Bed bugs, had to happen sooner or later. They leave a line of intensely itchy bites and the book says the only treatment is not to scratch them – yeah, like that is possible! I haven’t time to count them (the bites, not the bugs) but the scratching keeps me pretty busy. Apparently if you leave your mattress out in the sun they will disappear – this would be great if we had any sun but we are into the rainy season so the sun doesn’t appear very often. Anyway, I haven’t had any new ones for a few days so maybe they have had their fill.

Been so busy lately. Today is Sunday (or Tuesday – I’ll explain later) and I’ve spent about half the day marking. Yesterday, I had a class to teach in the afternoon. We have this extension programme on at the moment at college – they call it the summer programme tho I can only think that is because it is summer in Europe because it certainly isn’t here – anyhow, it is the long break in between school terms so lots of first cycle (lower primary school) teachers are busy upgrading their qualifications so that they can teach second cycle (like middle school). Teaching isn’t that highly thought of here and first cycle is bottom of the heap - you can qualify to teach here after a one year training course. Second cycle, however, involves a 3 year course. Anyway, so all these teachers are training during their school holidays – the course was meant to be about 6 weeks but there was some sort of government training for teachers for a week after term finished and they all had to do that first. (People refer to it as political indoctrination but I have no details!). This meant our extension courses had less time (are you still with me?) so the college decided that we would work the first three weekends to make up. The students have classes from 8.10 to 5 or 6pm each day (with a couple of hours for lunch) and now it is seven days a week! So on Saturday we did Mondays timetable, today was Tuesday (fortunately I don’t teach on Tuesday!) and then tomorrow it will be Monday again. It is all a bit mad but no-one except me seems to think so. The Friday before classes started the timetables went up at 5.05 pm and people were expected to start teaching the next day!

Anyhow, I only have myself to blame – I did volunteer to teach a class on the summer programme. I have ended up teaching Spoken English – it was that or Calculus! I figured I ought to practice what I preach – on the Higher Diploma course we push active learning methods and the candidates are all trying to use them in their large college classes – I thought I should experience the reality. So I have a class of 46 and I am loving it. We have some trouble understanding each other but we are getting there. I am using lots of games and group activities and trying to get to know everyone’s names. This isn’t helped by the college policy of allocating students into teaching groups. They list everyone alphabetically by first name (because that is the name you use) and then divide the list into groups. Fortunately I have only 3 Tsegaye’s!

Had a busy, social weekend as there were a whole load of VSO volunteers down in the south doing a language course and we caught up with some of them in Awassa. Also had a fab meal last night – there is a campsite in town run by a German and an Ethiopian and they have a small restaurant – just a couple of tables on the terrace. It was fantastic – they cooked a Chinese meal, absolutely delicious. And we had chilled white wine sitting outside on the terrace!

Crashed my bike last week – it was quite bizarre. I was cycling down hill from college and I could see this guy coming up the hill towards me and I just kind of knew we would collide even though we ought to have been able to avoid each other. Fortunately I managed to slow considerably but I knocked him off his bike and we banged our heads together. Poor chap looked quite shell shocked, being knocked off his bike by some mad ferenji woman. I wonder if he just didn’t see me coming?

Apart from that everything is fine. We’ve run out of chocolate tho so if anyone is feeling generous….

Monday evening - couldn't get online for long enough last night to post this. Had a full day at college, I loved it. I am much better when I am busy. Such a laugh with my English class - we played"the cat with nine lives" - just hangman but you end up with a dead cat rather than a hung man! They loved it. Then we read a short story together. Anyone with any ideas or materials I could use do let me know! It was hard work to find a short story at the right level that was short enough for me to be able to photocopy it!