Yesterday (Saturday) was more eventful than usual. The college held a workshop with the headteachers of local schools, to inform them about the arrangements for this years practicum. The practicum is what in the UK is called teaching practice, and is when the student teachers at the college spend a couple of weeks in a school gaining experience. Gill and I were asked to deliver a 15 min session about the HDP and the school placement each HDP candidate has to do. We spent an enjoyably frantic hour before the workshop started on Saturday morning getting ready. We had only been told about it all on Friday afternoon (that’s forward planning Ethiopian style) but, the short notice resulted in a welcome and enjoyable shot of adrenalin. I actually quite enjoyed the stress. So, fifty headteachers arrived, the workshop was “only” one hour late in starting and was crap. I mean, three of the four senior staff leading the workshop are HDP candidates who are now familiar with all sorts of active and participatory presentation techniques, and all of them talked at the participants without even a whiff of a visual aid, never mind anything “active”. We stood up, got everybody active with a Brain Gym exercise and delivered a short and snappy presentation with the use of three simple flipcharts and a brief paired discussion. It finally finished at 1230, still more than one hour late. Everyone appeared to enjoy our 15 min moment of glory, nobody appeared to enjoy anything else. It was though, a useful experience for us. We need to have some serious discussion with our colleagues about why they made no attempt to even use visual aids, never mind use any methods to encourage participation and effective sharing of ideas.

We had lunch today with Sudhir and Paul, two of the new VSO vols here in Awassa. Paul told us that the current literacy rate for Ethiopia is 37%. I was reminded of a VSO vol in another region of Ethiopia telling me about a recent planning workshop held for regional government, where he discovered that 40% of the senior civil servants are illiterate. Small wonder that progress here can be slow.