End of an era.

Well that was that, and now we find ourselves back in the UK and both feeling at a bit of a loose end and looking for work.  We are wandering around for a bit (thanks to friends and family who allow us to use their homes).
I say that was that, but really it is just the start of another period of our lives - we are more aware of the issues surrounding development of other countries; what donations to third-world countries really mean; the use of volunteers and how they can truly make a difference.  And of course when we say that we have finished our volunteering work in Aksum, that isn't exactly correct because I am still the founder member of Give Me Education and feel a tremendous responsibility to support and encourage my wonderful committee in Ethiopia.  They work so hard to promote education to the children of poor families and that is something that I shall always be grateful for.  So maybe we shall return there one day.
Do any of you wish to come with us next time?

A Day In The Life

A daily Diary

6am       Sun Up.  We are vaguely aware that the night guard is awake and noisily filling the buckets from the standpipe to water the garden.  He leaves as soon as this is done.

6.30am. Warm shower in our en suite bathroom, where the plumbing now works (more or less)   then Gareth starts on the porridge.  This is one of our luxuries.  It is sold vacuum packed in tins and costs £2 per lb.  So breakfast is porridge with local Tigray honey and a mug of weak black tea.

7.20am. Gareth goes down the road to catch the university bus.  This can become very crowded so it’s good to be at the front of the queue and get a good seat.  

Viv’s day.  Bit of a housewife type thing going on here.  Life is dominated by the need for clean water, so the kettle is constantly on the stove (I have a new 2 ring table top model) either boiling, cooling or ready for the next boiling. This is to kill the giardia bug that can cause really bad tummy upsets.  Boiled water then gets filtered in a big container.  There is usually some sweeping, mopping, washing, cleaning to do.  Dust is blown in through the constantly open windows and doors and sometimes a jug-full of earth can get swept up in a day – very satisfying.  I like to mop the floors often so that we can pad around bare-foot on the cool tiles. 

It’s nice to go out to the shops or the market by 9am before it gets too hot.  Whatever is fresh and good quality will dictate our food for the day.  Fresh soft white bread rolls, or chunky hard rolls, or a big, pizza-size soft bread from the bakers or ask around to find who is making fresh Injera today.  Then to the veg stalls for salad or greens.  A chance for a buna (tiny perfect black coffee with sugar- a bit like a French express) on the way back home.  I have a favourite buna bet (literally a coffee house) where I can sit and waste a half hour.

Noon.   Lunch is ready and waiting for Gareth’s return. He has to come home at lunch time as there are no toilets at Uni. so it’s a good excuse to eat together and have a little lunch-time rest.  Sometimes we will eat out for a bayonetu (veg mix on Injera) or ful (spicy bean stew with chillies, rolls and yogurt).

In the afternoon I may walk the length of Aksum high street to the tourist office to see friends and talk about our little educational charity, or go to the Foundation Library where I chat with the staff on an English language improvement programme.  The walk is lovely, along the tree-lined boulevard (walk in the shade, even if that means walking in the middle of the road) and there is the choice of about 20 chai/buna/juice/beer houses, to do a bit of people watching.  It’s not often that you don’t find someone you know for a chat; the children who know me call out my local name – Viva - It seems to sound good to the Tigrinya accent.  Sometimes, I will chat to the managers of the hotels along the road to see if there is any work that I can do – proof reading mostly, (some of the menu descriptions are atrocious – freed fish, chicken sup, brushed beef) but real work is hard to come by. 

Gareth’s day.  I get to the campus at 8am.  A week is dominated by two full days of teaching, which start at 8.30am.  These are carried out in the teaching room on the top floor of the block (windows covered in card and paper to keep out the sun, one window broken, chairs and tables of poor quality).  Most sessions involve lively debates that offer valuable insight into life as a university instructor.  Some candidates have a very high teaching load and listening to them reminds me so much of colleagues back at UoG.   Other days I have a series of tutorials with candidates who are currently completing action research projects, or lesson observations to determine the extent to which they have been able to incorporate active learning methods into their teaching.  I’m pleased to say that progress is being made albeit rather tentatively.  In my office on the first floor, I will meet with candidates and colleagues for  writing and planning.  I have presented a series of seminars and written some papers for publication in AKU journals and newsletters. This month I will run a series of workshops for university staff.

11.30am Time to head back to get a good seat on the noon bus.  Aaaagh, the buses!  Large, exhaust-belching monsters. Built to seat 50, regularly takes 75! If I’m lucky, I’ll catch the ‘executive’ bus which is smaller, cleaner and an altogether more pleasant ride. Conversation is lively and often has to compete against loud music from the radio but even with all this going on the fortunes of Arsenal, Manchester Utd, Manchester City and Chelsea are obviously being discussed. Shame I can’t join in.  Lunch and a rest, usually at home, and catch the 1.30pm bus back to uni. for afternoon teaching or planning.

5pm and it’s back home for supper and a film on the computer or an evening of peaceful reading or scrabble, or pop down to the draught house for a beer or to the local hotel for a football match.  There you go – nothing too taxing or exciting!!

7.30pm  Sun down.  Our night guard arrives to patrol the compound.  He stays awake until we are both in bed and copes with anyone knocking on the compound gate, and then he unrolls his mattress on the floor and sleeps under the outside stairs.   He is also a priest at the cathedral, so on occasions he has a sing song (not terribly melodic) to accompany the local wailing priest from Santa Micael on his loud-hailer, or he reads his bible out loud in Ge’ez.  All quite gentle and calming.

People you meet

One of the really pleasant features of living in Aksum is the opportunity to meet some of the visitors to the town. Tourists, backpackers, trekkers and international aid workers/volunteers taking some well-earned rest arrive from all over the world and it is a pleasure to sit down with some of them to discuss their experiences.

One such visitor was Phoebe, an American who was staying with Mariama, my University-based IFESH colleague. She had a rich history in international aid and development work, particularly in Africa but most notably in Uganda where she was involved in a post-conflict education initiative with the former child soldiers of Joseph Kony and the Lords Resistance Army (LRA). Some of you may have read the recent media coverage following the posting of a film on the internet called ‘Invisible Children’ that has gone viral and reawakened the world to Kony’s terrorism. 

Some of Phoebe’s accounts were harrowing yet uplifting in that they demonstrated the capacity of human nature to overcome the horrors and violence that have attended the experiences of so many families. What must it have been like for a teacher to work in a school with students who were responsible for the deaths of his immediate family? How do you help a 14 year old develop the capacity to be compassionate when all he has known is the ‘law of the gun’?

In all this type of work it is easy to forget the impact that such events can have on those that offer aid and support. How do you maintain your equilibrium in such an unsettling environment? After all, it is not unknown for aid workers themselves to suffer from post-traumatic stress. Thankfully, it is Phoebe’s love of animals that has provided her with the comfort and distraction necessary to cope with the consequences of endemic violence. She is currently working on a 3-month project studying primates in Zambia. It is a world away from Kony’s child soldiers and will do wonders for her own health and wellbeing.  Where she goes after Zambia has yet to be determined but, be assured, she will do great work.

I was humbled by Phoebe’s accounts and immensely privileged to have met such an inspirational women. Her stories make some of the challenges I have to face at the University pale into insignificance. Before coming here I occupied a world where impact and change dominated the professional discourse. They’re still with me but the context ensures you view these concepts in very different ways. I have come to learn that assessing impact in Ethiopia routinely resists attempts to make judgements based on the observable, measurable and quantifiable (what would Ofsted do here?) while change is incremental and, at times, painfully slow. The realisation that the ‘impact’ you are likely to have during a placement is so indeterminate is, at first, a little unsettling. Yes it would be nice to conclude a placement with some tangible evidence that you have made a substantial contribution but I have come to accept that the most profound impact takes place in people’s minds and that is altogether much harder to get at let alone measure. So, inspired by people like Phoebe and in true VSO style, I’ll continue to ‘share my skills’, in the hope that it goes some way to ‘changing lives’.

PS: The attached photograph is of (from left to right), Pat (VSO Volunteer, Finote Salem), Viv, Mary (IFESH Volunteer, Bahir Dar University), Phoebe and Mariama (IFESH Volunteer, Aksum University). Every one a diamond!

On leaving Lalibela

Viv’s thoughts

Leaving the hillside town of Lalibela, and dropping down to the airport 25K away, I was suddenly struck by the starkness of the landscape.  Mountains upon mountains, lined up against the horizon, everything brown or dusty.  Misty or dusty: not sure which.  The small fields have been harvested and some stand bare of any vegetation, some with short stalks of maize or wheat, but mostly grazed short, by the multi coloured, skinny goats, brown fat-tailed sheep, horned cattle and Zebu. Some thistle and sparse bushes line the edges of the fields, and some stumpy trees still standing, with small dust covered leaves.  There are a few really big trees – sycamore or fig – and the black and white boubou birds take advantage of the shade and perches they offer.  A dribble of water can be seen in the otherwise dry river bed and either side of the water are beautiful irrigated and green fields.

Up in the plane you can make out the round compounds each with their straw-roofed tukul and their stick surrounds to hold the animals in the evenings.  On the extensive plateaux there are rectangular fields right to the edge and then terraces down the sides of the mountains.  During the fight of the TPLF against the DERG one of the sayings was ‘Guns against the DERG, stones against soil erosion’.  That stone terracing is still doing its job really well.

Gareth in Lalibela

It must be nearly nine months since we had confirmation of our placement in Ethiopia. At that time I knew very little about the country that was to be home for the next two years. Up until then, Ethiopia had been synonymous with famine, athletes and Emperor Haile Selassie; I now have a very different view of a country that continues to reveal so much of its rich cultural heritage.

The latest part of my education took place in Lalibela where we spent a wonderful three-day break. Set in the mountains of Lasta, Lalibela is one of Ethiopia’s premier tourist destinations and is part of the northern Christian Heritage trail that also takes in centres such as Axum, Gonder and the monasteries of Tigray. It is a small, isolated town that attracts visitors to 11 astounding rock-hewn churches. As with so much Ethiopian history, legend and fact are sometimes very difficult to disentangle and the history of the Lalibela churches are no different.

There appears to be consensus that the churches and the many interconnecting tunnels, chapels and crypts were constructed in the 12^th and 13^th  centuries during the reign of King Lalibela. However, how they were built is altogether more contentious. I prefer to accept that they were yet another product of highly skilled Ethiopian masons and labourers rather than the celestial intervention of angels during the hours of darkness. One only has to look at the Stelae at Aksum and the ruins at Yeha to appreciate that an astonishing history in construction stretches back thousands of years. 

Writers far more adept at expressing themselves than I have struggled to comprehend the immensity of what confronts the visitor to Lalibela so I’ll settle for a rather lazy conclusion that it has to ‘be seen to be believed’. A distinctive feature of some of the churches is not that they have been hewn from the rock but are, in fact free standing; the most spectacular and recognisable of which is Bet Giyorgis. The Lonely Planet Guide describes Bet Giyorgis as the ‘most mesmerising object in all of Ethiopia’, a claim that is very difficult to dispute even amongst so many astonishing buildings. Incredibly, it is also the only church that, as yet, hasn’t been protected by one of UNESCO’s unsympathetic protective ‘umbrellas’. When asked, our guide replied the locals were ambivalent, at best, about the protective roofing and that it seemed to cause more consternation for the visiting tourists. I suppose it’s the feeling that somehow we have been cheated and are not seeing the churches as they have stood for so many hundreds of years before the conservationists intervened. That aside, Lalibela is a must for any itinerary. At least that will allow you to reach your own conclusions about the place and free me from searching for the words that will really do the experience justice. 

Ben Abeba Restaurant

It could be argued that Lalibela represents the pinnacle of Ethiopia’s architectural tradition with the newly built Ben Abeba restaurant’s ‘space age’ design adding a distinctive contemporary dimension to the architectural landscape. Situated on the outskirts of the town, Ben Abeba is owned by a Scot named Susan and her Ethiopian business partner and attended by a project to train young Ethiopian men and women the skills of cooking and restaurant management. It is an ambitious project that is reflected in the post-modern design of the restaurant but there is every indication that it will be a success. The food is good, the ambience welcoming and the relationship between the management and staff is evidently one of mutual respect. Following the meal, we enjoyed a lively evening listening and dancing to traditional Ethiopian music with a few renditions of the ‘Gay Gordons’ thrown in for good measure; the Scottish influence coming to fore as the evening progressed. However, as memorable as our evening at Ben Abeba may have been, it was the churches that will live long in the memory. That’s not to say we won’t be recommending Ben Abeba as an excellent venue for food, entertainment and spectacular views.

The trip to the Danakil - January 2012 - Viv Nutt

Extraordinary scenery; heat in the 40s; no breeze until the evening; miles and miles of salt; miles and miles of sand; damp sand; dunes with scrub bushes; pebbles reaching into the horizon;  looks just like you are at the seaside but the tide never comes in.  This landscape was created by the red sea seeping into the depression and then the water evaporating many times; the salt is quite a big industry and it has spawned the most revolting and unsanitary of villages, where the military, local workers and phosphate companies are serviced by bars and prostitutes.  Unsanitary?  There is not one toilet here, and no attempt at organising any.  No pits, no long drops, no attempt to harvest the human waste.  You just go for a little walk on the vast flat lands, and find a flat pebble to cover up your poo.  You hope someone else hasn’t found that same pebble first.

The salt is removed from its layer of sand; cut into blocks and loaded onto the camels and donkeys that wait patiently.  At this point each salt block is sold for 10Birr; the Afar sell it cheap because they know that they can make a profit in other ways from the traders.  By the time the camel trains have carried the salt blocks (20 to a camel; trains of about 20 camels, each with their camel master; groups of 4 or 5 trains) up the mountains to the market in Mekele, each salt block sells for 50Birr.

We visited the volcano of Irte’ale(613m); it is one of the only permanent lava lakes on the planet.  Because of the heat the trek is done at night and on an evening with a full moon rising behind the summit, we started the 3 hour trek at 6pm. It was so worthwhile to be able to see the moving lava, hear that force of nature, experience the bubbling as a burst of molten rock is forced up into a splash and a burst against the sides of the crater, feel the heat, not only from the moving red lava but also from the very rock that we were standing on. This was a ‘wow’ moment; you couldn’t help but be over-awed by the sight.  I shall never forget it.  We camped that night on the crater’s edge and after a short sleep we trekked back down the volcano so that we were at base camp just as the sun was hitting our backs, but before the heat of the day. A lovely breakfast of pasta soup awaited us cooked by the 2 women that we had bought with us.  Thank goodness that we had 4x4s to take us the 6hour drive across sands and pebbles and rocks, back to Hamd’ula and our main camp.

Our other visit was towards the North to see the sulphur pools and oily lakes of Dallol; Here again you really experience the heat of the area; it’s unrelenting and at -116m is the lowest inhabited place on earth.  The colours of the sulphur lakes are best seen, so I’ll try and upload some pictures. Beautiful shapes and pools are produced and gasses can be seen escaping from the earth.  The chemical is harvested from time to time and there is an old Italian settlement on a nearby ridge, now only used by temporary workers.  The other lake bubbles incessantly too and here the hot spring brings with it underground oils.  Birds and insects are attracted to this lovely blue lake in the midst of the desert, but the polluted waters spell death, and there are several bodies lying around.  The Afar collect this oily water as a skin preparation.

This was an amazing adventure, and one that I am so glad I had the opportunity to make.  I don’t think that there will be any trips to the Danakil for a while, as seven days after we were there, five tourists were killed and four others taken hostage just in the camp at the base of the volcano.  I count myself lucky to have been there and lucky to have got out, and incredibly sorry for those people who didn’t make it back home.