The pressure builds. I ran my last HDP session yesterday which had the same feelings around it for me as when you teach your last lesson with a class before leaving the school. Today has seen four lesson observations (two very impressive, one quite good and one disappointingly poor) and fighting to stay on top of sorting out my candidates portfolios of evidence. My temper and tolerance have been pushed at times as a succession of people have submitted portfolios which are missing certain pages, despite my repeated reminders and explanations of how to put it all together. I'm caught in the classic situation of stressing over portfolios which the candidates are responsible for and should be stressing about themselves. They all seem fairly relaxed about it all in a very Ethiopian way while I'm stressing and fussing on their behalf. Yohannes, my art teacher colleague, tried to submit his portfolio even though it was a jumbled mess. I had to grab Mesfin and get him to translate while we sorted it out for him. So, another day of marking and sorting out portfolios beckons tomorrow, and then its HDP graduation on Saturday.

I had a beer last night with some of the other VSOs (our usual Wednesday night get together). As much as I like some of them I feel like I'm detaching from them and Awassa already. Moving on feels "right" even though we're leaving a lot of good stuff behind.

As for "stuff", VSO have told us that we will need to take the cooking equipment, water filter, etc with us to Gondar. We arrived in this country prepared for two years with a rucksack each and one kit bag. At this rate we'll need a truck to move to Gondar.