The Cluster Unit building at Gondar CTE


The model classroom in the cluster unit

In the UK if I spent a weekend at home I’d feel like a caged animal. Here I’ve learned to really enjoy and appreciate spending most of a weekend at home. Our house is really nice, I get to sit outside in the sun (because it’s a lot cooler than it was in Awassa) and listen to the near-constant breeze through the eucalyptus trees that overhang our compound. As a Ferenji living and working here, the privacy of your compound is vital to maintaining sanity. Outside of the compound you have to be in “famous person mode” due to the constant attention, stares, children following trying to get your attention (the “cling-ons” as we’ve taken to calling them), people asking for money and general conspicuousness. Once inside the compound, you’re back in your own space.

The walk from our house into the centre of town takes about 25 mins and it’s uphill all the way. This morning I made the trek to stock up with kerosene. We cook and purify water using kerosene stoves. Unfortunately the garages don’t all have kerosene at the same time. Still, hiking into town was a good excuse to stop for a coffee and juice in Hash Bar, a very nice café. I managed to find a garage with kerosene and then lugged my 10 litre jerrycan back home: a round trip taking an hour and half.

A peculiarity of being a VSO vol here is that we have guards. When I first heard the term during In-Country Training I visualised a man in uniform brandishing an AK-47. Actually a guard is a person who hangs around in your compound to deter anyone from climbing over the wall. Day Guards are usually women who also clean and do laundry, night guards simply sleep in the compound to provide an overnight presence. In Awassa we didn’t have guards because our landlord and his family lived in the same compound as us. VSO policy is that you must have guards if you don’t share the compound with people who are around all the time. Given that just outside our house is the police barracks for the town with uniformed sentries hanging around with AK-47s, we’re as safe as you can get. However, we now have the sister of one of the college drivers as a day guard, and a friend of the driver as our night guard. Our day guard, Mekdes, is a qualified 1^st cycle primary teacher but she cannot get a job. Yet another ludicrous situation here is that there are now too many 1^st cycle teachers for the number of schools, even though less than half of kids go to school. She’s young, shy and frighteningly industrious. She actually looks around the house for things to clean e.g. yesterday I discovered she had scrubbed the INSIDE of the kettle. Our night guard, Tilahun, seems quite happy to sit in the compound and stare into space for the whole evening. It’s easy to forget that people don’t read to kill time like we might do at home: books are not available and many people cannot read anyway. I’m finding it strange getting used to somebody hanging around outside the house all night and somebody else cleaning everything she can find during the daytime. There’s a very different attitude to personal space here compared to the UK and it’s going to take me a while to adjust.