This is Hussen and I avoiding the mud in the Bale mountains!

Saturday night – nearly 11pm! Just got back from Jason’s housewarming. I tell you we have a wild life here. We have no news about placements – VSO are still holding on to the line that we could be going home in 3 weeks! Last weekend we had a visitor down from Addis and we just about exhausted our supply of “interesting” things to do in Awassa. We even went to watch Manchester play Liverpool. Should have gone to watch football this afternoon instead of getting gloomy about the future!

This bit I wrote last Monday but haven’t been able to get on blogger all week! Well, we have had a very lazy weekend. Today is a national holiday for Eid. We walked over Tabor Hill and down to the lake for breakfast this morning – the people next to us had a colubus monkey help them out with their food! It was ok till it put its hand in the butter dish and ate a handful – gross!

Not much to report really – we are in limbo as far as jobs go. We are due to finish here in four weeks and are having some aggravation with VSO trying to sort out what happens next. We did think we had sorted two placements up in the north but our work here has been delayed so we said we needed extra time to finish it. The initial response from VSO seemed to be that we should just leave the work unfinished and go north – something I couldn’t contemplate doing and couldn’t believe they were seriously advising us to do it. After some negotiation they asked the new placements if we could start a week late only to be told that the college would rather have no-one this year and would return the money. So then VSO said if there was nothing else in Ethiopia they would send us home!! I’m trying to focus on finishing things here properly so that the programme we have been delivering will continue after we have gone – hopefully something else will get sorted for us. We have only four weeks left in Awassa we think! Difficult to say, as term was meant to start two weeks ago but the students haven’t turned up yet!