Progress! One of the three Science Teacher Educators I have started working with on training for school teachers, has been very keen to be involved in developing the training. So much so, that she has come in to the college twice to discuss training ideas. He local knowledge is invaluable and she has tried to develop training before, without success. Lack of decent support from the college killed off her previous attempts at working with 2^nd cycle teachers, so I’m hoping that together we have a better chance of success.

This week is the last week of me teaching three classes in the college. Doing a bit of teaching has been a very good experience for me personally, although my ideas about working with the Science Dept to develop Modules, etc have fizzled out. As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink, and this horse has not wanted to drink. So, I have learned a lot but the hassle involved is now coming to an end.

Speaking of hassle, Gill and I have been trying to sign up for course with the Open University, but registration deadlines are conspiring against us. After a year of decompressing from a high-adrenalin UK work life, I’m keen to chew on something intellectually stimulating in the evenings. If the OU doesn’t work out then the college library will be plundered!

Let’s start with the successes. This week I have met with my VSO Programme Manager (Daniel) who spent three days in Gondar visiting all the vols. I was very impressed with him. Compared to our last Programme Manager, we could have a dialogue. He really listened instead of following a set formula. We were all taken out by him to a new restaurant in Gondar, an Italian place called “Tuscany”. The décor and food is almost like being in the UK, and we indulged in proper pizza. Gill and I finished working on a proposal for the college Deans, on how to develop training for 2^nd cycle teachers and integrate the work of the Cluster Unit with improvement to the quality of teaching in the college. At last, after weeks of delay I finally managed to get three college instructors in the same room at the same time to start planning training for Science teachers. Communicating within the college and arranging meetings is painfully slow. Even when I think I’ve managed to arrange a meeting, people might not turn up. However, the meeting went well, I presented a possible training model and everyone seemed to like the idea. I was especially impressed with, Hiwot, the Chemistry teacher. She was very keen to be involved in all aspects of developing the training and she has the added advantage of good English.

There has also been the ever present frustration. I can look ahead and see that next semester should be productive and we can potentially achieve a lot, but I’ve been bothered with self-critical thoughts about not achieving enough I the last few weeks. I can see that all the faffing around finding things out and struggling with the lack of college systems is leading to good work in the near future, but I can find it hard looking back at what looks like wasted time and not wishing I had done some things differently.

The English Club in the college, a group of 100 or so students who want to improve their English, has invited us to a coffee ceremony at the college this afternoon. Otherwise, I feel quite tired as if I’m going down with a cold or something. I’m spending this morning reading “The Return of John McNab” by Andrew Greig. It’s a beautiful book and makes me quite homesick. In a recent issue of the Guardian Weekly there was an article about a shortage of teachers in the Highlands of Scotland. Right now, when we finish here, I think I’d like to live in a Highland community. I’d miss the sunshine though.

Timkat celebrations

After nearly a year in Ethiopia I finally tried “Chat” yesterday. Chat is a stimulant drug found in the leaves of the Chat bush. Chat is widely cultivated and used throughout the Horn of Africa and has been part of the culture here for many hundreds of years. It is particularly associated with the Eastern part of Ethiopia (the Somali Region) and of course Somalia itself. Chat just looks like the leaves from any old privet hedge at home but it does come in different varieties. I joined some of the Ferenji volunteers here (two other VSOs and three German doctors) and two Ethiopian friends of theirs. Chat is a social activity and we gathered in somebody’s house and chewed together. I expected the leaves to be fibrous and chewy, but because they are young leaves they just disintegrated in the mouth, leaving a slightly bitter and “dry” taste. Although Chat is a drug the effect is just similar to drinking fairly strong coffee: you get a feeling of mental alertness. We spent the afternoon together talking about anything and everything. It was wonderful, just like being students again. Lots of scientific debate took place, along with some impromptu physics lessons, and also a slightly heated discussion about the hassle we get in the streets and the reasons for it. What a great way to spend an afternoon! There are people who become addicted to Chat, but you have to consume a lot of it very frequently for that to happen. It is entirely legal and almost everybody chews it, especially bus drivers as we noticed whenever we took the bus between Awassa and Addis Ababa. One of the Ethiopians yesterday told me that chewing Chat while driving a bus is illegal, but if that is the case then every bus driver I’ve seen is breaking the law. Given the state of the roads here I actually find it reassuring if the driver is chewing Chat as at least you know he will be fully awake and alert! Although I only had a small amount (about half a 100g bag) I could feel the effect. Gill and I had been running that morning but the Chat made me feel alert despite the underlying tiredness. The really enjoyable part was sitting around debating, the Chat chewing probably serves as big a function as a shared activity around which people can talk or not talk as it does as a “drug”. Also, eating a bag of leaves does take a bit of getting used to.

Dancing priests

Getting soaked in holy water

Today (Jan 19^th) is “Timkat”: one of the most important holy days in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and a good opportunity for us to be tourists instead of workers. Timkat (Epiphany) celebrates the baptism of Christ and is one event that brings tourists from all over the world to Gondar. Even if you didn’t know about Timkat you would guess something is up from the sudden increase in ferenjis in Gondar. Timkat is famous and is an amazing spectacle. Every Orthodox church has what is supposed to be a replica of the Ark of the Covenant, called a tabot, which is stored in the “holy of holies” in the centre of the church. Only the church priests are allowed to see the tabot, and the tabot itself is only ever brought out of the church for Timkat. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims to have the actual Ark of the Covenant, stored in a church in the ancient city of Axum. Since the priest of that church is the only person allowed to see it the claim has never been verified, although there is lots of historical evidence to back up the claim. The Timkat celebrations start on the afternoon of the 18^th, when the tabot from each church is very slowly carried on the head of a priest, wrapped in colourful cloth as only the priest is allowed to see it, through the streets to Fasilides Bath, a 17^th century palace in Gondar. Each tabot procession is surrounded by hundreds of people chanting hymns, singing, dancing and clapping. By about 6pm the tabots have arrived at the baths where an all night “mass” takes place. Even though I was working at the college on Thursday afternoon there was a real festival atmosphere, with the sound of singing and chanting drifting all over Gondar. Most visitors go to the baths early in the morning to see the climax of the celebration. In the baths is a large pool which the priests, after a very long service, bless. Traditionally, once the water has been blessed people jump into the pool while the water is also splashed onto the crowds to bless them. We went to the pool, which is only 10 min walk from our house, at 5am this morning and stood amongst hundreds of Ethiopians, for whom this was a very important and profound religious celebration. I felt a bit like a gawping tourist, but many people at college had assured us that visitors are welcome. Even then, although I took pictures I didn’t use the flash. Many of the Ferenji tourists were somewhat less discreet although the Ethiopians didn’t seem bothered. The atmosphere was hard to describe. On one level it was just a gathering of people, made somewhat less special as it was held around a much smaller pool than the usual one, the “proper” pool being closed for restoration work, but after a while I became more and more aware of just how ancient this celebration is. Many of the customs, practices and rituals of the Orthodox Church come straight from Judaism, so the Timkat celebration is many hundreds of years old, and has not changed much if at all in that time. Despite some modern trappings such as the tannoy system to better convey the constant chanting and praying of the priests, this service probably would have looked the same one thousand years ago. Many people prostrated themselves, while some people were silently praying while reading the Amharic version of the bible. I felt quite humbled and awed by the depth and scale of belief, and aware of just how important the Orthodox Church is. Ethiopia is a deeply religious society, which goes some way to explaining the incredible stoicism of the Ethiopian people in the face of so much hardship. We stood in amongst the worshippers through dawn until, at around 7.30am, the final blessing took place. A sudden frenzy of water splashing started, with people going into the pool and using plastic bottles to scoop up water which was then thrown over the crowd. Once somebody had been splashed (drenched in some cases!) they would leave and other people would replace them. Children stripped off and jumped into the pool while everybody just looked ecstatically happy at being soaked by the blessed water. At 8.30am the priests, who had been chanting and praying all night, placed the tabots back onto their heads and started the procession back to their churches, again surrounded and followed by hundreds of chanting, singing and dancing worshippers. The processions take hours, all day even, to get to their churches, distances which are normally walked in 30mins or less, such is the amount of singing and dancing taking place. All day today we have heard singing and chanting from all over Gondar as the processions slowly make their way through the streets. I feel very lucky to be living here in Gondar and being able to see Timkat. I’d love to know what the tourists make of it all. I’m even more curious to know what Ethiopians make of all these Ferenji tourists watching their Timkat celebrations while laden with cameras.

Gondar town centre

Our phone line died for several days (memories of visiting the telephone people in Awassa came flooding back to me…). After Gill visited the phone office today the line came back to life. This morning we also held a meeting with all ten school cluster supervisors in the town, at the local education authority office.

Today has been one of the most stressful I’ve experienced here. First of all, I had arranged with one of my physics classes to return their marked mid-term exam papers and show the correct answers. I had been given strict instructions by the other physics teacher not to let the students take their papers away and to be wary of students trying to change their answers. So, at 7.30am as arranged I displayed flipcharts with the correct answers, with explanations, on the walls of the classroom and gave out the papers. Within a minute I was inundated with students wanting to ask questions about the marking. The questions ranged from addition errors by me in adding up their marks to why I hadn’t given a mark even though the answer was wrong. Yes, it appears that everything is expected to be open to negotiation. There’s no culture of orderly queuing so I was faced with lots of students wanting attention all at once. I was staggered and shocked at how the students dealt with having proper criteria applied to their work and enforced by the teacher. Very few students fail courses here. There are no national standards, in fact there are no standards even within an institution when it comes to grading work, assessing, etc. I then had to deal with the Head of Science passing on concerns from some of the students about how I had marked their lab reports. I had applied “criteria” (nothing that would be recognized as criteria in the UK) supplied by the other physics teacher, with the result that some of the students received a low mark. There then followed the most incredible conversation I’ve had with a teacher about assessment. His view is that I should mark the reports based on how I think they should be marked, not based on a standard approach across the whole department, even though every class did the same experiment and lab report mark counts towards the students final grade. So a student from my class who gets 10 marks out of 15 might have produced work of a very different standard compared to a student with the same marks but from a different class. I tried to explain how I think it should be done (which frankly would be better than he would do it) but we just couldn’t agree. At one point I thought he was going to shout at me while I felt so pissed off and frustrated I nearly walked out. Eventually an amicable agreement was reached which I still think is crap. Given that I agreed to take on three classes so that I could work with the Science Dept and provide support, I feel completely taken advantage of, suckered. I’ve gained a lot from the experience but I can do without the hassle.

However, in amongst the anger and frustration there can be moments of magic. The staff lounge at college is closed, apparently because the person who ran it has found a job elsewhere. So, now there’s nowhere in college to get a drink, not that the tea and coffee served in the lounge qualified as “drink” (it’s amazing that in a country with the best coffee in the world, the country where coffee originates from, a country where the coffee ceremony is a key part of the culture it’s also possible to get coffee that tastes like dishwater). I asked Mulugeta yesterday morning to come with us for a coffee at one of the nearby cafes, which just look like ordinary houses to us. We sat outside in the shade of some trees and Mulugeta talked about the upcoming religious celebration of Timkat (Friday 19^th), and then talked about the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Apart from a Muslim enclave in town people in Gondar are Orthodox Christians. One consequence is that while the priest of the Orthodox Church close to our house chants the morning prayers via loudspeakers, the Mosque in the Muslim area of Gondar is also blasting out the call to prayer. This makes for an interesting mixture of chants and styles, but at 4.30am takes some getting used to. Mulugeta has such an expressive way of talking, with lots of use of his hands and lots of smiling. He is a fairly shy man I think, in meetings he will often sit separately and will not join in much, but on his own he’s a fascinating person to talk with. He has many years of experience of working in education in various places in Ethiopia and has a huge store of wisdom and understanding of his own culture. I could happily sit under a tree with him, drink coffee and listen to him for hours.

Identifying the key people in your placement institution is vitally important to actually achieving anything. These key people are not necessarily the obvious ones, such as your boss or your immediate colleagues. Sometimes a key person could be an admin worker who guards the photocopier or the Dean’s secretary. At Gondar College the most important key person so far has turned out to be the telephone operator. Her name is Birtukan, which is the Amharic word for “orange”. I tried to stifle a laugh when I was introduced to her (although I failed) but naming your children after food doesn’t seem to be that unusual. In Awassa I met a man called Atkilt, which is the Amharic word for “vegetable”. I don’t think it would be a good strategy in English – I think a child named “turnip” or “banana” might have problems in life. Anyway, Birtukan spends her day sitting in a tiny room, basically a cupboard with a window, with “the” phone. If anyone, apart from the Dean and Vice Deans who have their own phones, wants to make a call, they go to Birtukan, she dials the number and gives you the handset. All of the staff have mobile phones so the “system” for getting hold of anyone is to ask Birtukan to phone them on their mobile. Birtukan is very nice and happy to help, and it is definitely worthwhile maintaining a good relationship with her. The added bonus when seeing “the orange”, as Gill and I describe her, is that I get to marvel at the electrical wiring in the phone room. It’s the one room I really really want to photograph. There’s dozens of wires literally dangling out of a hole in the wall, some of which are attached to a voltage surge protector, some to a phone socket, some to a light fitting in the ceiling where the bulb has been removed and some just seem to have no purpose. What really intrigues me are the ones connected to two car batteries on the floor. When we get blackouts, which happen a few times every day, the phone also stops working. When Birtukan isn’t dialing phone numbers she sits at the desk and does her knitting. It’s a tough life being an orange.

The high point of today has been teaching physics this morning. The low point has been waiting in frustration to find out who in the Science Dept I’m supposed to work with to develop Science training for teachers. Three days have now passed with no result and I’m fighting the urge to just plan it all myself, which I’d be very happy to do, which goes against the whole idea of sustainability. If I plan with a counterpart then together we can develop training which might be more appropriate for the teachers than what I would produce myself, and more importantly helps to set up a training model which the college instructors themselves have ownership of and might be inclined to develop further and use in the future after I’m gone.

The police barracks outside our house

A very quiet and very very nice Xmas Day at home today (Ethiopian Xmas that is). There seem to have been fewer people around, probably because they had been at church all night and then been gorging on meat afterwards. We haven’t left our compound all day and it’s been great. Retreating behind our fence enables us to have a “break” from Ethiopia which is restorative and much needed. When I get some space like today it can be really nice to just sit outside and watch the many birds of prey circling overhead and listen to the eucalyptus trees around our house rustling in the wind. Beautiful. Something I’ve learned here is to enjoy the simple pleasure of just sitting and being without feeling any guilt-inducing “must be doing something” feelings. For one day, it’s like being on holiday: sunshine, warmth, African dance music in the background from “Ngoma” on our radio and temporarily forgetting about the poverty in the world outside our fence.

I set up a sundial in our compound this morning. When I say sundial, I actually mean a vertical stick in the ground, but I had fun placing small sticks at the tip of the shadow every hour and tracking the movement of the sun. Moments like that speak to the physicist in me and I browsed the internet for websites on sundials. It’s amazing how much info is out there on just about anything. I’ve learned a lot about sundials today and loved every minute.

It’s Xmas Eve again! Tomorrow (Jan 7^th) is Xmas in the Ethiopian calendar. Many people will be spending all night at church and then will feast on meat tomorrow, as there has been a period of fasting (no animal products) for most of this month. Monday will be just an ordinary day, so we are told, although our experience of Ethiopian Easter was that many people are missing for a few days afterwards, due partly to the effects of binging on meat. Unlike at home, there’s no evidence of Xmas apart from, unbelievably, plastic Xmas trees. Yes, that pagan symbol which is so popular in the “developed” countries of the “north” has infiltrated its way into this very religious of societies. In many of the shops in Gondar plastic trees complete with decorations and flashing lights are on sale. I even saw this morning one of the shopkeepers wearing a Santa Claus outfit. What the hell is happening here! Needless to say, Xmas trees, Santa Claus, etc are not traditional features of Xmas in Ethiopia, especially in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, but “northern culture” is slowly creeping in.

The week ended quite well. I spent some time with Mulugeta in the Cluster Unit testing a prototype kerosene burner. It’s a design I found in a VSO book about science teaching using locally available materials, and is meant to be a local version of a Bunsen burner for use in schools. I’ve developed a training model for developing the skills of 2^nd cycle science teachers in areas such as teaching in English, using Active Learning methods, etc in the context of a curriculum topic. I want to give the teachers some practical ideas for making equipment which are realistic and simple. The burner prototype didn’t work very well. But Mulugeta now has some ideas he will incorporate into the Mk II version.

Happy New Year, except we're already three days into it! As with Xmas day, New Years Day was just an ordinary day here. The frustrations at work have seemed a wee bit easier to deal with this week, in part because I think I've learned something already about trying to see a situation from somebody elses shoes instead of wanting things to change to a way I think is better. Also, I held what turned out to be a very useful and informative meeting with my Cluster Unit counterparts to examine our roles, and check my understanding of them. It turns out that the person everyone had described as the "boss" and being "in charge" of the unit, isn't in fact. He just acts as a link between the unit and the college departments. The problem was partly their use of the term "boss" and a generally different understanding of roles and the associated terminology here. The working relationships in the college are very informal, which leads to stunning inefficiencies but also nobody feels a need for clearly stated roles. Yet again, my criticisms, although largely valid I think, clouded my ability to see that how my colleagues work, works OK for them. So, now my role has become clearer and less complicated as I can focus on supporting and advising Meleshew and Mulugeta, instead of futilely trying to include Alemayehu.

The next challenge has been designing training for 2nd cycle Science teachers, but in a way that builds the capacity of the college staff in designing future training without VSO support. It's so easy to come up with what I think is a brilliant idea instead of working with a colleague to that the ideas are theirs.