a day in our life

A Day in our Life





We wake up at 6.15, if the cocks crowing and dogs barking haven’t woken us already. Breakfast is porridge, the milk being reconstituted from Nido powdered milk, which is all you can get here. The bars get fresh milk for coffee but it’s not sold in the shops. The powdered milk is really expensive for us, costing 9 pounds out of our 100 pounds a month salary and it lasts about 3 weeks. We have to have some luxuries that only the shops for foreigners sell, such as the milk and oats for porridge to start the day. Richard runs off to get a small loaf of bread for 2.5 pence which we use to make a peanut sandwich to take to the university. Most the university staff seem to go home for lunch for two or three hours, as the place is deserted then, but we prefer to stay, have a sandwich and banana and then leave at 3 pm. This may change once we start giving more classes.



Whilst it was still raining every day we took the university bus along with a hundred others on the 54-seater bus. That’s normal here; all transport forms are filled to bursting point and people squash together quite happily. Now that the weather has improved, we prefer to walk to get the exercise, which means setting off at about 7.10 to arrive just before 8 when classes start. Despite the stereotype of the slow-moving African, people here, particularly the school children, walk very fast, matching our customary brisk pace which so amuses people in Spain. Lots of the smaller children go barefoot to school, but even the shoes of those who have them are plastic sandals and, more often than not, broken. The older ones clutch 4 or 5 notebooks in their hands; very few have a school bag and textbooks are not to be seen. It is customary for kids, of all ages, to call out ‘ferenji’ (foreigner) as we pass, but it seems not to be badly meant and is accompanied by smiles and waves if we turn to face the caller. Little kids love to approach us, shake hands and practice their English. We walk along the edge of the pot-holed road, ever vigilant of the lorries, buses and 4-wheel drives that abruptly dodge the potholes and swerve towards us. As the country has one of the worst road death rates in Africa it pays to be careful. There is only one railway line in the country, from Addis to the port in the separate state of Djibouti which provides the only link to the sea, so everything moves by lorry on the few roads, causing endless hold ups when a vehicle breaks down or crashes.



If we’ve come by bus and it’s been raining, we have to struggle up a muddy slope, which the bus can’t manage, to reach our building. Everyone scrapes off their muddy shoes on the steps at the entrance but still the inside corridors and rooms look as though a herd of cows has trampled through leaving brown muck strewn along the floors. Richard was lucky to inherit a shared office with his own computer loaded with material left by former volunteers, and a classroom with walls decorated with learning aids. Emilie had to fight to get given a room for the English Language Improvement Programme at all. Eventually, she was given a room which had departmental posters and displays stuck with glue to all the walls. The university cleaners consider it beyond their remit to do anything but sweep the floors, so our first real job here was to be cleaners, ripping the posters off the walls and trying to remove the glue. In both our teaching rooms, the windows had been left exactly as they had been when installed with the glass covered in putty and paint, so that was another cleaning job we took on, considering as we do that a clean environment is conducive to better learning, prigs that we are. We’ve introduced the notion of Blu-Tack to promote British exports and prevent the destruction of painted surfaces by glue. We’d brought English language teaching posters from Spain and were able to cover the worst afflicted parts of Emilie’s walls with those. We’ll talk about the actual teaching some other time when we’re into the swing of it.



At first, we went to the staff canteen for a drink mid-morning, but it was a bare, dreary room where few staff seemed to go and where there was only sweet tea to drink so when we discovered the large, noisy, gloomy but livelier students’ canteen, which serves good coffee, we were happy to change our break time venue. Today Richard chatted to two political science undergraduates who, in the fashion of students the world over, were decrying the lack of democracy and honest government in their country and promising that they would change it. Richard was saddened to hear, as a small business owner in his former life, that small business owners only exploit people and give nothing back! The level of English is very poor and it is hard to see how the students have been through secondary school and are receiving their university studies through the medium of English, especially since the lecturers speak not much better English than they do. Of course, one must sympathize as most people speak their regional language, Oromifa in these parts, the national language Amharic to some degree and then have to cope with English as the language of post-primary education. Whilst Richard is running courses in teaching methodology, for lecturers from various subject areas, leading to an obligatory national teaching qualification, Emilie is tasked with raising the standard of English both of staff and of students and is starting classes with 2nd and 3rd year English undergraduates and with a group of staff members.



As we haven’t started classes yet and don’t take the lunch break, we get the university bus which leaves at 3 pm and go into town to have a coffee with volunteer colleagues from the Teacher Training College on the other side of town and do the vegetable shopping from the street market for our evening meal. It’s fortunate that we’re vegetarians (well, Richard cheats sometimes outside the home) as there the meat on display does not look very enticing, so meals at home consist of lots of vegetables with rice or pasta with a cup of tea and a few biscuits for dessert. The Ethiopian-made biscuits we get are simple but of a Western standard. There are few Ethiopian-made products, most items being imported from China or India, with the older cars being Russian made Ladas and all the newer vehicles being Japanese, with the Toyota Land Cruiser 4-wheel drive being the vehicle of choice for those who’ve made it economically. These are the vehicles of the NGOs, too, though there is the odd old British Land Rover around, too. Private cars are rare, though, and even senior university staff can’t aspire to one.



What all university staff of any level do aspire to, however, is a scholarship to study for an MA or PhD, preferably abroad, the less ambitious to India, the dreamers to the States. For this reason, there is a dangerously rapid turnover of staff, leading to a terrible lack of sustainability of programmes such as ours. We are supposed to involved with ‘capacity building’, not so much doing all the teaching ourselves, as passing on our skills to our Ethiopian counterparts who will carry the programmes on when we leave. The likelihood, however, is that they will not be here to carry anything on and the programmes will fold unless more volunteers are brought in, which is not the policy of VSO.



The evenings are quite short as we go to bed by 10.15, so, after eating, we read, play cards, do the crossword in the Guardian Weekly or watch an old TV series or film that has been recorded for us on an external hard drive. Apart from Saturday evenings, when we have started the custom of going for a simple meal, such as a pizza, with a couple of beers (another excellent Ethiopian product), we are not tempted to go out into the unlit streets where we have to walk with a torch so as not to fall into a drainage ditch or collide with a wandering donkey. We listen to the chatter of the night guard, which all VSOs are obliged to have, with the other neighbours in our tiny compound. Apart from our single-storied house, built in a somewhat western style, there is another much older building which really only consists of four rooms in a line. Two are rented out, one is used by an elderly woman who looks after two little children, the two-year-old son of one of her daughters who has five others and can’t manage the sixth, the other an orphan girl whose origins we don’t yet know, and the fourth is lived in by Emebet, her other daughter who has a Law degree, speaks reasonable English and who acts as our landlady. We love to come in the gate and be greeted by the gorgeous little kids who have learnt to blow us kisses and whom we are teaching some English greetings and so on. The delight on the children’s faces make a lot of the difficulties we face easier to cope with and make us feel that, if nothing else, we will have left behind some happy memories of the strange ‘ferenjis’.

Dear All,

We’ve been here in Nekemte for about 2 weeks now but I can’t say that we feel at home yet! The weather is excruciatingly dreary with torrential rain every day so far, sometimes more than once a day. We had read that that the rainy season was from mid-June to mid-September, but it’s cheating this year. This is not the usual image of Ethiopia, but to some it’s known as the water tower of Africa with five major rivers arising in its mountainous western and northern regions. The Blue Nile starts its travels north of us here, joining the White Nile, coming from Uganda, in Khartoum. We hadn’t quite realised how wet it would be, with mud everywhere as only the one main road through town being paved.

You have to admire the ambition of the country in trying to do so much so quickly. Thirteen new universities are being built around the country in regions that never had one before. Two hundred new teachers were inducted into this university last week and we were invited to a very modest dinner (a small plate of rice and vegetables with water or Coke to drink) to meet them as well as the university’s President, a sophisticated man who did his PhD in Agriculture in Norway. It’s surprising that he is from a small town near here and that he has chosen to return to a town that has no sophistication whatsoever! We admire, too, the fact that they have a positive discrimination policy in favour of girls, who can enter university with a somewhat lower grade than the boys, though, from then on, they have to achieve the same. This means that this year there are 25% girls in the new intake, a big increase. As I’m sure you know, female education is the single most important factor contributing to smaller family size, besides all the other benefits it brings to the females themselves and society in general which are prerequisites for development. Unfortunately, Ethiopia has a high population growth rate and it has overtaken Egypt as Africa’s second most populous country, after Nigeria. Emilie has been told that she is to be a role model of a professional woman.

Our living conditions are primitive, by western standards, though we remember that there were people almost living this way when we first settled in Spain. The kitchen has no sink so we have to get water from and wash our dishes in the bathroom. We have one electric hotplate to cook on and an electric kettle. There’s no fridge. Unfortunately, we haven’t had electricity for the past three days because a neighbour cut down a tree and brought down our electricity supply cable. Goodness knows when it will be repaired. Luckily, on the first day we had enough leftover homemade lentil and vegetable soup and the lady next door offered to heat it up over her fire; people here still cook over a charcoal fire outside their houses so there is always smoke in the air. Yesterday, we had a small lunch of local food in the staff canteen. It’s really hard to describe what the local staple, ‘injera’ is. It’s a rubbery, foamy substance which has been likened to carpet liner. It’s eaten with every meal and we had it with dollops of lentils in a spicy sauce, some rice and pickled carrots and cabbage on it. We’re not keen to make a habit of eating lunch here and prefer to bring a peanut butter sandwich from home. The peanut butter, by the way, is an expensive luxury which we brought from Addis, so I don’t know what we’ll do when it runs out.

So, we’ll see what has happened regarding the electricity when we get home today. Continuing with the house, our bathroom has a western-style toilet with no seat, so you sit on the porcelain. This is no great shock to us as it’s what you usually find in toilets in bars etc in Spain. The washbasin was leaking all over the floor when we first arrived but has now been repaired, at our insistence, and there is, to our very great surprise and relief, a shower which gives a thin trickle of warm water, if there is electricity. We had been warned to expect a cold shower only. We have various plastic water containers which we fill for times when there is no mains water. We’ve already had a few water cuts, even while the rain was bucketing down outside. We have a water filter as we can’t drink the tap water. We have to boil saucepans of water for three minutes, if there’s electricity, and pour the water into an aluminium container which was ceramic ‘candles’, through which the water slowly filters into a lower compartment with a tap. I had the same system when I was in the Turks and Caicos Islands forty years ago. We mostly use this water for cooking and making tea, buying bottled water for drinking. Our bedroom is basic, with a small double bed with a foam mattress, a bookcase and bedside table. We also use a mosquito net over the bed, although this is not, in theory a malarial region. Night times are cacophonous, with hundreds of wild dogs howling and roosters waking us early, in case the muezzin from the mosque doesn’t. The sitting room is gloomy with ugly, dirty blue walls, which we intend to paint white, a sideboard, bookcase, tiny, rickety dining table with four chairs, a hard wooden sofa and two armchairs, one of which has lost its legs and sits on the floor. Ceiling panels are hanging down in various places and there are two bare lightbulbs, just in case there is electricity. When there isn’t we light candles and play cards or do the crossword in the Guardian Weekly, which another VSO has a subscription to. Also, we can comfort ourselves with the iPod Rebecca gave us loaded up with music and plug it into external speakers as it runs off its own battery

We cook rice and vegetables, pasta with tinned tuna and tomato paste or vegetable soups on our electric hotplate. It’s not much variety but it’s healthy. We have porridge with powdered milk for breakfast, if there’s power to heat the water to make the milk. We really miss our dairy products, of which there are none here, as we’ve always been big cheese and yoghurt eaters. We miss our coffee habit, too, which is strange in the country which invented coffee and which grows it in abundance hereabouts. There is no coffee in the shops for drip filtering, nor for that matter is there instant coffee which we wouldn’t drink anyway. So, we have to go to a café in the town after work for our fix as even the university only offers sickly sweet tea. We always liked our mid-morning and evening coffees, but now we don’t feel like going out into the pitch black night and, often, rain. We get our food from the tiny markets, where women sit on a wooden platform with small piles of tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, cabbages, bananas, oranges and the occasional garlic or beetroot, or from the small shops which sell bottled water, torches, batteries, Coke, toilet paper and a random variety of other life necessities. You don’t go into the shops as they are too small, but buy through a hatch. There is a variety of other shops, some of which you can just about walk into, selling electrical or hardware bits and pieces, mobile phone paraphernalia or even internet services, when it is available. Internet is very slow and the places that offer it often busy so it’s hard to keep in touch with people. We were sold a device to get wi-fi internet in our house but so far, even if we have electricity, the connection is so weak that it’s slow beyond the limits of human patience

The university is a bus ride out of town, of 45 minutes’ walk. It’s potentially a lovely campus, on a hill with glorious views but, at the moment, it’s just a lot of bare concrete buildings which have been shoddily thrown up. It’s a mud bath as the priority was to put up the buildings before the roads, even though the mud hampers the building work, most of which is done by unskilled hands with little use of machinery, resulting in the most appalling workmanship. Everyone tramps the mud into the buildings, just to make matters worse. The students, 6,000 thousand of them, are housed on the campus in vast residential blocks. We haven’t dared to look into them as there is no running water in toilets, only standpipes at various points, so we can’t imagine what state they’re in. Incredibly, however, there seems to be money for computers and printers and every member of staff has one, including us. We’ve been warned, though, that every Ethiopian-used computer has a virus, or at least it’s best to act as if it has, a problem which is rife throughout Africa and which is further hindering development. A student in this country lost the only copy of his Masters thesis last year to a virus. We’re busy preparing to start work now. I’ve inherited an on-going programme of teacher training in methodology for an obligatory national diploma which all further and higher education teachers have to have. Emilie has been left little by her predecessor who left earlier in the year, so she is starting up what is called the English Language Improvement Programme from scratch. This is for university staff who want to improve their English, which is the medium of instruction though the level is not high. It’s strange really that English has been chosen as the national common language, in a country of 80-odd languages, because it was never a British colony, unlike so many other African countries. The national ‘native’ language is Amharic, but that is only spoken by a minority; more people speak Omorifa, the language of the region where we are, Oromiya, and that may be why a neutral, non-native language has been chosen which, at the same time, enables them to communicate easily with most of their fellow Africans and the rest of the world. The headquarters of the Organisation for African Unity is in Addis, which it may not have been if the use of English had not been widespread.

We’ve both had colds since we’ve been here, which hasn’t helped us feel very happy, though we’re battling through this initial period, knowing that it was never going to be easy; adapting to a new country, culture, language, job never is. We hope all is well at your end and that we will hear from you sometime. Don’t forget that our fundraising page is still active; see our blog: www.emilieandrichardvso.blogspot.com/ for the address. We are still trying to add to our blog from here. Our postal address, if you want to be old-fashioned is: PO Box 328, Nekemte, Oromiya, Ethiopia. We would love to hear from you.

All the best.

Richard and Emilie.