Temper temper. I nearly lost it this morning. I had a brief meeting with the other physics teacher, who is teaching the same course as me to his own classes. At the start of the course he told me all the students had been “told” to buy calculators, which cost about 25 birr and are available here in Gondar. I’ve discovered that in each of my three classes only one or two students actually have calculators. I wanted to check what happens during exams if students do not have calculators, if they lose marks for not producing a final answer, etc. “Don’t worry”, he said, “it is not our problem”, “it’s not for us to solve”, etc. Getting a straight answer about what happens during the exam proved impossible, and the usual lack of anyone taking responsibility really wound me up. If the students really cannot afford to buy calculators, fair enough. What about the college arranging a deal with a supplier to get them cheaply? What about arranging the course and the exams to remove the need for a calculator? No no no. Nobody is doing these things. “You shouldn’t take on these difficulties, don’t worry this is Ethiopia”, I was repeatedly told this morning, with a smile which suggested he thought it was mildly amusing watching this ignorant ferenji get worked up. Nothing is going to change unless people take responsibility, get a bit angry and decide that some things really are unacceptable and should be dealt with. Sometimes I feel like screaming.

Still, teaching Section II this morning lifted my spirits a bit and raised my energy level. After the lesson I was filled with energy and wanted to get on and change the world. Unfortunately, the world didn’t want to change at my pace and in the way I wanted it to. Increasingly I feel frustration build up and threaten to spill over into an outburst of anger. Sometimes here I feel lacking in drive and at other times I can build up a big head of steam and end up seething with irritation at the shortcomings of others. I can so easily feel angry in response to the passivity of my Ethiopian colleagues, to get angry on their behalf. The symptoms are easy to spot, such as getting more and more irritable while they seem more and more serene, and feeling like lashing out in response to everybody in the street shouting at me to get my attention when a smile is all they want, but sadly I can be stubbornly closed while nursing my anger. Thank God for the privacy of our house – a sanctuary where we can be “off duty”, stop, breath and think about how to respond better to life here. There was a copy of Steven Covey’s “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” at the college in Awassa. When I was browsing through it, one phrase of his leapt off the page and really resonated with being a VSO volunteer: “seek first to understand, then to be understood”. How often have I forgotten that piece of wisdom! When I jump in with both feet and expect people here to “somehow” permanently change how they think and work, how can I expect anything other than frustration?! I can’t think of a better guiding principle for a VSO to follow. I just have to remember to do it.