One year!!!!!! One year ago today we arrived in Ethiopia. On one level I can’t quite believe that we have made it this far. The VSO volunteer rollercoaster has well and truly been memorable, in some ways worse, and in other ways better than I imagined. We have both been reflecting a lot on what we have been through and how we felt one year ago. I have vivid memories of waiting at Heathrow and feeling like I was about to jump into the deep end of a pool and having nagging doubts if I could swim. Well, swim we have although with an awful lot of splashing at times. We went out for dinner tonight with Lucy, the other vol here in Gondar who was in our intake. We wanted to celebrate making it to one year, although we seemed to spend most of the time sharing our frustrations and cynicism about how much of a difference we are actually making. One disadvantage of completing one year is that the initial naïve optimism we started with has taken a bit of a battering. Feeling cynical is seductive but increasingly hard to avoid. Our primary role here is supposed to be individual and institutional capacity building, but at times it seems to all of us that there isn’t really much capacity to build. There are many amazing and remarkable people, but there’s a deep deep resistance to change, even though everybody says they want to. It’s hard to stay positive and believe that we can make some kind of difference. So, a significant day for the three of us although tarnished by pessimism and frustration.