethiopia. There are three main religious groups here: Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, Protestant Christians and Muslims. Reliable figures are hard to find but most estimates put Christians at around 55% and Muslims at around 45% of the population. One of the most impressive features of Ethiopian society is that the three groups live pretty much intermingled with no real religious tensions. The Ethiopian Orthodox church has a very long history, was founded in the north of the country in 4 A.D. and contains many customs and features of Judaism, which is thought to be due to the north being Judaic before it was converted. Church services are held in a language called Ge’ez, which was the forerunner of Amharic. Today Ge’ez is the liturgical language of the Orthodox Church, which means that most worshippers at an Orthodox service cannot understand a word being said by the priest (just like Catholic services used to be in Latin). Non-Orthodox Christian churches here are all referred to as Protestant, and as far as I can see they are all very like the modern evangelical “happy-clappy” churches at home. The most striking thing about the Protestant churches is the loudspeaker systems they use to broadcast their preachers’ sermons. At home noise abatement orders would be flying thick and fast, but here the Ethiopian easy-going tolerant attitude seems to prevail. Protestantism is very much on the increase, which is partly due to disenchantment amongst young people with the very traditional approach of the Orthodox Church, and probably also due to any reservations they might have about defecting being battered into submission by the sheer number of decibels generated by a typical Protestant Church loudspeaker system.

There seem to be quite a lot of Ferenji missionaries here. When I last flew back from the UK, out of a total passenger load of approx fifteen there were a group of six Ferenji (Brits and Americans) missionaries. Their conversations were a dead giveaway along with their bibles, which they spent most of the flight either reading or discussing. My in-flight reading material (The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy) was embarrassingly light by comparison. I respect the religious views of others (well, up to a point) but I do feel quite cynical about white missionaries coming to Ethiopia to convert people who often have much bigger issues to worry about. To me there’s something almost sinister and arrogant about spending your time and energy trying to change the religious beliefs of others, instead of primarily seeking to change certain views because they are demonstrably harmful (e.g. Female Genital Mutilation and the low status of women). I know there are many people who come here whose motivation is religious and who also try and contribute in practical ways to helping people improve their lives, but I feel quite contemptuous of missionaries whose primary (or only) goal is to convert. Ethiopia has many difficulties to deal with and Ferenji missionaries seem to me to be the last thing this amazing country needs.

The atmosphere around college has been very different this week. There are no students around as the summer programme has now finished, and a lot of the teaching staff have gone home. We have been busy wading through marking. I know marking is important and, if done well, a vital part of enabling your students to develop, but I am not temperamentally cut out for it. One of the pieces of work I’ve been assessing has been a reflective commentary about using active learning methods. Although the commentary should be between 500 and 750 words, a lot of them are hard to read. The quality of written English is often poor, and it is also clear that many of the candidates seem to have little experience of structuring a formal piece of written work. I know that English is their second (in some cases, third) language but they are also teacher educators who are training the future teachers of this country. There is a big need for a programme designed to improve the English of teachers.

On Friday evening we were invited for drinks at a hotel by the lake to celebrate the marriage of Deirdre and Kumilachew. Deirdre works for an Irish NGO called Goal and has lots of experience of working in development here in Ethiopia. Her Irish relatives travelled here for the wedding and met Kumilachew’s Ethiopian relatives for the first time. There must have been about one hundred people there. There was a performance by a youth circus group and then an Ethiopian musician playing a Mesinko (kind of like a very mini cello but with only one string) sang a traditional song. Within minutes Ethiopians and ferenjis were up and dancing to Ethiopian rhythms. All of this while under the stars by Lake Awassa.

Today, Sunday, Gill and I went for lunch at a campsite owned by a German woman and her Ethiopian husband. It’s a lovely, peaceful place. On the walls were photographs of groups of independent travellers who have passed through while cycle touring or motorbiking round Ethiopia. I wouldn’t have had the guts to have done something like that when I was a student. I found travelling in the USA scary enough!

We walked back along the lake shore to the delighted amusement of groups of kids. As soon as they saw us there would be excited shouts of “Ferenji!” and then half a dozen or more little children running around us barefoot and trying to hold our hands. Inevitably the shouts included requests for money which can be so depressing. Little children of five years old or less begging for money because that’s just what you do when you see a Ferenji. Most of the time I’ve learned not to let it bother me otherwise you simply would not be able to function here, but sometimes the begging from children is just awful. The poverty so many of them live in is shocking and yet the answers do not lie in them turning into beggars. Despite their Ferenji-equals-money reflex response, they smile and laugh in a way I’ve seen few kids at home do. Even though we do not give money seeing and talking with us probably makes their day.

Sharing a house with cockroaches is part of everyday life. There aren’t that many of them and seeing them doesn’t make my skin crawl as much as they used to. Fortunately the roaches usually confine themselves to our kitchen. Death by fly swat is the preferred method of execution, although every few weeks I empty the kitchen of food, spray lots of bug killer, close the kitchen door and return an hour later to remove the bodies. The interesting bugs are the ones that jump. The best way to describe them is that they look just like mini versions of the alien in the film Alien 3.

I received my monthly allowance today. I am officially an employee of the college so I am paid in the same way as all of the staff. I go the finance director’s office where I sign a pre-completed form. I then sign another form along with a duplicate copy. The finance director then tears a cheque from a chequebook, and I sign the cheque stub. We then walk together approx 10 m down the corridor to the cashier’s office. Before I actually receive my cash I have to sign the back of the cheque. That’s five signatures before I receive my money. Perhaps there are good reasons for collecting so many autographs but I'm afraid it's beyond me.

Lake Awassa from Tabor Hill


The prison

Happy New Year! Today is the 1^st day of 1999 in the Ethiopian calendar. There’s definitely a feeling of holiday excitement in the air. Most of the shops were closed today, the chicken population was conspicuous by its absence and on some street corners there were piles of fresh sheep and goat skins for sale, not only is nothing wasted but money is made from the waste! Awassa was unusually quiet all afternoon although there were a few families slowly strolling around, dressed up in their best clothes. I spent part of the afternoon slowly strolling over Tabor Hill, although definitely not in my best clothes. The sun was shining and there was a fresh breeze blowing over the lake. I sat watching the prison at the foot of the hill. The number of prisoners wandering around seemed far too big for the size of the buildings. Prison in Ethiopia is not a pleasant place to be, although the Red Cross official here in Awassa has told me that prisons here are not as bad as the hell holes he’s seen in West Africa. As I walked down the hill, I passed one of the prison guards wandering around with his AK47 assault rifle cradled in his arms. There’s not much of a chance of anyone succeeding with a prison break I suspect.

The last two days have been the loneliest I’ve felt for a while. Being in the middle of celebrations by other people of an event that has no significance to me has left me feeling left out, sort of unconnected to the people around us. We both talked this afternoon of looking forward to our next jobs in Gondar, where we will not be assessing the people we work with. It will be good to have true colleagues instead of candidates and our bosses. I'm missing hanging out with friends and having a laugh. Most of the time I feel content to be here, but sometimes I want to be doing something with people I know with a sense of humour I can relate to.

An early morning walk with Keith today, up the hill with the radio mast we climbed last weekend. Unfortunately Keith turned back early after suffering an overdose of sunshine yesterday. After our walk, we met Fitsum (Vice Dean of the college and one of Gill’s HDP candidates) and Tesfaye (one of my HDP candidates) for breakfast at Pinna Hotel. Gill and I are often aware of how difficult it is to have friendships and social relationships with colleagues who we are also responsible for assessing (and in a few cases on the verge of failing) for the HDP. Despite this, we had a good time with Fitsum and Tesfaye. We discussed some of the differences between our cultures, one of the main differences being how individualist our culture is compared to the communal culture of Ethiopia. How often at home are foreigners, especially non-white foreigners, welcomed, given respect, freely assisted, treated with courtesy and simply smiled at in the street? I don’t always appreciate the social culture here, and can be too intent on getting on with what I want to do instead of being open to people who smile and want to say hello. At least the attention I get is good willed. What experience do non-white skinned visitors to the UK have? It certainly wouldn’t come anywhere near to the hospitality we experience in Ethiopia, and we are supposed to come from a “developed” country.

Breakfast here doesn’t mean cornflakes, coco pops, or any number of other processed sugar-filled cereals. Fitsum and Tesfaye ate Dulette, which is minced meat and offal served, of course, with injera (This is not something I would go anywhere near, except I accidentally had it in Addis when we arrived in Ethiopia – I was told the name for a type of doughnut to ask for in a café for breakfast and mistakenly ordered dulette, which I proceeded to eat to try and avoid looking like the ignorant fool I almost certainly actually looked like). I think Ethiopians would love Haggis, although neeps might be hard to get hold of. Gill and I had “egg sandwich”: an omelette cooked in too much oil served in a white roll. After a few mouthfuls of “egg sandwich” the dulette started to look appetising.

The afternoon has been spent at home. Today is New Years Eve (Hogmanay!) in the Ethiopian calendar. The streets were full of people this morning buying chickens, sheep and goats to slaughter and prepare for the celebratory family meals tomorrow. As is usual during main holidays, everybody travels to their home town to assemble with the rest of their family at the parent’s house. Fasil (our landlord) and his sisters travelled to Yirga Alem to be ready to gorge themselves on meat tomorrow. We were invited to join them but didn’t fancy it, and we have been there before, for Easter. During this afternoon I’ve felt lonelier than I have for a while since arriving in Ethiopia. For us, this is just another Sunday, but for everybody else today is special. I feel left out of something that doesn’t mean anything to me.

New Year approaches: Monday will be New Years Day in the year 1999 in the Ethiopian calendar.

The summer programme at college is now finished, and instead of lesson observations my time will now be taken up with marking. Out of the four modules in the Higher Diploma course we finished Module 2 on Wednesday, and now I have to assess the candidates and comment on their self-assessment forms. I also have to mark and write feedback on the candidates Active Learning Projects. They had to teach four consecutive lessons with the same class in which they used a variety of new active learning methods. The reports have highlighted the lack of experience many of the candidates have about how to write a formal reflective commentary, complicated of course by them having to write it in English. I can see that many of them have made progress, and despite a lack of experience at reflecting on their teaching, there are a few “stars” in the group. The willingness of some of them to put in extra effort and to really try to make their teaching better, despite disenchantment with the college (and of course not wanting to be teachers in the first place!), demands respect and is quite humbling. Would I be as dedicated in the same circumstances?

Compared to how malnourished and gaunt we felt before we visited the UK in June, our diet is now healthier if limited in choice. When we first arrived we didn’t know how far our money would go each month, and we were a bit cautious about what we could eat given the many gastric horror stories we heard during in-country training. Over time our diet has become a bit more varied and interesting as we have spent more money on treats and become more creative with ingredients. Breakfast in particular is now worth getting up for now that we can buy South African cornflakes and once, Weetabix!!! Other highlights so far include: pancakes made with wholewheat flour and fishcakes made with tuna. What we really lack (in the healthy food arena) are greens. The green bean season is clearly over. The other options are a variety of spinach, which needs lots of cleaning and preparing, and cabbage. Now, I like cabbage but I don’t find it the most inspiring vegetable to eat. As the only easily available green vegetable I’ll have to look around for some advice on fun things to do with cabbage.

No matter how hard we try to eradicate bugs there always seems to be one mosquito that survives and buzzes my ear in the evening.

Marking marking marking: an essential part of teaching but dull dull dull.

A parcel from mum containing posters, a copy of The Great Outdoors magazine (lots of homesickness-creating photos of hills in the UK) and decent chocolate!!!!

Demis, who is the Logistics Officer at the VSO office in Addis Ababa, arrived in Awassa today with Brian, who works in the London VSO office but who is on secondment to the Ethiopia office for four months. Us Awassa vols got a free meal at Pinna Hotel and enjoyed a social night with a completely different dynamic from our usual vol get-togethers. Having a new person to talk with, along with getting to know Keith a bit more, is refreshing and stimulating.

Working in Ethiopia has its highs and lows, and then there are the tedious everyday nuisances that have to be dealt with, whichever country you’re in. Our latest telephone bill (covering May!) was much more expensive than usual. The only way to query a bill is to go in person to the main office of the Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation in Awassa. I’ve been there before with other queries and found their procedures to be arcane and slow with an amazing amount of paperwork being shuffled around between people in the same office. This afternoon, the office was busy with lots of people trying to pay bills, get a new phone line, complain, etc. Inside the main door was a woman at a desk for general enquiries. She was, appropriately, busy on the phone. After I had hovered for a minute feeling increasingly conspicuous she smiled at me and I explained why I was there. She indicated another desk, to which I indicated the large number of people who were sitting by the desk obviously waiting to be served. I tried to ask if this was the queue (how quaintly British!), to which she smiled again and then indicated for me to follow her to an office. Perhaps she thought I wanted to jump the queue, or she hadn’t understood a word I said and probably decided to dump me onto somebody else. In the office was a woman sitting behind a desk looking officious (and talking on the phone) and five customers waiting to get her attention. Ms Officious ended her call, ignored the waiting Ethiopians and asked what I wanted. I explained, she listened and then told me to fill out a form to ask for an investigation. I had visions of an afternoon floundering in bureaucracy, especially when the “form” was a blank sheet of paper. I wrote my story and she then took me to another desk, occupied by a harassed looking man (the first harassed Ethiopian I think I’ve seen) surrounded by six Ethiopians who were obviously complaining about their bills. I waited and waited and waited. I remembered exercises on VSO training courses about dealing with bureaucracy and official people (and horror stories of volunteers returning day after day to government offices to get a form signed). Eventually Mr Harassed finished dealing with one man and turned to me, completely ignoring the other waiting Ethiopians, who didn’t even raise an eyebrow at this ferenji being given preferential treatment. I cringed with embarrassment and made a half-hearted attempt to indicate that these people should come first, but Mr Harassed was having none of it and took my “form”. He scribbled a note in Amharic on it and gave it to somebody at the next desk, who tried searching for something on a computer. My “form” was now passed to a woman who filled out another form (a real official form this time) in a book, and then indicated I should follow her to…another office, with two men sitting at empty desks doing absolutely nothing as far as I could see. If the previous guy was harassed, these guys were chilled-out. Mr Chilled-Out No. 1 read my “form”, the added Amharic note and the woman’s official form and then asked me to explain why I was here. Feeling the afternoon slipping away from me I explained it all again. Mr Chilled-Out No. 1 then stood up and indicated I should follow him (I had an urge to scream “noooo!”)…..to Mr Chilled-Out No. 2, sitting at a desk approximately 1 m away from him. Mr Chilled-Out No. 2 read my “form”, the Amharic note, the woman’s official form, listened to Mr Chilled-Out No. 1’s explanation and then asked me to explain why I was here. It’s no wonder Ethiopian’s usually don’t officially complain about anything! However, Mr Chilled-Out No. 2 immediately told me the reason: our April bill did not include any local calls (this data was “unavailable” at the time) and these had been added to the May bill, along with the May local calls. I left feeling grateful, if a bit ashamed and embarrased, for being "fast-tracked" as a ferenji, and that it was still daylight outside.

A view from part way up the hill


A tukul, a dwelling common in rural areas, near our college (the hill we climbed today is in the background). Tukuls are made from wood and dried mud, and because there is no chimney often have smoke pouring through the roof when a fire is lit inside.


One of the tukuls on the hillside and the outskirts of an ever-expanding Awassa


Awassa and the lake, with the western edge of the Rift Valley on the horizon.

After a day of intense sunshine I feel irradiated and slightly overcooked. As we are so close to the equator the sunlight can be very intense and, compared to recent days, it’s been particularly hot today. Not a good day to go for a walk then, but like crazy Ferenji that’s what we did. Actually the plan was to get up early (5.30am) and go for a run, but at 5.30am I just couldn’t motivate myself enough. Plan B swung into action, which was to walk up a much bigger hill that overlooks Awassa than our usual Tabor Hill. I’ve eyed up this hill for a while and, from the top of Tabor Hill, picked out a route through the suburbs of Awassa and the surrounding agricultural land. After seven months here we’ve acquired enough experience, confidence and Amharic to wander through new areas without being too intimidated by hassle. So, at 7am we set of. We walked past lots of houses under construction, which highlighted just how rapidly Awassa is expanding. All the people we met were smiling and friendly, especially the children, partly because the area we walked through would never normally be visited by ferenjis. After only half an hour we could have been in a remote countryside area. The poverty became more noticeable but the people were as friendly and cheerful as ever, with a lot of the children greeting us in Sidamingna instead of Amharic (Sidamingna is the local language of this area which is populated mostly by ethnic Sidama, Amharic is a second language for most people in the south). I loved the exercise, which is the closest we’ve had to proper hill-walking in a while, and the peacefulness of being high up with no people around. The big surprise then, was the appearance of tukuls (the traditional round dried-mud houses) near the top. At the top of this hill, at least 300 m above the surrounding land, were several families with grazing animals and slightly surprised looks on their faces as two sweaty Ferenji walked on to the 80 m high transmitter mast for the local radio station at the summit. What a place to live, especially as it’s a long walk to get water! A group of men we met on the way down the hill were surprised and impressed that we didn’t have a vehicle waiting to collect us and that we preferred to walk. I suppose to many local people, ferenjis are aloof white people who are driven around in comfortable 4x4s. After three hours of being irradiated by an increasingly hot sun, we arrived home tired and with slight sunburn. That’s my first dose of sunburn since I arrived in Africa. We don’t normally spend so much time in the sun so today has been a reminder of how fierce the sunshine can be, but the walk and the views were worth it.

Sunrise over Awassa, from Tabor Hill. The "wall" of hills the sun is just appearing over marks the Eastern edge of the Rift Valley.

Shopping is a very different experience from shopping at home. At home almost everything has a price which is displayed and is non-negotiable. Most shopping experiences in the UK involve freely browsing through an obscene variety of different items, and then taking your chosen item to a till where you pay, with little or no interaction with the sales person. Here nothing has a price and interaction is the very essence of successfully buying what you want. For example, I wear flip-flops in our house (not just for comfort but so I don’t feel the crunch if I step on a creepy crawly) and one of them died on Wednesday. Nearby, there’s a vegetable stall we often go to and I remembered that the stall next to it sold shoes. Now, you can’t simply browse in a shop here, because the shopkeeper instantly latches onto you and tries very hard to sell you whatever he thinks you want, at the most inflated price he thinks he can get away with. The shoe stall is run by a small boy (called Morgos) who must be about 12 years old and speaks very broken English. He’s a charming character who reminds me of a young Ethiopian version of Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses. We started our negotiation over a pair of flip-flops and he proposed 10 birr. As a ferenji you get used to being constantly ripped off, but this time I had the advantage of remembering how much I paid for my last pair of flip-flops – 8 birr. So, Morgos and I smiled, laughed and exchanged exaggerated expressions of amazement at the prices under discussion, while I also enjoyed bargaining in Amharic. The result – 7 birr!!! We concluded our transaction with Morgos going through the motions of asking for an extra birr, to which we both laughed. I normally can’t be bothered with the necessary evil of bargaining, but negotiating with Morgos really made my day.