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’.