After one abortive attempt to fly back to Gondar on Friday (when her booking had been mysteriously cancelled when she tried to check-in), Gill made it home on Saturday afternoon. The pleasure of her return was enhanced by the bag of leeks and other food goodies she was carrying. Tofu marinated in soy sauce, lime juice and garlic; with noodles and carrots; a roasted sesame seed garnish; followed by tinned pears with custard was our Saturday night feast. Steve & Gemma, who joined us for dinner, were suitably impressed. It doesn’t take much to make volunteers happy.

In the morning I had visited the Ploughshare Women’s Crafts Training Center, about 3km out of Gondar, with Liza, an Addis-based volunteer visiting Gondar. Ploughshare takes batches of women, who are single mothers, from different regions and trains them in weaving, pottery-making and other simple crafts which they can use in their home villages to make money and support themselves. This was a good example of a small scale scheme which helps people with few opportunities to help themselves. The Center is self-supporting from the proceeds of selling its crafts (which were all of impressive quality) and gets various bits of equipment donated by foreign embassies eg the British embassy paid for a new kiln for firing pottery.

Sunday afternoon was spent with all the Gondar vols at our house while I led a security & emergency planning session, with my Gondar volunteer representative hat on. After a productive two hours working our way through a scenario where Marjo had been flattened by a line taxi Tilahun, our night guard, turned up looking unrecognizable. He had been beaten up the night before and had stitches under his right eye, a puffed up face and heavy bruising. Given he was attacked at 8pm, a time when none of us think twice about walking alone, on a street that always seems perfectly safe, his battered appearance was somewhat ironic as we finished discussing emergency scenarios. Fortunately he’s OK.

The pace at work is slow and steady. Since we’ve decided that I am not the unit leader, but they need me to provide leadership, I’ve been pushing for some systems to be established. I’ve also made some progress in getting Meleshew and Mulugeta to consider how they want to develop professionally. As a result, I’ve started training both of them to use the cluster unit PC, starting with learning to use Word. The delight on their faces at receiving some individual attention and really learning something new has been great.