More from Asmara

Sunday 3rd February

Apologies to those of you who may have been waiting avidly for the next posting (if any). I think we've got too used to instant Internet access and emailing in the UK. It can be very intermittent here, in fact non-existent sometimes. Hopefully we can sort out something more reliable when we move into our house which we're hoping to do in a week's time. On the subject of accommodation:

The standard varies tremendously. It's obviously better in Asmara as generally the standard of living and availability is better but VSO do make sure that the volunteers working in the villages (who are the majority) have have a good basic standard of accommodation - a bedroom and either their own or shared toilet and kitchen. The toilet can be a flush or a pit latrine. Water can be on tap or delivered daily by anything from a tanker to a mule. We've just had an overnight stay in a village with a volunteer as part of the in-country training, which was was really interesting and enjoyable. Kaska is a methodology trainer and lives and works in a village about 20 k outside Asmara. She has a large bedroom and her own kitchen and toilet in a compound which she shares with a family of 7 and a shopkeeper. We learnt how to maintain and use a kerosene stone and we cooked a meal on it! The family has 5 kids who were great and their mother set up a coffee ceremony for us - the coffee beans are first roasted, then ground and the coffee made, this is repeated twice, it's considered very bad form to stop before the third cup. Strangely enough the coffee is always accompanied by popcorn. It suits me, I love popcorn. We were shown round the village to cries of "Kaska" from all the local kids. Kaska's worked their for 3 years and seems to be adored by all the people living there. Her job involves working inside and outside the classroom training local teachers in more communicative methods, although she's based in the one village she also travels out to other outlying schools. It's a basic but very rewarding style of living.

We're going to be living and working in Asmara. VSO have found us a house which is being cleaned up and painted and they will provide us with the basic necessities. All I can tell you about it is that it's got 2 palm trees in the front garden which is good to going on with. We've tried peering through the undergrowth around the front gate but can't make out much more so more later on that one.

We're just about to start the 2nd week of in-country training which seems to be more work orientated than the first week, we'll be going out to our places of work and meeting co-workers.

We've taken lots of photos but haven't yet sorted out the best way to link them into this blog or even if we can , bearing in mind how slow the upload speeds are but watch this space.

Time to try and post this. Before I do, one thing:

My personal email is @mac.com but this is proving very difficult to use. Gmail is much easier, problem is we both have are email address books on mac and can't access them. So we'd appreciate it if everyone would send us an email at carholden@gmail .com (for Phil or me) so we can build up a new address book (and also because it would be nice to hear from you as well).

C