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.