Bet Giorgis (St George's Church)




The priest in most of the churches was happy to pose. "Elvis" here insisted on wearing sunglasses to protect his eyes from the flash.


From the plane back to Gondar

An indication of how underemployed at work I am is that I have nothing really to say about it. I’m still waiting for the college to select the instructors who will work with the Cluster Unit on the in-service programme, and keep getting told that it will be “soon”.

Gill and I have used some of the slack time to get serious about what we will do when we return to the UK. We spent most of a day working on our CVs, have signed up for various automatic email education job alerts and looked carefully at a few advertised education-related jobs on the internet.

If we can’t work because there’s little of value to do then we might as well do something for ourselves. We went to the town of Lalibela over the weekend; flying there on Friday morning and returning on Sunday afternoon. Vincent, a visiting lecturer in Physics from UMIST who is spending a couple of weeks at Gondar University, came with us. Lalibela has been described as one of the wonders of the world, and the most remarkable thing about it is that it is almost completely unknown by most people outside of Ethiopia. What Lalibela is famous for is its rock-hewn churches. Created sometime around the 11^th century the churches are the most important site in Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity and one of the most important in all of Christianity. The churches were carved from the bedrock using simple hand tools, probably taking around 25 years and involving 40,000 people. These churches were not built out of blocks of quarried stone, like European cathedrals, but were actually carved as one block from the rock and then hollowed out. To walk around them is really quite amazing. But what really is amazing about Lalibela is that it is a living place of worship. It is not deserted ruins or preserved like a museum, the churches are still operational in a way that hasn’t really changed for hundreds of years. UNESCO are busy constructing a canopy over each cluster of churches to protect them from weathering which meant clambering at times around ugly scaffolding.

We stayed in a cheapish (for Lalibela) hotel after a 40 min flight from Gondar. As long as you know in advance that the prices will all be inflated tourist prices then that’s not so bad, but some of the prices really were silly, especially for Ethiopian food which wasn’t really up to much compared to what we know is good. We joined a group of Ferenji tourists with an official guide, Berhan, and went round two clusters of churches on the Friday afternoon and the remaining cluster on Saturday morning. The sense of awe I had about the churches was a bit dampened by having to pick our way around poor Ethiopians who were attending services or trying to pray. The tourism brings in much needed money, but as far as I could find out local people don’t benefit directly which surely has to be sorted out. Why can’t some of the entrance fee for the churches (200 birr per person!) go directly to organizations or activities which benefit local people instead of all going to the church?

Lalibela is one of those places that you “must” visit if you are in Ethiopia. My preference is always for wild places, natural history, etc but it has been a very interesting experience to wander round Lalibela. It’s certainly impressive, but somehow not quite as impressive as I imagined. After living and working here for a year and a half the Ethiopian setting, the poverty and the traditional way of life held no novelty value for me, which would be a big factor in the overall Lalibela experience for any tourist. Developing a cold (yes, a cold) while I was there didn’t help. Vincent was good company and had some interesting views from his perspective as a short-stay visitor.

Debre Birhan Selassie church

After a couple of recent trips to a local workshop to cut-up wood and produce a blizzard of wood chippings, Mulugeta has been happily banging and sawing away in his workshop for the last few days. He’s finished a new noticeboard for the cluster unit, to be displayed in the main admin building, and has also been producing counting sticks for Gill to use in mathematics training. My main task for the last few days has been assembling pictures and blurb for the noticeboard. I like the creative part of it but it’s hardly a full-time job at the moment.

Our somewhat limited social life is one of the things that keeps us going. We had lunch at Steve & Gemma’s on Saturday (veggie curry) followed by wandering up to Debre Birhan Selassie church to take a look around. Debre Birhan Selassie is one of the most famous churches in Ethiopia. The original site is several hundred years old and was supposedly built to house the Ark of the Covenant (Ethiopian Orthodox Christians believe the Ark is in Ethiopia, currently in a church in Axum). The feature it is perhaps most famous for its ceiling, which is decorated with the painted faces of 80 angels. Although we had to pay 25 birr for entry, the churchyard was just as beautiful as the church itself. The trees inside have been protected from being chopped down for firewood and the whole place had a soothing and tranquil feel to it.

An often-quoted slogan in advertising about Ethiopia is “The Land with 13 Months of Sunshine”. Ethiopia uses a Julian calendar, which means there are 12 months, each with 30 days, and a 13^th month with 5 days, or 6 days in a leap year. Several hundred years ago the date of the birth of Jesus was re-calculated and most countries changed their calendars at the time to reflect this. Ethiopia didn’t so yesterday was the first day of the year 2000. For months people have been looking forward to the millennium celebrations, with many diaspora Ethiopians expected to return from abroad. The most visible sign of the approaching millennium has been the sudden rush to repaint many of the buildings around Piazza, the centre of Gondar. Some extra lights have gone up and masses of T-shirts have been printed with millennium slogans on them. I’m a bit cynical about it. Apart from the fact that it is just an arbitrary date (and the often ignored fact that the 2000^th anniversary of Christ is actually at the start of 2001) I don’t really know why anyone is celebrating. Ethiopia has a rich and glorious history, but in the last hundred years it was a rigidly feudal society which was replaced by a brutal Marxist dictatorship which was in turn replaced by a democratic government which isn’t worthy of the name. The country is one of the poorest in the world (171 out of 176 countries on the UN Human Development Index) and has a whole heap of problems which I don’t see getting any better. Nevertheless, people have been looking forward to it. On the streets for the last few days there have been lots of undernourished sheep and goats hanging around in forlorn-looking groups ready to be sold and eaten. With the heat and sunshine in the afternoons it's hardly been a Scottish hogmanay, although the sight of scrawny creatures hanging around in the streets with bugger all to look forward to did kind of have a Scottish ring to it. So yesterday was a holiday which people spent with their families. New Years Day was a Wednesday, which is a fasting day (no animal products) for Orthodox Christians. The government announced only the day before that Thursday and Friday will also be public holidays (the coming of the millennium has only been known about for two thousand years after all), which is probably a smart move as most people in this carnivorous society will be gorging on meat today and will be ill on Friday as a result.

We were invited round yesterday (New Year’s Day) by a neighbour for a coffee ceremony. We were also plied with misir wat (spicy lentil stew) and injera. We are slowly getting to know this neighbour. One of the daughters, Kibub, came round to our house a few days ago and, for an Ethiopian woman, was surprisingly confident and forward about asking questions about us and our lives. Her look of horror on discovering our non-religious views was a picture and I’m fascinated to pursue further her stated non-belief in the theory of evolution. When she was together with all of her family yesterday she went back into shy Ethiopian woman mode. I think on her own we can discuss a much wider range of topics than when her father is around. We all sat together for a chunk of the afternoon and watched the Ethiopian TV, ETV. There was lots of coverage of the millennium celebrations in Addis Ababa which did actually look quite impressive. Ethiopians with money ($150 per ticket apparently – at 1400 birr that’s our entire month’s allowance!) could go to the new Millennium Hall in Addis and hear the Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, give a speech. Having sat through many many official speeches here I can confidently state that it would have been a tedious waste of money. Still, we had a nice time chatting and drinking coffee.

On New Year’s Eve we went to a party at the house of two physiotherapy non-VSO volunteers, one Canadian (Katie) and the other Japanese (Micky). A couple of dozen of their Ethiopian students were there, so instead of the usual UK syndrome of everyone getting hammered there was lots of singing and dancing to traditional Ethiopian instruments. One of the students did unfortunately manage to get drunk enough to pass out and vomit, giving the whole event a certain British-style charm.

Today, the day after New Year, there’s a noticeable lack of sheep in the streets and piles of freshly removed sheep skins and fleeces are appearing on street corners for sale. The meat consuming has begun in earnest.

Mulugeta and I did some work together on Tuesday. I helped him carry some wood to a workshop a few streets away to be chopped into pieces he can turn into counting sticks and other maths resources. The “workshop” was actually the front yard of a house and was a health & safety nightmare, although after a year and half here I get less fazed about that sort of thing now. In a small room was a circular saw surrounded by piles of sawdust. Moving the sawing bench into a more convenient position was achieved by the operator kicking it across the room while it was on. I spent the next hour watching him spray the area with wood chippings and sawdust.

A lot of the time I want to be in charge of the cluster unit so I can make some necessary changes, but then occasionally I’m really glad I’m not. A few days ago I was told by the instructor who is “in charge” of the unit that we have 20,000 birr left over from last year to add to the 50,000 birr we have been allocated for the coming year. Yesterday it turned out that we supposedly overspent by 23,000 birr last year. Given that the 50,000 birr has already been allocated this leaves us with a few problems. As usual I was left stunned by the lack of any proper systems that would allow people to track important things like budgets.

At least Mulugeta was happy yesterday. Being busy making something makes Mulugeta very happy and contented. We want to put up a noticeboard in the entrance to the main admin building to communicate what we do in the cluster unit to the college staff. I’m hoping that this will help to get instructors onboard about what we do and make it easier for us to get instructors involved in the in-service programme. Getting this thing up and running will feel like a big achievement in the current climate of chronic under-work.