Much has been going on for the last week or so. Blogger has been slow or inaccessible and there has been continuing uncertainty about our future, which has coloured a lot of my recent experiences here. I had emailed our programme manager and her boss several times to raise the issue of being sent home if VSO cannot find placements. The emails we received in response didn’t address this issue which left us with increasing anxiety, frustration and anger. Eventually I phoned the VSO Country Director in Addis and spilled out our frustration to her. She phoned back a few hours later with some reassurances that if Gondar College does withdraw our placements there will be others VSO can offer. It’s not a cast iron guarantee but simply having our concerns acknowledged, even thoug there was nothing of substance, helped a lot. So, now we are still waiting for news with two weeks left to go before we finish our current placements.

Our working lives have become a blizzard, dust storm would be more appropriate, of paperwork and marking. I have two HDP sessions left to deliver but a pile of assessment to do. The new semester at the college has eventually started more than two weeks after it officially started. I also have about twenty lesson observations to fit in, hopefully by next Friday when our candidates will graduate from the course. In my final individual meetings with them, all of my candidates have gushed appreciation for what we have done for them, and some of them really have developed their practice and, more importantly, their attitudes. At the same time, a lot of the good teacher educators are planning to leave to join government universities, where they will get better working conditions and the chance of funding for a Masters degree. Some aspects of how the college is run remain as crap and inefficient as ever, but at least we have added something to the individuals we have worked with.

We heard on the radio last week reminders about the clocks changing in the UK. We get Virgin Radio on our World Space satellite receiver radio, which means we get to hear the traffic reports for the M1! The announcements made me realize that it must be well and truly autumn in the UK and we now have more daylight hours here than at home. Our sunrise and sunset times are the same as always at approx 0630 and 1830, it’s always sunny but it has been cooler in the mornings and there’s often a fresh breeze in the afternoon. In short, the weather is beautiful at the moment.

We finally made it to the cinema last night. Yes, there’s a cinema in Awassa. When I say “cinema” I’m not talking of some multiplex with popcorn and comfortable padded seats. I’m talking about the main “hall” which is used for graduations and public meetings. It has several hundred hard, squeaky and broken seats. EVERY seat has something wrong with it and throughout the film there were odd squeaks and scraping sounds as people moved in their seats. As a cinema it was not bad: a large screen, fairly decent speakers and a digital projector connected to a DVD player. Every Friday night an English-language movie is shown for a cost of 2 birr (13p!), with English subtitles to help the Ethiopian audience. The movie was some Hollywood crappy straight-to-video effort called “Elizabethtown” starring the guy who played Legolas in the Lord of the Rings movies (what is his name? I waited to see it in the final credits but somebody shutdown the projector!). No matter, watching an American movie with lots of scenes of smalltown America was a mesmerizing experience, as we sat in a wrecked improvised cinema in Ethiopia. I’d love to know what the Ethiopians who watched it made of it all.

Our running has picked up again with 50 min runs starting at 5am every second day, probably as much to do with responding to stress as to needing exercise.

The prospect of being sent home soon (however unlikely that might be) has certainly concentrated my thinking about the idea. We are in some kind of transition state where we don’t want to be here forever, and we do miss lots of things about home, but we are in no rush to move home. What would we do when we finally return home for good? I don’t want to go back to my former life but I’m not sure what I do want to return to.