Yeah I know - I'm not very consistent with this blogging business. Theres not much to say often! It hasn't been the best of months really, we have both had minor ailments and not been running for a while. One thing that cheered me up tho - I bought some rope yesterday and we have started skipping to try and get some fitness. Funny watching Mike learn....

Anyway, here is a bit I wrote last night, not the most cheerful but it is pretty much how it is these days....

Nearly a full moon and the dogs are howling.

Was walked home from the market today by Getachew, a little boy in Grade 4 who sells packets of tissues in order to pay for the exercise books he needs for school. It is quite common amongst the kids at the schools in town. Like Getachew, a lot of them have no parents and manage as best they can with the support of extended family. They shine shoes, sell tissues or beg. There is no other support system here. He sang me a song in English as we walked.

I’ve been in Gondar for four months now and the placement isn’t really working out. No demands are made on me, I’ve seen no evidence of ‘management’ and had no support. Somehow, though, you are supposed to carry on and work to convince people that things can be different. It is really hard to keep on reaching down to find the strength to go at it again in the face of - well, in the face of what? It is hard to describe. The effort to try to find someone, to arrange a meeting, prepare for it and then of course when you turn up on time they aren’t there. They say they will come and find you and they don’t. And you think ‘Why am I here? Do they want me?’ I am supposed to be working on continuous professional development for college staff but most of them don’t want it – they just want to get out of teaching (very low status here). Two months ago we agreed I needed an Ethiopian counterpart to work with but I still don’t have one. Apparently the guy identified is building his house.

So, anyway, the CPD bit at present is the downside of my placement! The other bit of it is working on training for school teachers and that is rewarding. These people are paid much less than the college lecturers (and their status is lower) but they are much more ready to learn. The last two Saturdays I have done training on Action Research and was delighted this week when two teachers came in to see me to ask some questions and talk over their research proposal. I do have some qualms about this training tho – Action Research is meant to be about changing your own practice but there are serious questions about how much freedom people have to do that with the current political situation.

Mike and I have been visiting the teachers who attended the maths and science training and observing them teach. That has been really interesting and given us more useful information about where people are and what we can usefully do to help them. I also have a small group of teacher educators working on Action Research with me in college and I’ve started a maths club with some first year students. This last was mainly motivated by the my need to have some maths learners for the course I am doing but I think it will be really interesting. I offered the club to a class of 43 and 37 of them turned up and stayed for two hours! Will they come back?? We had some language difficulties but we will see how it goes.

Thinking a lot about coming back to the UK. The job doesn’t help. Well, we will see – I will give it a couple more months. Things move so slowly here. You know if this was job in the UK I would have quit months ago. VSO are no support – we don’t have a placement officer at the moment (tho maybe that is better than having one!).

OK, enough of that. Time to get positive again.