Sunday Indulgence

Sunday 16th March

The small sum of five British Pounds ... is a lot of money for a VSO volunteer in Eritrea being paid at local rates but that's what gets spent on occasion at Asmara's Intercontinental Hotel on a buffet (all you can eat) breakfast. This time the occasion was nominally the Sunday before St Patrick's Day (there are quite a few Irish volunteers in the current batch) and a mixture of Asmarinos and volunteers from the villages - they have a harder time than we do in terms of having a limited diet and are usually keen on maximising the breakfast experience - showed up for the feast.

It was all quite civilised really - a lot of coffee and food was consumed and there were a few accidents (breadrolls and pastries falling into open bags and the like) and a couple of hours later another Asmara experience had been chalked up and we were all stuffed!

P

Four of us are having Tigrinya language lessons for an hour and a half every Sunday morning - this involves learning a completely new script, the Ge'ez syllabary (we thought we'd left all that behind after our time in Japan). VSO cover the cost for the first 6 months. It's a jolly occasion with a lovely teacher, Amanuel, who was also our teacher on the in-country traing when we first arrived. Because of our slight over indulgence at the Intercontinental yesterday we were all feeling less than ready for the lesson (which was straight after the breakfast at our house) and we spent a lot of the time trying to deflect the teaching process by asking questions about the culture, the number of times I've been on the other end of this scenario ........ It's interesting to learn the language and use it but it possibly has limited use in the future.

C